How does this represent “Excellence in Engagement”?

Simply put, the Falcons onboarding experience has ushered in a new level of app onboarding and engagement. With many professional sports teams taking a copycat approach, it is apparent that the Falcons onboarding experience has been well received, as several other professional teams across the NFL, NBA and NHL have created experiences to mimic the Falcons best in class app onboarding.

While this onboarding experience has set the bar for how all teams should onboard their app users, it is just the tip of the iceberg. The Falcons, along with several other teams, are already looking at new ways to evolve their onboarding.

Leveraging self-identifying questions throughout the onboarding process, teams are trying to gain insights that will allow them to build more meaningful user profiles of their fans and put them into specific profile tracks to ensure they are engaging with content that is valuable to them.

Objective:

A sports team’s design goal is to establish an identity that is easily recognizable and enables fans to immediately build a connection with the team. Recognizing this, the Atlanta Falcons aimed to enhance their brand throughout their mobile app.

While many team’s apps are filled with templates and web feeds, the Falcons wanted a way to do more to increase engagement and retention in their app. To do so, they leveraged the Rover platform in order to quickly design custom pages in their app without requiring developer resources. Throughout the season, the team designed and launched a variety of innovative content, including impeccable game day guides, game recaps, and onboarding experiences to engage their fans.

Their focus on quality and innovation, ensured their app content would engage their fans and keep them motivated to return. From the start of the pre-season in August until the end of their season in December, the Falcons launched over 60 different unique mobile app experiences, garnering over 318,000 opens, over 398,000 screen views, and over 179,000 button clicks. It’s clear that their focus on brand consistency and providing engaging content built a connection with their fans.

Strategy & Execution:

One of the most innovative mobile campaigns the Falcons launched was their onboarding experience. With fans unaware of the diversity of features a mobile app can provide, the team sought to create an easy-to-digest onboarding experience to help fans get the most out of their app, while increasing app usage and user retention.

Their onboarding experience instantly loaded when fans opened the Falcons app for the first time, presenting a multi-screen campaign that walked fans through each part of their app, while providing direction on how they can access tickets, set notifications, use the stadium map, and utilize many other features.

The campaign was filled with quality graphics, video, and GIFs, setting the precedent for the level of quality of the content fans would receive in their app. Since its launch September 2019, the experience has been viewed by new app users over 41,000 times, with an average time in the experience of over 1 minute and 42 seconds. With such a high precedent, fans have become more likely to engage with future content, as well. In fact, after the onboarding experience went live, the Falcons’ push open rate and session time both improved significantly.

Production

Atlanta Falcons
Rover

Credits

Gregory Urbano
Director of Digital and User Experience
Atlanta Falcons

John Coombs
CEO & Co-Founder
Rover