Event Genius Founder and Managing Director, Reshad Hossenally outlines 8 ways that a joined-up approach to your ticketing, access and onsite payments can benefit your fans and events:
Improve the fan experience, improve revenues: Why end-to-end platforms will redefine events
The events business has changed. Little under a decade ago, even for the largest events, selling tickets was relatively simple. All you had to have was a website with a box-office to sell tickets that were authenticated with a scan of a barcode at the entrance.
COMPLEXITY OF PLATFORMS
But as social media, smartphones and payment technology evolved to change the way we shop and engage with brands of all kinds, an increasingly complex web of platforms fragmented the way all organisers need to do business in order to sell to their fans.
What followed, saw an explosion of single-service providers promising profits by leveraging innovative technology that powered ideas like ambassador sales, NFC and RFID cashless payments, CRM tools, app only sales and secondary ticketing. The promises rarely matched reality.
ROBUST SOLUTIONS NEEDED
The start-ups introducing this new technology lacked the experience required to design tools and services robust enough to cope with hundreds of thousands of fans at once. Meaning that organisers were left troubleshooting for their suppliers and finding workarounds which created trade-offs that impacted the experience for fans.
It’s why we’ve stretched our wings to redefine what’s expected of a ‘ticketing’ agent and become an event management platform; adding strategic services like our white-label fan apps that reward fan loyalty, enhanced access control as well as Event Genius Pay, an NFC and RFID powered cashless point of sale solution that lets fans pre-purchase credit that can be spent with a tap of their wristband and more besides.
THE END-TO-END SOLUTION
By adding new innovations to our ever-improving ticketing and access control solutions, we’ve created a platform of end-to-end services that helps event organisers and fans reap significant rewards. These include:
• Sell everything in one place: Whether you’re directing your fans to one of our white-label apps or to a box office on your website, the value in being able to sell more than just tickets in a single transaction is unparalleled. It’s something we’ve seen with our clients El Dorado Festival who, by allowing fans to purchase tickets and cashless credits in at the same time, generated 48% of overall revenue in advance.
• Reward fan loyalty: By keeping your purchases in a single location, it becomes easier to cultivate, communicate and reward a loyal audience away from the noise and costs associated with social media platforms. By driving app installs with loyalty bonuses and reward schemes, you create a space that’s owned by your brand through which to communicate with your fans using push notifications, custom content and experiences.
• Reduce wait times: By using Entry Genius and enterprise level scanning equipment, fans can have their tickets authenticated and get their wristband loaded with cashless credits without a lengthy wait. As payments to buy food, drink and more can be made offline with a quick tap of the wrist, queues move at speed and staff make few errors, while physical cash and card payments don’t need to be managed at every point of sale on site.
• Increased fan spending: With fans freed up to spend more time enjoying themselves at your event, you’ll begin to see a steady boost in their spending. We’ve seen up to a 25% increase in spend-per-head at debut events and rises of up to 38% as Event Genius Pay becomes established at your events.
• Better customer satisfaction: With only a single account required to sign into apps, engage with content, make purchases and claim refunds, we make life as easy as possible for fans. In fact, the quality of the customer experience we provide across our platform has earned us a 93% approval rating on Reviews.co.uk.
• Unrivalled data: With every purchase and engagement online or on-site recorded by our systems, our team can provide you with a level of customer insight that has, until now, been the reserve of large multinational corporations and banks. With transactional level data, you can use vendor performance, the most popular products, busiest times of the day and so much more to make operational improvements at your events.
• AI-powered marketing: Our latest addition. By plugging this data into a new AI-powered CRM, our partners will benefit from new levels of customer insight we are developing about their life-cycles, how they interact with brands and more, all in order to utilise a range of automated marketing communications.
• A flexible provider: While our data and client feedback show that you’ll reap bigger rewards by using our full end-to-end platform, we understand that existing commitments with other providers mean this isn’t always possible. For this reason, we have developed our systems so that they can be used as individual modules, meaning if your event or brand would prefer to introduce these services at a slower pace, we can still help.
If you’re interested in joining the growing number of events using Event Genius’ end-to-end services, get in touch at our website.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
In 2008, Reshad Hossenally launched Ticket Arena to provide consumers and gig-promoters with a better way to buy and sell tickets online. Over the years that followed, the business developed the Event Genius platform, and has increased its market share to become a multi-award-winning provider of innovative event technology to promoters across the UK and Europe. Tried and trusted by some of the biggest events, club promoters, venues and artists across the globe, including Wales Rally GB, Ibiza Rocks, BPM Festival, The Warehouse Project, Annie Mac’s Lost & Found Festival, Parklife and Egg London, together the two brands have grown to serve over 1.8 million customers, have generated over £350 million worth of sales, processed in excess of 4 million cashless transactions and have earned a reputation as one of the most innovative and trusted independent event technology and ticketing suppliers in Europe.
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