New Era Tickets (www.neweratickets.com) is a full-service ticketing and fan marketing company that gives sports teams and venues the control they deserve to increase revenue.

And while the company continues to grow and expand its service offerings, New Era Tickets, headquartered in suburbia Philadelphia, also is navigating the changing ticketing industry.

In fact, Fred Maglione, president and CEO of New Era Tickets, believes the company is a better ticketing solution than the other options available in today’s marketplace. And he has some pretty strong reasons for feeling that way. After all, he says, New Era Tickets delivers value to both its clients and the end users of the New Era ticketing system, the loyal fans.

“Our primary goal is to increase our clients’ overall revenue,” Maglione says. “While there are many points that make us different from our competition, we provide both a short-term and long-term strategy for teams and venues to achieve financial success.”

Maglione explains that the short-term strategy is centered on New Era Tickets’ fee structure. New Era Tickets has a fixed schedule of per-ticket fees that vary by channel of sale, but not by the price of the ticket. It gives clients the control to set the end-customer convenience fees, and clients keep 100 percent of the difference between New Era’s fees and the end-customer fees.  With this ability, many New Era clients increase their ticket revenue by over 50 percent after switching from other fee models.

“These results are visible within the first few months of becoming a New Era Tickets client,” Maglione says.

The company’s long-term strategy is focused on both branding and digital fan marketing. New Era Tickets’ clients own their brand and can leverage it for additional sales and revenue streams. Along those lines, New Era Tickets creates a seamless ticketing website for its clients, where they can choose to showcase their brand or even sell the naming rights to their ticket sales setup.  Either way, New Era Tickets is not visible to the clients’ fans.

Ticket purchaser information is also extremely valuable, Maglione adds.

“We recognized a need within the marketplace for a solution that can not only store this valuable information, but also help leverage it to generate further sales,” he says. “As part of our services package, we provide clients with the fan marketing tools needed to increase individual ticket sales, up-sell existing fans, retain season ticket holders, and increase overall per capita spend before, during and after events.” 

Differentiating the digital fan marketing tools that New Era provides from what teams and venues are currently using is an easy one for Maglione.

For one, he says the web-based system New Era offers has just about every marketing capability available, including list segmentation, email blasting, web tracking, online chat, text messaging, personalized direct mail, complete tracking and reporting…the list goes on.

“We found that even teams that had a centralized storage point for their fan data were not using that data in the most effective way,” he says. “By that, I mean teams were sending the same email blasts to most of their fans and not capturing additional information to learn about individual preferences.”

In today’s world, fans and customers expect to receive personalized and relevant communications, which is much more than addressing the buyer by their first name. In turn, fans will respond much better to messaging and offers that make sense for them, he says. For instance, New Era Tickets’ clients are sending different communications to individual ticket buyers than they are to their mini-package buyers. 

Are these fan marketing tools hard to use? At first blush, it might sound like it requires a lot of marketing and computer expertise to use a system like the one New Era offers.

But, Maglione says, it’s not hard to use at all. New Era’s digital fan marketing solution is web-based, so all clients need is an Internet connection and a Web browser to access full functionality.  There is no real “shrink-wrapped” software to worry about, so the platform is very easy to implement. The programs are also designed in a user-friendly interface, and computer coding is not required.

“We provide full training and support to get our clients up and running,” he says.

Of course, Maglione adds that New Era understands the already demanding tasks faced by sports marketers, as well as some high-turnover issues.  So, New Era Tickets does offer services packages to be deployed piecemeal or end to end – whatever the client needs.

Another bonus is that New Era clients do not need to use New Era’s ticketing solution in order to get the marketing solution. Teams and venues can use New Era  just for their fan marketing process and strategy. In fact, the company currently is working with several teams in that capacity.

Maglione was eager to outline how New Era Tickets will be affected by Ticketmaster’s acquisition of Paciolan, the New Era Tickets software provider – something on the minds of many teams and sports entities.

“We have a long-term contract we intend to honor, and we have been assured by Paciolan that they will honor it as well,” he says. “New Era will continue to wrap our services around the Paciolan technology to provide a superior tool and user experience for our current and future clients.

In the end, teams and venues that are looking for a new, innovative ticketing and/or marketing solutions should remember that choice is the number one factor in finding an effective ticketing solution.

“They should know that they have options, great options,” Maglione says. “Sure, there are very clear, dominant players in the ticketing space. But that doesn’t mean they offer the best solution for everyone. New Era Tickets is proof of that.”