Popular types of discounts to increase signups to your pickup games

Early bird discounts, First game discounts and more get more players out!

In order to set up a discount, you must be an OpenSports group admin and you must have your bank account linked up to your group to collect payment. From your OpenSports group, go to Payment > Discounts > Create Discount.

1. MOST POPULAR First game discount: One discount per customer

Pat and Harrison from Casco Bay Sports in Portland, Maine ran a 50% off discount for everyone’s first game, and by their second game, had a full house:

“I wanted to fill you in on our 2nd pickup soccer event from this past Friday. We had some more bodies show up and ended up with around 18 people, so a solid increase from session 1! It’s been going really well and having the OpenSports app has made it go incredibly smooth and easy to run.”

Here’s what their discount set up would have looked like:

Tip: Make sure you Limit the number of times a user can use the discount over time to “1”

Bonus Tip: Here’s how they use the announcements tool to promote their 50% off discount to everyone in their OpenSports group:

Casco Bay Sports also offers 50% off to all first-time attendees. They set this discount up to manually apply when a player joins their first pickup game and types in the code! They announce it to everyone in their group!

2. “Early bird discount”

Making a limited number of tickets available at a reduced price can get people to sign up for your events very quickly and significantly drive up sales! Here’s how you can do it using OpenSports’ discount code feature:

After you have entered a monetary or percentage discount, in the Usage Limits section, select the amount of early bird tickets you want for your event (e.g., 10), and limit the number of times a user can use the discount per event to one time (See image below).

Select the limits of the discount (if it’s an early bird, you’ll want to limit it to, for example, the first 10 players to join):

How to create an “Early bird special”: This set of limits would open up 10 discounts, but would only allow each user to redeem it once. You would also have to select one event to apply this discount to (see above).

3. Social Media Discount

Leverage your social media channels (Instagram Stories!!) and see where players are coming by promoting discounts through social media. Here’s how:

Create the discount through OpenSports (For this type of discount, make sure you uncheck the “apply code automatically” box, so that players have to manually type in the discount code)
Create a post (i.e., through your Instagram story) promoting the 50% off discount code.
Add a link to join the event somewhere (i.e., in your link in bio section)
You can track how many players used that discount code through OpenSports’ reports tool. This will help you track which social media channels are most effective at promoting discounts!

4. Contest

Atlanta’s biggest pickup soccer group, Sons of Pitches FC, uses OpenSports’ discount feature to engage their users in photo caption contests, generating buzz within their community!

They simply set up a discount and gave the winners the discount code to use the next time they RSVP’d for a game in their group.

5. Bring-a-friend 2-for-1 discount!

You can set up your discount so that if a player joins an event and adds a guest, only the one player will be able to redeem the discount. They will still have to pay for their guest.

The set of limits in the example below would open up 50 discounts, but would only allow each user to redeem it once per event.

“One discount per customer per event”: This set of limits would open up 50 discounts, but would only allow each user to redeem it once per event

Cool! For more tips, info & advice on creating discounts, you can read this article or ask me anything at alicia@opensports.net