How the Minnesota Wild Elevated Fan Engagement Using TrueDialog

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Introduction

The Minnesota Wild are a popular hockey team in the National Hockey League. Based in Saint Paul, Minnesota, they made their debut during the 2000-2001 season. The team competes in the league’s Western Conference and has made the playoffs 13 times.

Fan engagement is essential for the team’s success, so they use a variety of communication channels to stay connected and share important messages. Bryan Hafemeyer, the Wild’s director of digital analytics, plays a big role in these efforts. He’s constantly seeking new methods of marketing automation to streamline his team’s efforts and expand their reach with fans.

“I’d say that our organization has seen a lot of great success with engagement within the community,” says Hafemeyer. “We have a ton of support from our fans. I suppose that every team probably says that, but we really feel that.”

While the Wild have relied on email communications for many years, they realized that they needed to introduce a more effective solution. This catalyst came as the team began to tighten their security at the Xcel Energy Center. Rules related to parking, bags, and other security matters were new to fans, so the team wanted to spread the word in advance so that people wouldn’t arrive at games and run into frustrating situations when they weren’t in accordance with the new rules.

“Email communication is great,” says Hafemeyer. “But it’s not as timely, and it’s easy for those communications to get lost in the inbox. We didn’t want people bringing their bags to the arena, getting all the way up to the security checkpoints, and then having to be turned away. So, text messaging gave us the medium to reach those people. We didn’t have to worry about whether they were checking their emails. With a text message, it’s right on their phone’s home screen.”

But as the team continued to focus on this new channel, they realized their current texting solution had too many limitations. In order to score big with SMS marketing, they needed a partner that could deliver better reliability and deliverability in mass sends.

The Challenge

Hafemeyer and his team realized their current SMS platform’s model was flawed because it wasn’t directly integrated with carriers. This is a common situation in the SMS industry, as few platforms offer direct carrier connections. Instead, they build their platform with the extra step of using third-party software to relay the messages.

Due to this ineffective process, The Wild’s text deliverability was suffering. Here are a few of the reasons why:

  • The middleman in the system introduced a potential point of failure
  • They might not know about carrier network issues until it was too late
  • Lack of direct communication with carriers made it more likely that they’d unknowingly violate rules
  • When problems occurred, carriers gave lower priority to the Wild’s non-preferred platform

Even when everything went according to plan, messages might not get sent out as quickly as the team desired. Their current SMS vendor didn’t have expertise with carriers, so they weren’t given priority in the queue. The result was more delays in the process – and fan engagement inevitably suffered.

It became clear that Wild needed an SMS partner that worked directly with carriers to send bulk messages successfully. The status quo simply couldn’t provide the reliability and scale needed for the team to take fan engagement to the next level.

The Solution

After evaluating the marketplace, Hafemeyer and his team found TrueDialog. They explained their use cases to the TrueDialog team and were impressed by the collaborative way the team approached solutions.

Hafemeyer even had the chance to talk to TrueDialog’s development team about how existing features met his needs and what enhancements could be made to elevate his team’s performance.

Thanks to TrueDialog’s direct connection with carriers, they now get more insights into new rules from carriers, ensuring compliance. For example, it was important for them to understand the requirements for privacy policy opt-ins so they could ensure compliance and rest assured that fans would receive the right messages at the right times.

Another crucial aspect of this new solution was how TrueDialog integrated perfectly with Eloqua, the Wild’s existing marketing automation platform. Because Hafemeyer and team operated within that system on a daily basis, it was incredibly helpful to have their mass texting solution now sync up so quickly with it. They were able to add the text element to their campaigns directly in Eloqua instead of needing to toggle between multiple windows. Further, it was essential to find a solution that would be available in future iterations of their tech stack. 

TrueDialog’s reliability and expediency were put to the test during the pandemic. Like other professional sports leagues, the NHL initially closed its games to fans to meet lock-down requirements and ensure the safety of their organization. When the time came to begin allowing fans back to games, that process came with a lot of new and unfamiliar steps.

“We had to figure out what kind of process or policies we were going to put in place from a health perspective,” recalls Hafemeyer. “So we built a health check, and a large component of that was text messaging. We’d notify people ahead of time who had tickets on account and tell them they needed to complete a health check before they’d be granted access to the arena. We’d text that approval directly to their phones, and they would show when they went to the gate. We also sent that approval through email, but obviously, it’s so much easier for the fan to pull it up right from their text messages.”

Not only did TrueDialog’s enhanced deliverability and performance support the team during the precarious months of the pandemic, but it has also proved impactful for other use cases.

For example, the Wild uses SMS for marketing promotions such as Black Friday ticket promotions and last-minute deals. They are also using it more on the retail side of their operations. When they introduce new jersey designs for sale, text messaging is now a major component of those launches.

The Result

Top to bottom, True Dialog has helped the team’s fan engagement strategies. Most importantly, the Wild have experienced a substantial boost to their three main use cases:

  1. Know before you go/game day operations texts became more timely and thus were more likely to connect with fans.
  2. One day ticket sales also became more accurate and reliable, which provided a strong boost to the team’s revenue.
  3. Retail and merchandise texts got better fan engagement even during busy times during the year when people typically wouldn’t be as likely to see those messages.

Rather than simply seeing spikes on major retail days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the team has enjoyed solid improvements year-round.

“When we look at this year’s campaign, we saw a return on ad spend related to text messaging of 1,200%,” reports Hafemeyer. “From a marketing perspective, a good return on ad spend is typically considered 500% to 800%. So, being at 1,200% is exceptional. Beyond the actual return on ad spend, we saw better conversion rates for text messaging than we did even for email. Email averaged .03% total transaction conversion, and text messaging was .16%, which is 433% higher.”

Hafemeyer and his team attribute this increase in engagement to the fact that SMS places their messages directly in front of fans. While emails and other channels can get lost in the noise, especially during busy times of the year, text messages are usually visible right on people’s home screens instead of getting buried in the inbox.

The opt-in process is a big part of this success. Many fans are subscribed to a wide range of email marketing accounts but are more judicious with the texts. So if they opt in for the Wild’s communications, they clearly want to stay connected with the team and are more likely to engage with the content.

With an opt-in list of about 25,000 fans, the Wild have a great base for their SMS campaigns. It’s important to note that although the opt-in list is substantially smaller than their email list, it still outperforms that channel due to its higher engagement and conversion.

To this point, the team has built their SMS list organically. However, they have big goals for the future and will draw from strategies employed by other professional sports teams to increase their connection with fans. For example, they’re hoping to do more text interactions with fans in their arena on game days.

Backed by TrueDialog’s industry-leading platform, the Wild will be able to continue to elevate its current fan engagement strategies and introduce new successful campaigns. And by leveraging the platform’s direct carrier connections and Eloqua integration, these messages will be delivered faster and more reliably than ever.

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