Blog Project - Week Three

Kansas State Football

Ciara Smith

DeVry University

Abstract

            Today’s blog post we are going to discuss one of my favorite college football teams, K-State University. I have been on their email list for a few season’s now and they send out alerts for season tickets, player and coach statistics, updates on the next few upcoming games, and links to video highlights. I enjoy reading their emails due to the information being easily and nicely displayed. In this blog post, we will discuss if K-State has good direct marketing and design. We will take a look and see if they are compliant with the current CAN-SPAM act. We will also discuss if K-State is using the internet to their full advantage to achieve direct marketing strategic goals. Now, let’s begin!

 

Kansas State Football

Lately, with football season now in full force, I have seen a great influx of email’s, alerts, and marketing for all my teams that I follow or have attended live games in the past. A current, long-running favorite team of mine and my family is the Kansas State Football team. I have family members that buy season tickets every year and we all get the chance to enjoy each others company and participate in some great tailgating shenanigans!

Now, since I am an avid fan and have been for serval year, I always know when football season is near. However, when life seems to get busy and hectic, I know I can trust the K-State marketing team to keep me in the loop for all the “need to know” information that is available to me. When I receive the emails on my phone, at first glance, the emails are appealing. They have neat graphics and as you scroll down the page, everything nicely fits on the screen and it divides the information into “boxed” sections.

The most recent email I received, for example, had a link that said, “Cats Ranked #25 in Coaches Poll” and then had a little information about their coach, Klieman, and directly underneath this was a link to buy tickets to a game. Following that, it had another box with a graphic giving information on the next home game and then once again, a link to buy tickets to the game. Following this section there were a couple of cartoon drawings of two of their star players, Golsby and Knowles, and had a mini-article titled “Big 12 Player of the Week Honors.” Underneath the mini-article, it had a button that allows you to “read more” and this link takes you right to the K-State athletics website. The remainder of the email consisted of more graphics and upcoming games. Some of the games had promotions saying, “tickets as low as $30” and “group tickets at low as $15.” At the very bottom of the email had links to their social media sites; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In general, I believe the emails do have a great overall design and nice layout. From a marketing standpoint, it is an excellent idea to have so many opportunities in just one email to click a link to buy tickets. I counted in this email alone and it had ELEVEN links that say something in regard to click here to buy a ticket to a game. I feel like this is necessary due to the number of games they are ultimately selling in a season. I will mention, when I opened the email on my computer, the graphics and articles didn’t quite fill the page as it did for the mobile version. The mobile version of the email looked the best.

One section in our chapter this week refers to the layout design of an email marketing campaign and how it needs to be tested to make sure they have the right fit for the computer screen size or cell phone size. With that being said, I would gather that the K-State athletics marketing team has found that a majority of their ticket purchasers are buying the tickets on their cell phones and that is why the email marketing is set to fit best for a cell phone. Now, if this actually isn’t the case, one strategy to improve would be to set the emails up to be accommodating to both cell phone and computer if cell phone ticket sales are not the highest percentage. (Roberts and Zahay, 2013).

K-State athletics’ marketing is also in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act. The requirements to be in compliance are the emails can’t be false or misleading in the header, no deceptive subject lines, recipients had to opt-in, and the email has to alert that it is an advertisement. Throughout the email the information is clear and there is nothing misleading about the information the University is presenting. To be able to receive these emails you would have purchased tickets in the past or went to the website to “opt-in.”

Now once you click past the email and are on the K-State Athletics official website, you are able to find lots of great information on the football season as well as any other sports that are in season. You can get information about upcoming games, how the teams are doing, any news articles related to any “wins” or any of the student-athletes, and how you can purchase apparel. If you head to the main website you can find all the student information and ways to enroll in classes, very similar to ours at DeVry.

The final thought we will discuss is how K-State’s marketing team uses the website strategically for direct marketing. I would say this is done via their emails. The emails list is going to consist of fans, alumni, and student who are already “loyal customers” to their brand. The emails have many links to click on inside that get you directly to their ticket purchasing screen. I also noticed how it will supply a positive article like about the Coach having a high ranking or those two student-athletes that made “Player of the Week” and then allowed the receiver to click a link to read more and to also buy a ticket to the game. I feel like the way they advertise and prompt fans to buy tickets is a great set up. (K-State, 2019)

If I was going to suggest any improvements, I would say to add more of those “positive articles” to encourage more purchase of tickets. If a player wins an award or deserves some type of recognition, I believe highlighting that could encourage someone to go to more games. I would maybe even suggest, depending on who they are playing, if it is a team that we have a rivalry against, or maybe lost by only a few points last time, to encourage more fans to come out to support that game!

References

K-State. (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2019, from
     https://www.kstatesports.com/

Roberts, Mary L., Debra Zahay. (2013). Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies, 3rd Edition. Cengage Learning, VitalBook file.