How the Minnesota Wild Elevated Fan Engagement Using TrueDialog

Introduction

The Minnesota Wild is a popular hockey team in the National Hockey League and has found great success with its fan engagement efforts. The team introduced SMS in 2017 when they began to tighten security at the Xcel Energy Center. Rules related to parking, bags, and other security matters were new to fans, so the team wanted to make sure they spread the word so that people wouldn’t arrive at games and run into frustrating situations where they weren’t admitted due to violation of the rules.

However, as the team continued to focus on implementing texting in new ways, they realized their current solution wasn’t up to par. To score big with SMS marketing, they would need a partner that could deliver even better reliability and service.

The Challenge

The Wild’s current SMS platform was flawed because it was built on a third party, which meant it lacked direct carrier connections. Additionally, it wasn’t integrated into their tech stack. Deliverability and consistency issues were common for multiple reasons:

• 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 communication with carriers made it more likely that they’d unknowingly violate rules

It became clear that if the team wanted to take fan engagement to the next level, they needed a reliable SMS platform that delivered bulk sends consistently, had direct carrier connections, integrated into their tech stack, and was a vendor that would guide them on compliance.

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.

Thanks to TrueDialog’s direct connection with carriers, the Wild 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 team’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 natively inside it. They were able to add the text element to their campaigns directly in Eloqua instead of needing to toggle between multiple windows.

“TrueDialog provides excellent software and support. Best of all, they’re directly integrated with the carriers and our marketing automation platform.”

– Bryan Hafemeyer,
Director of Digital Analytics

The Result

Top to bottom, TrueDialog has helped the team’s fan engagement strategies. Most importantly, the Wild have experienced a substantial boost in their text channel through 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 engagement spikes on marketing promotions 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. “Beyond the actual return on ad spend, we saw better conversion rates for text messaging than we did even for email. So email averaged 0.03% total transaction conversion, whereas the text messaging was 0.16%, which is 433% higher.”

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