A benefits package three quarters of holders never opened

Context

The benefits package was attached to season tickets as a value-add, bundling redeemable entitlements that holders could use across the season. It was being counted as a retention and engagement product. No one had looked at whether it was being consumed.

Constraint

Redemption sat in the ticketing platform against its own identifier while the holders themselves sat in CRM, so usage could not be attributed to a supporter without the reconciliation work first. Redemption is also a floor rather than a true measure: an entitlement recorded as unused is not proof the holder was unaware of it, so the analysis could establish scale but not cause.

Approach

1. 01Pulled redemption events per unique customer ID and classified every holder as fully used, partially used, or never redeemed.
2. 02Plotted redemption over time to see whether non-use was a slow decline or a hard stop.
3. 03Broke redemption down by stand and by purchase channel to establish whether non-use was concentrated or general.

Outcome

• 75.5% of holders never redeemed anything. A further 19.7% redeemed partially. Fully used came to 4.8%. Redemption peaked in August, roughly a month into the season, then fell away and was effectively zero by the end of October, so this was a hard stop rather than a gradual tail-off, which points at awareness and prompting rather than at supporters exhausting their entitlements. Redemption was also unevenly distributed: the two general stands accounted for around 92% of all redemptions while the premium stand, whose holders paid the most, accounted for under 8%.
• That reframed the package. It was being counted as an engagement product but consumed as a one-off discount at the point of purchase, which means the club was carrying the cost of the benefit without receiving the return it was meant to buy. The commercial options split cleanly: prompt redemption through the season and make the package do the job it was designed for, or accept that supporters are valuing it at purchase and price it accordingly.

Reflection

I found this at the end of the season, which is when the finding is least useful. Redemption is trivially cheap to monitor weekly, and a monitoring view with a mid-September alert would have converted the same insight into an intervention with three quarters of the season still to run. The second gap is that I established non-use without establishing why, and a short survey of non-redeemers would have separated awareness from access from indifference, which are three very different problems with three very different fixes.

Stack

• Roboticket
• SQL
• Power BI