Founded in 1949, the Edmonton Football Team are a professional Canadian Football team, based in Edmonton, Alberta. Despite being founded in the late 40’s, the team is still one of the younger franchises competing in the CFL. Playing out of The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium, Edmonton consistently find themselves amongst the top CFL teams in terms of annual attendance. The team also possesses a relatively unique ownership structure, with the team being community owned. On the field, the team is consistently a perennial contender, having won 14 Grey Cups in total, most recently in 2015.
Even though the Edmonton Football Team consistently rank amongst the top teams in the CFL in terms of ticket sales, and per game attendance, they recognized that they still had room to grow. This was in large part due to the capacity of their home venue, The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium. Originally built for the Commonwealth games hosted in Edmonton in 1978, the stadium boasts a seating capacity of 56,302, making it the largest stadium in Canada, not to mention the league. This large capacity means that Edmonton must manufacture urgency for fans to purchase advance tickets, or fall victim to a “Walk up City” culture. Approaching this challenge from a glass half full mentality, the team saw their large capacity venue as an opportunity.
Leading up the 2011 CFL season, the Edmonton Football Team partnered with Cosmos to supplement their outbound ticket sales efforts. Coming off a season where they hosted the Grey Cup, team executives wanted to combat the “Grey Cup hangover,” and ensure that the team was continuing to grow it’s ticket base.
In order to achieve this objective, Cosmos assembled a sales team who would work out of Mississauga, but would become members of the Edmonton sales team for all intents and purposes. This sales team would focus their efforts on outbound calls to portions of the team’s fan database that would otherwise have gone without a direct touch.
The goal of the Cosmos sales team was to reacquire Season Seat holders who had not renewed their seats in several years. The team would also focus on up-selling single ticket purchasers into Flex Packs & Mini plans. Once the season kicked off, the Cosmos team transitioned to Group Sales, by once again focusing on leads who had not engaged with the team in several years.
Throughout the entire campaign, the Cosmos team sought to provide a personalized Fan Service experience, and gather important feedback directly from fans to help team executives with future decision making.
