Louisville City FC Brings in More Fans with Conversica

The Challenge

• Large pool of single-game ticket buyers to reach
• Inconsistent quality among leads
• Limited capacity for manual outreach

Louisville City Football Club, or LouCity as the club is often referred to, is a member of the fully professional USL Championship now sanctioned Division 2 by U.S. Soccer. The club has solidified itself as the nation’s premier second-division soccer club since launching less than a decade ago. The club’s women’s team, Racing Louisville FC, is a newer addition to the family, playing its first season in the National Women’s Soccer League in 2021.

Initially, the ticket sales team at LouCity was looking for a way to handle their very robust lead lists. A victim of their own popularity, they had too many single game ticket buyers for their team to comb through.

“We just couldn’t call all those people to see how their experience was, or to follow up and get more ticket sales, for example,” says Business Intelligence Manager Evan Alvarez. And among those that the sales team did have time to call, the quality was inconsistent; with little ability to pre-qualify the large group of potential buyers, the reps would often spend time talking to the wrong fans, missing out on the best opportunities.

So the team sought out a solution to more efficiently connect with their fans—to solicit their feedback, but also to offer new experiences, including flex ticket packs, group buying, season tickets, and more.

The Solution

• Revenue Digital Assistant™ for Ticket Sales
• Skills: Winback Former Ticket Buyers, Cultivate Fan Interest, Website Chat

The club deployed a Revenue Digital Assistant (RDA) to help pre-qualify leads for Sales and engage with fans. Originally, the AI-powered assistant was mostly used to follow up on leads who had clicked on Facebook and Google ads. The strategy was to identify fans who bought single game tickets and gauge interest in buying season tickets. 

While ad clicks are still a major source of leads for Conversica conversations, Alvarez and his team have found that there are many more opportunities for the AI assistant to have an impact. LouCity now places almost all their past game attendees into various conversation flows to find those interested in season tickets, flex packs, group tickets, and more.

“Before, it was like a drip,” Alvarez says of the leads they funneled into Conversica. “Now, it’s like the whole fire hydrant is open.”

Circling back to leads who didn’t initially respond to the RDA’s outreach some months later has also proved fruitful. Alvarez and his team adds leads that didn’t convert in the initial conversation into their marketing email list to keep in touch, then recycles them through a new Conversica campaign three to four months later. 

“New opportunities do pop up when we come back to those groups. These leads all qualified for us in the first place, so the fact that they didn’t reply to the initial outreach could be down to any sort of life event,” Alvarez says. “Four months later, their life really could be very different. Or maybe it’s more pertinent to the season. Maybe we’re playing better, for example, or maybe the initial outreach was during the off season and now it’s getting closer to game time. Having the RDA circle back helps so much in terms of timing. It’s well worth it.”

The club has also added Conversica Chat to their website to answer fan questions and capture new leads. “It gives a more personal touch to our website. And when a fan brings up wanting tickets, we get that email saying, ‘Hey, this person’s interested,’ and then we can reach out to them.”

Advice for New Conversica Users

1. Embrace It!
   “The more you use this technology, the more you’ll get out of it. If you make sure you get leads into the system consistently, you’ll see results. Then there’s education across the company with sales reps and with executive leadership, to help them embrace it. Our reps are in Conversica every day. We have total buy-in from the entire organization, top to bottom. You can earn your money back and more by doing this. It results in higher commissions, higher revenue, everything. It’s well worth your time at the end of the day.”
2. Look for Timely Campaign Opportunities
   “Every April, the city has an event called Thunder Over Louisville that’s basically a kick off party for the Kentucky Derby. This year, our women’s club happened to have a game that day. So we used Conversica to let people know about our game, and we ended up with a record crowd that day. After, we hit all of the attendees through Conversica as a follow-up, since Thunder attracts a lot of new people to the city who’ve never been to the stadium before. It was a great touch point for them to learn about the team and have a rep who they could speak to. We made a lot of sales of our flex packs, not to mention raising the general awareness for the team.”