Simple campaigns to generate years of audience insights

The partner

The Vancouver Canucks are a component of Canucks Sports and Entertainment (CSE), which deals with not only the Vancouver Canucks brand but also with Rogers Arena, along with various other sports teams including the Abbotsford Canucks and Vancouver Warriors. Since their inception in 1970, the Vancouver Canucks have become an integral part of the city’s sports culture and have built a dedicated fanbase.

As a team that represents the diverse Vancouver communities, the Vancouver Canucks prioritize connecting authentically with all segments of their fan base. Whether hosting special community nights or celebrating local heroes, they strive to ensure everyone feels welcomed while also reaching a broader demographic.

The Challenge

The team uses a variety of platforms to engage with their audience and make them feel included. But, this multi-channel marketing comes with a challenge:

Accurately tracking and synthesizing data across different platforms.

The Strategy

To tackle this, the team decided to leverage Tradable Bits’ platform for their 2023 season with two goals in mind:

1. Establish a Unified Central Data Platform

Jenna Wills, Senior Digital Marketing Specialist - CSE, elaborates on their strategy, saying, “It was important for us in the marketing team to have something both our digital teams and ticketing teams could use to grab fan data and streamline our systems while reducing the chances of losing any important data. For this reason, we implemented the Tradable Bits system to bring all our data into one place.”

Using the Tradable Bits platform, the Vancouver Canucks can create a cohesive system that systemizes their tracking, manages advertisements and integrates with their existing stack, including Shopify, to improve cross-functional collaboration and efficiency.

2. Track Offline Conversion Data

Acknowledging the value of tracking purchases on external platforms like Ticketmaster and Shopify, the team describes attributing purchases on these platforms as “a black box filled with valuable fan insights that if tapped into, could enhance revenue tracking and expand our audiences”

Identifying marketing-attributed revenue:

Attribution is in an age of change. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to attribute revenue to marketing efforts - especially with more fans & consumers opting out of tracking. With direct purchasing data from Ticketmaster, and the Tradable Bits ecosystem of partners, the Vancouver Canucks used their season to start tracking offline conversion data more effectively - pinpointing the specific marketing activities leading to higher revenue with more accuracy.

Reaching previously unknown audiences:

In addition to optimizing their existing fan-marketing-purchase flow, the Vancouver Canucks invested heavily in uncovering new demographics through targeted campaigns and contests focused on different communities. With a cohesive plan for who they wanted to reach and how they wanted to use this data - the Vancouver Canucks came a way with in-depth and targeted segments for new audiences around major season-milestone events like Diwali, the Warrior’s Home Opener and more.

One Stellar Marketing Initiative:

Throughout their season, the Vancouver Canucks launched a series of targeted contests ahead of big milestones/cultural events for their properties. These simple contests were designed based on the theme of an upcoming game and included things like giveaway merch and ticket prizes for all fans entering. Any participating fan was automatically pushed to an email endpoint, where they received an offer for the upcoming game.

In addition to their timely offer, the Vancouver Canucks team also tagged, segmented and organized all participants based on their affinity for specific game nights to build their single-game audiences for the future. All this data was also used to nurture community engagement in future game nights.

The Results

Short-term: Improved ticket sales for upcoming single games.
Long-term: Developed a broader understanding of their audience and who their evergreen fans are for future marketing events.

Campaign benefits for Vancouver Canucks:

This series of targeted contests through Tradable Bits engagement campaigns resulted in over 21K new marketable contacts uncovered and captured in the Vancouver Canucks Sports & Entertainment Database, with over 64K actively engaging with the team. Using Tradable Bits, the Vancouver Canucks have gone beyond name & email on these marketable contacts, uncovering things like opponent affinity - useful for targeting around specific game matchups.

Campaign benefits across all events:

Across all of their properties, the Vancouver Canucks were able to engage and acquire the data on over 83K fans. Their organization also won the “Best Use of Fan Data” award for the 2024 Fan Marketing Awards for their mastery of acquisition and dedication to data cleanliness and efficiency.

Fan Data, Sports Marketing, Case Study, Engagement Campaign