With BizBash IdeaFest just around the corner, I had the pleasure of connecting with Tamara
Mendelsohn the VP of Marketing for Eventbrite to find out a little more about
her perspective on our industry, specifically around the possibilities to
supercharge your ticketing opportunities for events and insight into her
session at Ideafest next week.
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| Tamara Mendelsohn |
- Eventbrite
not only does a great job of marketing themselves, you take these lessons
and apply these to your client’s events. Do you believe this sets you
apart in the crowded marketplace?
Thank
you. One of they keys to our approach in event ticketing is building
relationships with customers through a genuine interest in sharing ideas, and
by continually improving our platform based on their feedback. We feel it
is important to keep an open relationship where we share our commitment to the
process, and seek their input regularly on how to make both our product and
their experience better. In addition to our 24/7 phone and email support team,
we also have marketers located in 6 major markets to build relationships with
our customers and engage them in these idea sharing discussions.
- Without
giving away the whole session, what is one lesson you feel the approach
Amazon takes has been key for you to apply to Eventbrite?
We’ve learned
the importance of being data driven by studying the major players in online
retail. When you are selling online you have the unique opportunity to learn
from your data. Amazon is a prime example of listening to what the customers
tell them with each transaction, and finding ways to maximize that information
in the product. This process is often not second nature to event
professionals but if you want to learn from the best (Amazon) Eventbrite has a
platform that allows them to capture a lot of data in a way it can be easily
analyzed and implemented in their marketing efforts.
- You
have a very “active” site full of knowledge for planners – do you find
that planners are eager for the information, or overwhelmed, with
registration, obviously key, being yet another task to master in a
never-ending list?
Of course
there is an adoption curve – from novice to power user – and we do have a
natural distribution over this curve. What we are seeing is the event
professionals that use the wider range of tools available are finding more
success with the ticket sales. They are taking action on learning about
their event and attendees – and using the insights and opportunities the data
provides to make decisions about their ticket sales and marketing. We’ve
worked hard to provide robust analytics and information for the more sophisticated
event planners, but not too overwhelming for novice users. Nothing excites us
more than when people who consider themselves scared of analytics actually get
sucked into our tools because are so easy to digest.
- You see
all kinds of events – are you finding planners are more often looking to
fill seats or are you seeing a trend towards curating specific
audiences? (How can you help with these)
Sophisticated
event professionals often know intuitively how many tickets they will sell and
how they can sell them. But they can now tie the data trends and patterns to
actual sales, which gives them more power to control their attendance. This
includes watching the data related to your partnerships – are the sales coming
from where you expected them to?. Of course more often they want to fill to
their desired capacity but the experience is ultimately the most important
part. The quality of experience should go up with the quality of people
in the room relevant to your event. You do want to focus on the quality
of the people who attend, and Eventbrite can help do you target in a few ways.
The way we have integrated social media into the ticket buying and promo
process allows the community to magnify itself. As attendees register, news
travels through the channels of the people who will care most about the event –
your participant’s communities Social media allows event professionals to
build focus with the right information, and with Eventbrite you can collect
information through the process – and you can see how it is skewing by job
function or geography –allowing you to gut check if you reaching the right
people.
5. How is mobile impacting the process?
Mobile is one
of our fastest growing channels – nearly 25% of our overall traffic comes from
mobile, up from practically zero a couple of years ago. You know the
scenario, you are out with friends and start talking about the event you will
attend on the weekend and you look for it on your phone. With the pages
mobile-optimized, we are seeing a really nice bump in conversion rates because
we have made it incredibly easy to buy on a mobile device. It also helps you
discover events that are ticketing on Eventbrite – for example, if one of your
friends is attending an event on Eventbrite, you will see a picture of them
next to the event listing on your mobile phone. Eventbrite found that
people are 3 times more likely to get a ticket or register for an event on
mobile when they see these pictures of their friend attending. (WOW! This is
truly what event professionals want to see!)
Key is to
watch your data – this can’t be said enough.
- If I
was going to New York, this looks like a great session to me – but in your
words, why should someone choose your session to attend?
There are some
easy ways to supercharge your ticket sales and easy ways to treat it as a
science. We’ll talk about how to easily make data analytics a habit - a little
bit like eating more vegetables. I want event professionals to walk away
inspired to put these ideas into action and see the results for growing their
events.
