For the entire month of May, the city of Indianapolis embraces the sights and sounds of the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Spectators come from all over the globe to enjoy the fast-paced track activity such as practice, qualifying, and pit stop challenges leading up to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing. VIPs look forward to being hosted at each event with exclusive catering and unique access to pit and garage areas. With more than 150 premium spaces to service, IMS welcomed a solution to take that VIP experience to the next level.

The Challenges

• Inability to Communicate Directly with Guests — The IMS team is well-connected to each company’s Club Administrator, who coordinates the logistics for their experience at IMS. However, IMS isn’t typically aware of who the individual guests are in each club, which makes it extremely difficult to provide personalized communications or special offers to these guests. 
• High Demand for Spotters’ Guides — One of the coveted items at the track is the Spotters’ Guide–a printed guide that includes each driver’s information and photo so guests can spot drivers from afar. Given the popularity of the Spotters’ Guide, it was very common for IMS to run out of printed copies within a few hours. 
• Repetitive Release Process — Many premium space packages include access to exclusive areas and one-of-a-kind experiences that require a release to be signed. A solution was requested to eliminate this release to be signed by the same guest multiple times. 
• Limited Connectivity — With upwards of 300,000 attendees on race day, connectivity at IMS can sometimes be challenging. A mobile solution needed to take this into account, and be reliable regardless of how many guests were trying to access it.

The Solution

Given the challenges IMS needed to solve, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) built with the Lumavate platform were an ideal solution. In less two months, the IMS team was able to launch its club-specific mobile experiences that addressed all of the challenges previously mentioned, and added major value to the overall club experience. 

After creating the mobile club experiences, the next step was to provide all of the club guests with access to the experiences. Early in the month of May, Club Administrators sent out emails containing activation methods (text and QR codes) to each of the guests. This allowed guests to access parking directions, event schedules, menus, and driving directions, as well as the opportunity to opt-in for real-time notifications, and the ability to save the experience to their homescreen for easy re-engagement. 

Once they arrived at the track, guests could digitally complete their garage and pit pass release, eliminating the need to do so again on repeat visits. The experience also included an interactive Spotters’ Guide, club contact information, IMS map, and the ability to share the mobile experience via text with another guest. 

Since these guest experiences were built using the Lumavate platform, the IMS team had total control over the content and branding of each experience allowing them to easily change out the event schedule, menus, and any other content at anytime and have it immediately accessible to club guests. In addition to using the Lumavate platform, the IMS team also had access to a mobile Admin experience that allowed them to send out real-time notifications to guests, and even segment those notifications by club. 

Results

By prompting users to opt-in for real-time notifications throughout the month of May and sign up for IMS marketing emails, the IMS team was able to reach more premium guests after their VIP experience with personalized messaging before, during, and after their club experience. 

• VIP guests accessed the mobile experience, approximately three times each and spent an average of 3 minutes and 51 seconds in the experience 
• 73 percent of VIP guests opted in for real-time notifications, and 53% opted in to receive promotional marketing messages from the IMS after their event

In addition to the impressive activation and engagement rates, the IMS team was thrilled to provide a mobile experience that exceeded Google’s mobile web standards. Where the average load time of a mobile web page is 12 seconds, the IMS experiences produced load speeds under two seconds even on race day. And, according to Google’s Lighthouse audit, any score above a 50 in each of the audit categories is in the 75th percentile of mobile experiences. The mobile experiences built for the IMS far exceeded this standard in each of the audit categories. 

"We were really pleased with how our mobile engagement increased with these Lumavate mobile experiences. The fact that we could not only engage our guests in such an accessible way, but also drive more signups for our real-time notifications and email subscriptions throughout the month of May was something that just couldn’t have been done with any other team–especially in the timeframe of our project." —Rebecca Simon, Client Services Director