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Wed, 29 Feb 2012 12:35:12 -0500

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Have You Noticed an Increase on Purchase Recommendations Made by Women in Your Social Graph? « Flockified

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:56:25 -0500

Have You Noticed an Increase on Purchase Recommendations Made by Women in Your Social Graph? « Flockified:

According to the survey, 54% of US female internet users said they feel a responsibility to help friends and family make wise purchase decisions, and nearly half said they influence friends and family to buy—or not buy—a product or service on a regular basis.

What's Wrong With B2C Conversion / Purchase Funnel and How We're Fixing It With Flockified

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:44:03 -0500

BACKGROUND

It all started out when we decided we’d failed with our Artist Powered Ticketing service.

We had a unique approach to our ticketing service’s inbound marketing where we managed to persuade the performing artists to post unique, trackable links to ticket transaction pages for the concerts and festivals they were playing.

You could go as far as saying there’s no chance in hell you could get more “qualified leads” to your purchase pages than that.

Nearly 50% of all our inbound leads to our landing pages were already fans of the artists in question and were coming in because the artist directly asked them to buy the tickets from our page. Because of this we had managed to get some success cases under our belt and the ticket sales were going steadily enough but we we’re still very much disappointed in our ability to convert those qualified leads we had even with numerous iterations and optimization tests we did to the landing page.

For all intents and purposes we had managed to “crack the nut” on how to optimize the Discovery phase of the purchase funnel through artist powered inbound marketing to get as qualified leads as possible but something was inherently broken along the way in the purchase funnel since our conversion rates were not significantly higher (as we had hoped for) than the average conversion rates for e-commerce.

We started taking a long, cold and hard look at our landing page data and more importantly we started contacting and communicating directly to our ticket customers - especially the ones we did not manage to convert - to figure out what was going on.

What we found was an eye-opener to say the least.

It was, actually, something that the industry (and us along it) should have figured out a long time ago since it was so unbelievably apparent and - especially with ticket purchases - something so inherently built-in to the whole social experience of events that it seemed the answer was literally right before our eyes.

Group Decision.

When we started getting these kinds of answers from our customers we felt like idiots for not seeing this was going on:

“I needed to text two of my friends to know if they are interested to join me before I’m ready to buy the tickets.”

There it was. A clear as the sky retention problem right there.

Since we did not have anything to offer our customers to help them make the necessary group decision we ended up losing the customers when they exited our landing page to send their SMS’s, emails, Facebook messages and what-have-you’s. No wonder two of our biggest exit channels in our page analytics were http://mail.google.com and http://facebook.com. And what’s worse, the exits started happening around the 10 seconds mark - ie. exactly the time it takes for the consumer to figure out that:

“This is a cool event that I’d *possibly* like to attend…”
“But I don’t want to go alone…”
“… I need to make sure if my friends are coming with me.”
“I can’t just go and click the “Buy Tickets” button yet…”
“… aaand what the hell do I do next….”

THE PROBLEM

Since ticketing industry (and many other of the more “social” B2C industries as well, but I’ll get to those later) seem to think that their Conversion / Purchase Funnel is relatively simple - starting with Event Discovery, Intention Broadcasting and ending with Final Transaction - we noticed we had stumbled across a huge gap in between the way the industry had set up their sites and services and how people ACTUALLY plan & buy stuff online.

This is both a very very bad situation and an immensely important realization.

Why this is bad is because the top-of-funnel discovery sites and services (especially the discovery sites and services) AND the end-of-funnel transaction services wind up with churn problems when consumers exit the funnel to perform an auxiliary *but* critical function using sites and services like Gmail, their iPhones to send SMS’s or Facebook Events that are disconnected from the funnel and thus out of reach of the the marketer.

This very same consumer might or might not come back to make the transaction after possibly maybe coming up with the group decision to purchase.

By their own.

And that’s the problem: the consumer or the resulting group of consumers are doing all of this planning and deciding without a direct emphasis from the marketer who could, with proper tools, help the group make their decision much faster and much more efficiently.

I’m talking about incentivizes as much as I’m talking about offering a valuable free tool to consumers to take the pain out of group decisions.

The important thing here is that neither of the aforementioned ways will not work without both of them being integrated to or squeezed in between the existing services, ie. where people find out about cool stuff (Discovery) and where people buy that stuff (Transaction).

The silver lining in all of this is that realizing the importance of Group Decision is very much a positive thing!

Exactly because this gap is as of yet critically underserved and largely ignored by the B2C marketing industry & community it will leave a lot of room for future improvement regarding B2C CRO and it’s obvious impact on increased sales revenue.

SOLUTION

Flockified is very much a direct response to the needs of the consumer upon Discovery.

It’s essentially two things:

1) An easy to use, super-efficient way for people to figure stuff out together starting from the 10 seconds mark when the person taking ownership and interest in something realizes he / she can’t make the decision alone

2) A way for marketers to keep the consumers within reach and inside the funnel to help carry the group of friends from Discovery, Group Decision and all the way to Transaction - there’s a lot things regarding retention marketing going on there: lead nurturing, hyper-targeted incentives and one-to-one contextual communication but let’s get to specifics later

What is important in our solution is that it will benefit each part of the B2C ecosystem.

We’re building a group decision making platform that (i) allows consumers to decide on purchases, (ii) fixes the disconnect between Discovery and Transaction phases and (iii) let’s Discovery and Transaction services improve their retention marketing by allowing to send hyper targeted incentives to groups making a decision.

We are in a unique position to provide ridiculous value to every one involved. And some people are already taking notice…

Flockified fixes the disconnect in B2C industry conversion /...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:16:32 -0500

Flockified fixes the disconnect in B2C industry conversion / purchase funnel by introducing a mid-funnel solution where consumers are encouraged, helped and incentivized to make the necessary group decision by providing them an efficient free tool to use upon discovery phase of the funnel.

There’s a significant disconnect between how B2C...

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 05:12:05 -0500

There’s a significant disconnect between how B2C industries THINK their conversion / purchase funnels are set up and how the consumers are actually discovering, deciding and buying stuff like concert and festival tickets.

"@jvermasheina @Flockified Fantastic concept! Cannot wait to see more! I was just saying to a friend..."

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:32:00 -0500

““@jvermasheina @Flockified Fantastic concept! Cannot wait to see more! I was just saying to a friend that I could see you redefining B:Cx10+””

- @CanazaresC | Twitter | Nov 29th 2011

https://twitter.com/#!/CanazaresC/status/141571561839796224

Flockified position in the event industry ecosystem & ticket...

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:48:00 -0500

Flockified position in the event industry ecosystem & ticket purchase funnel.

Flockified Links Event Discovery to Group Purchases

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:32:00 -0500

There’s a fundamental disconnect between event discovery and ticket purchases.

In almost 90% of cases when a person first discovers a cool new event on event listing sites like Eventful, Zvents, Jambase, Songkick, Plancast, or ticketing services like Eventbrite, Ticketfly or Ticketmaster they are already facing a problem.

Put yourself in Sheila’s shoes for a moment…

Sheila discovers a cool concert on Jambase. But she can’t buy tickets yet since she doesn’t know if her friends can make it or not. That rules out the primary call-to-action of “Buy Tickets” right there and then for her.

She will be forced to send out a bunch of text messages, email messages or use the social sharing buttons available. She might even hop on to Facebook to create a Facebook Event. But that’s a lot of heavy-lifting just to find out if her friends would like to go to the gig or not.

Flockified app is targeted to all the Sheila’s out there - the people who go the extra mile to arrange fun activities together for their friends. The Flockified app makes it easy for them to ask friends, track their opens and answers, set deadlines and reminders etc in order to find out if there is enough interest among their friends to actually go to an event.

These “organizer types” are also extremely important people for the event organizers since these people are effectively sitting on top of the ticket buying decision for the whole group of friends. If she’s not able to get her friends to come with her the whole group will cancel their plans to buy tickets.

With that in mind The Flockified app also allows event organisers to see well in advance the number of the groups of friends (“Flocks”) who are interested in coming to the event and how many people within those groups are planning to attend. Depending on the activity within these “Flocks” they can be offered exclusive discounts, incentives and rewards in return for their loyalty and early booking – using sophisticated analytics, measurement, data, communication and updating tools - all without any heavy selling.

The Magic Loungeabout, recently shortlisted in the UK Festival Awards, and one of the UKs best family festivals, is an early adopter of the newly released Flockified app for Facebook.

“Facebook Events does not provide us with enough tools or analytics to convince groups of people to attend our events”, says Simon Adamson, promoter of The Magic Loungeabout Festival in Yorkshire, UK. “The Flockified Facebook app allows us to see in advance how many groups of friends are considering attending. Flockified also allows us to deliver targeted discount offers to these groups to help convince them to buy tickets. After trying out Groupon last summer, we would much prefer a private platform like Flockified, that enables us to do all this without having to publicly discount our ticket prices and most importantly, protects the value of the product.”

The Flockified team is now looking to partner with all the major event listing sites and ticketing services to improve the stickiness of their event listings. Flockified would like to bring people back to the partner pages to buy the tickets - after facilitating the group buying decision first.

For more information, please contact:

CEO & Founder Juuso Vermasheina

email: juuso@yourflocks.com

twitter: @jvermasheina

mobile: +358 401 922 917

Images:

Image #1: Choosing an event on the Flockified Facebook Application

Image #2: Overview of friends’ answers on the Flockified Facebook Application

Choosing an Event on Flockified Facebook Application

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:25:00 -0500

Choosing an Event on Flockified Facebook Application

Answers from friends on Flockified Facebook Application

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Answers from friends on Flockified Facebook Application