Recent studies have found that over a third of the UK’s population have attended a festival since 2016, proving there’s always a fanbase ready to trade home comforts for a weekend of music, food, and drink in a field.
Yet while the demand from music-lovers continues to grow and organisers remain eager to meet these demands, it’s surprising that the outreach and sales process is still rather old-fashioned.
Festivals are big business, but margins are getting squeezed all the time. Glastonbury is the UK’s largest festival with a turnover of £37 million, but this only translates into profits of £86,000 – under 50p a ticket.
When looking forward to 2020 planning, event organisers should be looking for new opportunities to ensure they remain relevant and profitable.
With today’s technological solutions, event managers are not only able to get to know their customers better but also deliver the best, most satisfying fan experience possible through ‘conversational commerce’. When fans are having a good time they’re more likely to spend at festivals and continue to return for years to come. By rethinking how to approach and interact with fans directly – through bypassing costly and rather generic display social media ads and simplifying how payments are processed before, during and even after the festivities – organisers can achieve the ultimate fan experience.
The personal touch
Festivals are renowned for retaining loyal fanbases, with festival-goers opting to return to the same festival year after year for a guaranteed good time. However, with so much choice on offer, it’s proving increasingly difficult to ensure that your event remains top of mind when sales open for 2020 festival season. How you approach fans in the build-up is critical to whether they chose your event or a competitor’s.
Fortunately, by utilising the previously unused data collected the first-time round, you can create highly personalised and relevant content for the future. The true value of data is how it helps you get to know your customers on a personal level; what artists did they favourite on your festival app last year, and what drinks did they order? By collecting all of this data in a Customer Data Platform (CDP), it can help to determine which fans are the most likely to become frequent attendees for your upcoming events. Useful data – such as contact details, which tickets they bought and when – can be put to good use in building a loyal, recurrent fanbase.
Every customer is unique and so it makes sense that the way they like to be approached differs drastically. By using each customer’s unique data from the CDP, the fan’s preferred messaging channel established, and be used as the default route for engagement. Nowadays generic emails will likely end up deleted or in a customer’s junk folder, but by proactively approaching the fan on the messaging channel of their choice, that is tailored to the customer, you greatly increase the chance for engagement and conversion.
As the smartphone grows in importance as a basis for ticketing and customer engagement, channels like SMS – that still enjoy a 98 percent open rate – will remain important, but festival organisers also need to think of the future. There is a growing trend of a move towards Rich Communications Services (RCS), Apple Business Chat and Over-The-Top (OTT) messaging services like WhatsApp as customers seek greater convenience and the ability to transmit in-call media.
By catering to these rising services, organisers are futureproofing communication and engagement with customers by talking to them on their preferred platforms and ensuring that all personal data is collected, used and stored in GDPR-compliant manner.
Far too many event organisers make the mistake of completing their ticket sales and then dropping any form of customer engagement in the weeks and, sometimes, months between the point-of-sale and the festival kick-off. This period of time is an invaluable opportunity to build excitement in the fan leading up to the event.
Between the ticket sale and festival date, more information becomes known as bands are confirmed and merchandising and supplier deals are signed. Proactively communicating these updates via the customer’s messaging channel of choice will build their excitement for the event and help them plan their time for maximum enjoyment. What’s more, informing them of special deals and merchandise ahead of time will only maximise revenue opportunities once they get there.
Taking the stress out of payments
During the build-up to ticket release, most festivals will release teasers a few weeks prior and a couple of reminders a few days before. For the most popular festivals, hardcore fans will often queue up online hours before the ticket sales page comes online, constantly refreshing in the hope of getting ahead in the virtual queue.
This is an unfair and unnecessarily stressful process for the customer. The person with the fastest processor on their machine almost always gets their ticket first. As a result, the customers experiencing frequent disappointment, are left dissatisfied with the festival, increasing the likelihood of them giving up on ever trying to go again.
Fortunately, there are many ways to overcome these pitfalls. Once you have proactively reached out to festival fans, you can offer a preregistration by asking them how many tickets he or she wishes to receive and what kind. This way a fair drawing can be organised where everyone who preregistered gets the first opportunity to reserve tickets and a notification telling them whether they were successful. Additionally, new fan profiles can be created and added to the existing ones on the festival organisers customer data platform – all enriched and updated in real time based on customer preferences and purchase history, allowing for highly personalised engagement.
Fans will then receive a payment link on the same messaging channel they were first contacted on – or a different one based on their preference. You can set the system up so that if they don’t pay within a set amount of time the tickets are offered to another preregistered fan. Once payment is complete, the tickets can be sent directly to the customer or made accessible through a festival app or an OTT app of their choice. Organised and efficient solutions such as these are already being deployed by the likes of Formula 1.
The same app-based approach can be applied to customer payment solutions during and even after the event. By linking their account to the festival app, a customer can open a festival ‘tab’ to order refreshments and merchandise in-app, enjoy the festival experience and settle the bill automatically after the festivities are over.
This means no more standing in line to order, losing cash or having to shout over the music for a bartender’s attention. All fans need to do is show the QR-code automatically generated after making their order. As a result, fans have more time to enjoy their festival experience without the hassle of payments. This solution was pioneered by the organisers of Lowlands Festival in the Netherlands this year.
When payments is an effortless part of the fan’s festival experience, you’ve achieved true conversational commerce. When you cater to all communication channels and ensure payments processes are embedded in each, the customer can contact and do business with you the way they want. They have both the optimal Customer Experience and the incentive to come back to you again and again.
The new communication age
Personalised contact and conversational commerce are only the first step. If you want to understand your audience to their core, imagine all the other platforms your audience use and link them to their festival account. With the consent and approval of the fans, all relevant social media accounts could be linked to a single customer data platform. This way, you could analyse their favourite artists and make relevant suggestions to the customer in real time, such as which stage to visit and when to get the best views.
In order to deliver this next level communication experience, event organisers need one platform that ticks all the boxes – from data collection to messaging and processing payments. With the right tools and data infrastructure, however, the truly customised fan experience of the future is there for the taking.