If you open your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform right now and look at your segmentation lists, what do you see?
More than likely, you see lists built around customer transactions and demographics. Your lists, no doubt, include Season Ticket Members, Partial Plan Holders, Past Buyers, or Generation Z.
While these lists are necessary, they are also incomplete. They tell you who bought a ticket, but they don’t tell you how they behave once they are in your venue. In the modern sports and live entertainment landscape, transaction data is just the tip of the iceberg. The real revenue opportunities are hiding in the behavioral data, the actions fans take between the purchase, and the end of the show.
Here are four high-value fan segments that likely aren’t in your current CRM, but should be, and how to engage them.
1. The Early Bird
Who Are They? Fans who consistently scan their tickets 60+ minutes before the show starts.
Why Do They Matter? Your ticketing system records the scan time, but rarely flags it as a behavior pattern in your marketing tools. This fan is a prime candidate for food and beverage (F&B) upsells and merchandise. They’re at the event early and have dwell time.
How To Target Them? Send a Happy Hour push notification 90 minutes before the game. Offer exclusive early access merchandise drops that are only available before the show starts. Make them feel like they’re part of a secret club that they’ve magically unlocked.
2. The Invisible Attendee
Who Are They? This is the transfer recipient. The friend of the Season Ticket Member. The person sitting in the seat who didn’t buy the ticket.
Why Do They Matter? In many CRMs, the data stays with the purchaser of the ticket, not the attendee. Which means if you don’t have a strategy to capture transfer data, this person is a ghost. However, they are your warmest lead for future ticket sales because they’ve already experienced the product.
How To Target Them? Incentivize them to create an account on your mobile app for mobile ordering or free Wi-Fi. Then, send them a “Did you have fun?” automated email 24 hours later with a discount on a future event.
3. The Second Screen User
Who Are They? A more prevalent segment, as this is the fan who is in the venue but is constantly engaging with your mobile app for news, exclusive offers, and playing games.
Why Do They Matter? This is the most engaged audience. They are high-value targets for digital sponsorship activations. If you’re not currently tracking it’s most likely because your data lives in a siloed app provider that is disconnected from your ticketing or sponsorship reports.
How To Target Them? Target them with gamified sponsor content like Trivia Tuesday presented by {sponsor name}. Use these fans to drive traffic to specific sponsor activations within the venue via geo-fenced alerts.
4. The Weeknight Warrior
Who Are They? Fans who rarely attend weekend shows, but consistently show up for Tuesday or Wednesday events.
Why Do They Matter? These are your diamonds. This is your inventory-mover for low-demand shows, so stop blasting them with Saturday Night emails that aren’t relevant to their schedule or lifestyle.
How To Target Them? Create a specialized “Mid-Week Mini Plan.” Remove this segment from any weekend promotions or premium weekend inventory if they’ve never shown interest in buying.
These segments are hard to build because most organizations suffer from data silos. Your ticketing is in one place, your app data in another, and your email metrics in a third. To target an Early Bird or the Second Screen Super-User, you need a single source of truth, a platform that ingests data from ticketing, F&B, retail, and mobile apps, and resolves it into a single, clean fan profile.
Having data is great, but it needs to be the right data connected in a way that lets you act.