Echelon showed the Orlando Magic how to sell more season tickets by targeting current ticket buyers with the greatest capacity to spend.  The results they’ve achieved have their fans (and the Magic marketing staff) declaring “I love this game!”

The Orlando Magic had season ticket packages to sell.  And some of their best prospects were already at the game.  But where do you start looking for season ticket buyers in an 18,000-seat arena?  Or in a database of thousands of records?  How can you figure out who has the capacity to spend more with you … and who doesn’t?

“Which of my customers could be spending more with me?”

It is the second most elementary question in business (with the most elementary being “how do I get customers?”).  Whether your business is in retail, restaurants, travel and entertainment, luxury goods, automotive or another sector, expanding share of wallet with existing customers is by far the most productive means of increasing revenue (five to ten times more cost-efficient than acquisition, according to most studies).

But every customer isn’t the same.  Some may have already spent every dollar they’ll ever spend with you.  Others may have almost unlimited capacity to spend more on your brand.  Understand that difference — and know who’s who — and you can execute a customized upgrade or brand migration strategy to achieve greater individual relevance and higher results.

The Orlando Magic: Courting more season ticket buyers

The Orlando Magic has played in the Amway Arena (formerly the Orlando Arena) since their inception in 1989.  NBA stars such as Shaquille O’Neal, Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill and Dwight Howard have donned the Magic uniform.  For 41 home games each season (plus many more playoff appearances, including 2007), Orlando-area fans enjoy a thrilling, fast-paced brand of live entertainment.

But Orlando, perhaps more than any other city in America, is full of other entertainment options vying for fans’ dollars.  Maximizing profits and providing a consistent and predictable revenue stream depends on selling as many season ticket packages as possible.  The Magic knew that not all of their fans — not even all of their partial season ticket plan holders — were good candidates for a full season subscription upgrade, given that season packages can cost thousands of dollars.  They were looking for insight that would allow them to differentiate - to know who would justify the marketing expense, and predict which customers were most likely to upgrade. 

So they contacted Echelon Marketing, the world leader in measuring capacity to spend and helping marketers leverage that insight for improved performance and results.

The Objective: Sell more season tickets leveraging capacity to spend.

The Tool: Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index®

Echelon Marketing provides strategic marketing solutions built on proprietary consumer economic data and customized analyses for extraordinary insights into consumer purchasing power and behavior. 

Echelon’s Discretionary Spending Index® (DSI™) is a highly predictive customer and prospect evaluation system that offers the unique and powerful capability to identify customers and prospects at the household level based on their discretionary spending capacity.  DSI is based on Econographic Data: proprietary wealth information derived from multiple sources, including over $18 trillion in consumer assets from IXI™ Corporation.  DSI scores enable marketers to achieve greater insight, higher performance, and a more personal and powerful level of relevance with their customers and prospects.  

Echelon began by analyzing a select group of partial season ticket holders.  All had demonstrated an affinity for Orlando Magic basketball by purchasing tickets, but not all were equally good candidates for the full season package.  And traditional measures like income wouldn’t reveal who really had money to spend.  So Echelon scored the data with DSI, and returned a file with the 193 households whose DSI scores showed the greatest capacity.  Armed with this new level of insight, the Magic solicited those 193 households with individually targeted marketing messages. The results were unprecedented:

7.5% of the households solicited upgraded to a full season package, generating $62,100 in sales and substantially more projected revenue based on future renewals.

To increase success, start with higher scoring — and Echelon Marketing.

When it comes to purchasing, capacity to spend is what separates aspiration from acquisition — which makes it a key to understanding and predicting purchase behavior.  All Magic fans might like to go to every game; what Echelon helped the Magic to do was determine which fans had the household wealth to make such a large purchase. 

What’s relevant to the Orlando Magic is this:  more than $60,000 in additional revenue has been generated.  The Magic took a shot and called Echelon Marketing — and they scored.

But DSI isn’t only about large purchases.  Other companies have used Echelon products to:

• Determine what apparel lines to carry in their retail stores
• Plan and execute one-to-one marketing communications plans
• Migrate customers up their family of brands and insulate against competition
• Predict vacation purchases

Because capacity to spend informs almost every purchase, it’s a critical tool in understanding and predicting customer behavior, and in creating marketing messages with real individual relevance.