2026 Inaugural Season · Ticket Marketing
Elise Nguyen · Fan Lifecycle Cohort Study
01 — Where we started
“WLL fans are young women — Gen Z and Millennial players, 18–32, who finally see a professional future for themselves.”
182 campaigns & programs 7.1M delivered emails 1 complete season
02 — What we already have
Attention is the one thing this product earns effortlessly. Everything that follows is about what we do with it.
03 — Who they are
Some of our list came along for the ride — a PLL ticket with a women’s game attached. But a segment subscribes to the WLL and not the PLL. They didn’t inherit this audience. They created it.
04 — The twist
I expected a spike at 18–32. The curve spikes at 35–54. The WLL list skews older than the PLL list, not younger — and the shape of it says lacrosse parents.
05 — The conflict
Fan score is our own metric — email opens, clicks, site visits and ticket purchases rolled into one weighted number.
Fair context: ticket buyers are auto-subscribed, so much of that dormant mass never chose us. Some of the dormancy is by design, not failure. But the shape is real — an 837-person core is carrying 15,563 names.
06 — What should be measured
Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection opens email on behalf of users, so open rates across the whole programme are inflated. These are real reported figures from our own 2026 sends:
Nearly impossible numbers. Opens still tell us something about subject lines — they just can’t carry the weight we’ve been putting on them.
Each dot is one campaign. Across is the engagement metric, up is whether it actually converted.
R² values are the study’s own ordinary least-squares fits across all 2026 sends. Dot positions on this page are a display reconstruction drawn to those fits — 182 points, one per unit in the study — not the raw export. Conversion tracking isn’t reliably wired up league-wide, which is precisely why the study runs on ticket clicks, and why fixing attribution is recommendation two.
07 — Regraded
Ticket-click rate by email type.
08 — The bigger gap
155,207 people visited the WLL site this season. 1,136 of them are reachable by email. Each dot is roughly 100 site visitors. The lit cluster is the entire emailable list.
09 — The mission gap
The WLL’s whole premise is that young girls can finally see a professional future. Yet under-18s are half as present on the WLL list as on the full list. The daughters aren’t in the database. Their parents are.
Parents are the base. Young women are the growth.
10 — Top standout
It was a t-shirt. The WLL × Togethxr bundle — a collab with a women’s sports culture brand.
People clicked to buy a shirt, not just a seat.
This audience buys identity, not admission.
11 — Where the leverage is
14 Days Out is a third of everything we send, and it performs respectably — opens at par with our other large sends, converting slightly better.
At that volume, a tenth of a percentage point on 14 Days Out is worth more than doubling any single campaign.
The 2027 Content Playbook
Keep scrolling down to see more
What we say next year
The obvious risk in season two is that the novelty wears off. But year one bought us something we didn’t have twelve months ago: history. All of it is calendar we can plan against.
Who we send to
The 837-person core
Nobody who joins next season can be one. That makes it the most durable retention asset we have. Don’t pitch them — include them.
The dormant ~13,000
A single re-permission email, asked properly.
A smaller list we can actually reach beats a bigger one we can’t.
837 fans are already listening.
Let’s go find the rest of them.
