Super Bowl contest proves profitable

Our register-to-win Super Bowl tickets contest ended last week. A college student from Indianapolis won it. We actually sent our most famous fan, Zack Legend, to surprise the young woman a la Ed McMahon and Publisher’s Clearinghouse. You can watch the video here. I’ll write more about the Zack Legend phenomenon in a future post. For now, let’s talk about some data…

Results from our contest

In total we collected 18,812 registrants for the Super Bowl tickets. We actually got over 25,000 registrations, but after we eliminated the duplicates, we netted out just under 19,000. This number was a bit lower than we expected given the fact that last year we collected 15,000 gross registrations for a playoff ticket contest (Steelers game), and that contest only lasted 24 hours. This year we ran the Super Bowl promo for 3 weeks – and promoted it much harder.

The big difference this year, however, is that we required each registrant to give us a amount of information. We asked them general biographical questions (name, gender, age, etc.) and we asked them 10 survey questions about things like their online habits and avidity levels. So the quality of this year’s data is extremely high, which is important. In order to get the tickets from upper management, we had to assure them that we would generate value from the survey that exceeded the value of the tickets. Here’s what we got:

First of all we collected 18,812 accurate E mail addresses of which (71%) opted in to receive our weekly Football newsletters. This represents a 48% lift in total subscribers. This will allow us to significantly increase our advertising rates for next season.

And of the 18,812 contest entrants, (63%) opted in to “pre-register” and receive updates about our upcoming social networking site. Add this to the 1,500 fans who had already pre-registered for My Colts Network, and we’ve got over 14,000 fans who’ve indicated strong interest in using the system.

It’s frustrating that this new system has taken us so long to build – we’re running way late – but it’s nice to know there’s strong demand for it. We already have sponsors attached to this program, and the pre-regisrtrations gives us a direct promotional channel to announce and grow the community, and it gives something our sales guys can use to get more sponsors to invest in this program during the upcoming “selling” season.

Finally, nearly 9,000 fans opted in to receive our “sponsor offers” E mails. This influx of registrants will increase this list by 10%. These E mails are simply ads from sponsors. We sell these “e mail blasts” as elements in sponsor packages, so expanding the list will make it even valuable.

Quality and quantity

Aside from adding numbers to our lists, we also added customer knowledge to our CRM system as fans gave us valuable data when they registered to win the Super Bowl tickets. Below you’ll find some of the highlights:

- 40% of contest entrants have had their own blog

- 22% use Myspace, while 8% use Facebook

- 70% of these fans have visited the fan forum on colts.com

We’ve been collected this type of behavioral data in hopes that it would help us understand which types of fans are most likely to use social networking platforms, which will add the most user generated content and which will add the most value to the system.

Some other interesting tidbits:

- 89% of contest entrants indicated that the Colts are their favorite team, but the other 11% was spread across the entire league. In fact, all 32 teams were represented. This illustrates how fans cross-over between the various NFL sites, which is something we’re counting on as we look to bring more teams onto our Fan Network platform.

- 56% of the entrants were from Indiana. This number is higher than expected since over 70% of our Website visitors come from out of state, and previous pre-registration campaigns had held closer to that mix. Curious.

- 92% of registrants listed their passion for the Colts as “7″ or higher (on a 10 points scale). The biggest group (63%) ranked themselves as “10″ and the second biggest group (14%) ranked themselves as “9″. So these fans are apparently VERY passionate about the Colts.

One final note – “inside access” appears to be critical

We ask registrants which feature they would most value in the My Colts, social networking system. Choice are: Inside Access, finding new friends, building personal profiles, uploading photos, joining commmunity. By far and away the most popular response is “inside access”. This is not a big surprise, but it is a big challenge. How can we give these passionate fans what they want? Inside access is not physically possible for most of them, so we’ll need to find ways to give them a “sense” that they’re on the inside. That’s my theory anyway. And I think that’s exactly what we’ll accomplish with our social networking community. Or at least it better be!

I need to spend some more time cross-tabbing the data and digging a bit deeper, but overall I’m satisfied that this conest brought us value (and ROI) that exceeded the cost. The return on investment will continue to grow over the course of several seasons.