The stadium is the lifeblood of sport—it’s where the magic happens. Rarely a month goes by without new stadium plans being drawn up. The prospect of having an NFL team (or two) back in Los Angeles has kept architects busy at their drawing boards. One L.A. candidate—the City of Champions project in Inglewood—is due to break ground next month. The total cost? Nearly $2 billion.

With the cost of new stadia so high, sports organizations are under pressure to generate top-line growth and bottom-line return in order to justify the huge capital expenditures involved. This means having a business plan that will generate maximum immediate returns—based on understanding demand for different products and building accordingly—and having a brilliant sales and marketing plan to bring it all to life.

But after they’ve come once, how do you get them to keep coming back? Once the new paint smell has left, organizations need to keep providing fans with reasons to return.

Providing compelling experiences is the single biggest factor in getting people to come back to sporting events. Don’t take our word for it—we’ve spoken to millions of fans after events and, without exception, those that have a better time come back more often.

Experience doesn’t begin and end at the gates—and the customer journey is now more complex than ever, constantly flicking between online and offline. The principle of personalized, timely communications throughout is one that we see working time and again. Delivering info on traffic, weather and team line-ups all help enhance the fan experience and help get first-timers into the routine of a gameday.

Of course, we don’t always know who will be attending a game with the ticket purchaser, so trying to capture their data too will help build a broader understanding of our gameday public, and give us more people to talk to next time tickets come on sale.

Those organizations selling out week after week are in an enviable position of being able to focus more on generating extra non-ticketing revenue from their gamedays. By modelling customer propensity you can gauge who’s likely to spend an extra $10 and who will spend an extra $100—as well as what they will spend it on, and when—and use this info to deliver the right commercial message at the right time to maximize revenue once a ticket purchaser is inside the stadium.

Here are three tips for organizations looking to get more fans to come back and spend more:

    Evaluate the quality of data that you’re collecting from various touch points. Poor data usually leads to poor decision-making.
    Deliver tailored pre- and post-match communications that enhance the gameday experience.
    Build step-by-step. Start with a couple of gameday commercial campaigns and properly evaluate their ROI.

Often, the data and understanding that allows organizations to make these decisions can feel just out of reach, but our work with rightsholders has proven that it is within the grasp of many types of organizations and can be brought to life to drive revenue growth.

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