Supernova Award Category

The Problem

The Texas Rangers’ marketing team wanted to take advantage of data to make better decisions about marketing programs, promotions, attendance, and ticket sales. But they described their business intelligence tools as “blunt,” and “dull.” Everyone in the marketing organization had their own data, but no one had a 360 degree view of it.

How do promotions and giveaways affect attendance? Who’s buying merchandise and when? How is the weather affecting ticket sales –  in real-time?

The Rangers’ marketing team wanted answers to these questions, but didn’t have a means of getting them.

The Solution

The Texas Rangers selected Tableau for visual analytics. They knew they needed a solution that could connect to a wide variety of data sources, containing information ranging from ticket sales, to merchandise sales, to attendance data.

They also needed a solution that was easy enough to use so anyone, not just data analysts, could see and explore data with it. Sarah Stone, The Rangers’ manager for advertising and marketing, had used Tableau in a previous job to track political ad spending. She recommended Tableau to her new team.

The results

Since rolling out Tableau to its marketing team, the Texas Rangers are making more data-driven decisions about marketing programs and ticket sales.

First, the team started a new analytics task force group to help roll out analytics to the team. They’re now able to see how different marketing programs impact ticket sales in nearly real-time.

The results are more efficient, faster decisions about marketing programs; savings in terms of staffing costs; a better understanding of how promotions and giveaways impact ticket sales, and a culture of data-driven decisions throughout the organization.

Metrics

Examples include:

The marketing team looked at media buys for the marketing department to see how they impacted attendance. All of this data lived in Excel spreadsheets. So they downloaded a free trial of Tableau and just during the two-week trial period they were able to see the exact numbers behind how these were affecting attendance.

They also wanted to know how promotions like bobblehead giveaways would impact ticket sales. So they looked at five years worth of promotions, ranging from T-shirt giveaways to fireworks to bobblehead giveaways. They realized that promotions on Tuesdays were driving up ticket sales to games even more than on weekends. Based on this data, they added more bobblehead giveaways and saw an incremental increase of ticket sales for that particular game. 

The Technology

The Texas Rangers selected Tableau for visual analytics.

Disruptive Factor

The Rangers’ Tableau adoption has changed how the marketing team uses data to make decisions. They have seen a change in culture, making data a part of every-day decision making. The entire organization has adopted Tableau across different departments, making everyone a data analyst in their own way. 

Says Stone, Tableau has “just given access to people to our data…it’s enabled us to understand it more, to grasp it more, and to actually start looking at it.”

Shining Moment

The Rangers’ team faced a severe rain delay leading up to a game. When the marketing team pulled up real time data, they realized they had not sold a single ticket in the last 15 minutes. That led to the decision to shut down approximately 75 percent of the team’s ticket windows, helping the organization save on staffing costs that day.