AMERKS NAMED AHL’S EASTERN CONFERENCE WINNER FOR DIGITAL MEDIA EXCELLENCE
Award is one of eight won by the Amerks honoring business excellence for 2022-23 season
Jul 25, 2023The Rochester Americans were named the American Hockey League’s Eastern Conference winner for Digital Media excellence for the 2022-23 season.
The award was among several presented honoring excellence and service at the 2023 AHL Awards Gala during last week’s Board of Governors' Annual Meeting at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Spearheaded by the efforts of Emily Wade, the team’s director of marketing and digital media, the Amerks were the second-most followed team on social media behind only the Toronto Marlies this past season, welcoming more than 17,200 new followers and receiving more than 1.5 million total interactions. The team also successfully created over 90 million impressions, including 58 million on Twitter, and sent more than 4,000 tweets over the course of the season, which culminated with a historic run to the Eastern Conference Finals.
In addition to Bills Day, some of the most consumed content came in the postseason, highlighted by the third-round sweep over Toronto as well as the road victories in Games 1 and 5 in Hershey. More impressively, the team generated more than 14.3 million impressions on Twitter during the month of May alone.
Additionally, the Amerks generated 9,400 new contacts through the team’s online database, representing a 103.6% increase, and had a total of 1.3 million visits to www.amerks.com (574,170 total users) in 2022-23.
The award for digital media excellence was the eighth won by the Amerks for team business excellence during the 2022-23 season. The team also received several other achievement awards, including Ticket Sales Department of the Year, at the 2023 AHL Team Business Meetings presented by Ticket Evolution last month in Tucson, Ariz.
The Amerks were among the AHL teams honored with an 85 percent renewal rate in corporate sales revenue for the 2022-23 season, a mark the team has reached every year since 2016-17 except for the condensed 2020-21 campaign. In addition to selling 600 new full season equivalents (FSE), Rochester also saw a 15 percent increase in per game FSE revenue, per game group ticket revenue and growth in overall corporate revenue.
Rochester was also one of only three teams to generate more than $27,500 in revenue through AHL team subscriptions this past season, joining Hershey and Utica as the top organizations in that regard.
The team’s biggest achievement came in ticket sales as the Amerks successfully generated more than $1 million in Season Ticket Revenue for the first time in their 67-year history, totaling nearly $1.2 million during the 2022-23 campaign.
The Amerks posted a recovered full-season ticket sales revenue rate of 126 percent, doubled their group ticket sales and increased their individual ticket sales by more than $300,000. The team also finished in the top five in the league for overall increase in revenue growth, holiday pack FSE’s, new FSE’s sold over the course of the season and FSE recovered revenue. More impressively, the team accomplished all of this with most of its staff in only their first or second year of selling tickets for a professional sports organization.