Ticketfly lets venues, promoters customize loyalty programs

Ticketfly, a ticketing and marketing service, has launched an initiative aimed at giving venues and event promoters the ability to direct targeted rewards at their most loyal customers.

The impetus behind the Fanbase initiative, announced Wednesday, is that while 7 percent of ticket buyers generate 30 percent of the revenue brought in at the gate of events utilizing Ticketfly tickets, there has previously been no way to adequately identify, reward, and motivate those people.

While other ticketing and marketing services have rolled out other loyalty programs, San Francisco-based Ticketfly said its new program is the industry's most sophisticated effort to date.

Ticketfly has built its business around a suite of tools available to venues and promoters aimed at helping to streamline the ticket-selling process, while also boosting the range of digital communications and analytics that are used to get people in the door -- and to understand who they are and what they like.

With Fanbase -- which has been in a beta test with 50 of Ticketfly's top clients -- those clients can take deep dives into who are their best customers and figure out how to best get those people to continue spending money, but in a way that makes the customers and their friends happy.

In the initiative's early going, promoters will be able to create profiles of their best customers. Those profiles will show the event-goers' purchasing patterns, their recent activity on Facebook and Twitter, how much revenue they've generated, and more. Venue managers and promoters will only be able to see customers' behavior at their own venues and shows, but they can choose if they want to see data based on single events, or across all events.

In order to determine who are the most valuable customers for each venue or event, and how to reward them, Ticketfly built an algorithm that sifts through users' more recent four months of social data in order to try to best target them. That algorithm weights users' attendance at Ticketfly clients events, as well as how much they spent and how social they were.

But that algorithm is pliable. Promoters can change the weighting for each category as they like so, for example, they know that in the electronic dance music field, users love being social, while for attendees of big festivals, customers enjoy spending a lot of money.

With Fanbase, Ticketfly clients can quickly sort to determine who their top attendees are -- while shunning resellers. For now, at least, ticket buyers cannot see their own profiles, but Ticketfly plans on changing that dynamic in the near short-term.

For Ticketfly, being able to help its clients do a better job of rewarding their customers may go a long way to help it grow. The company pales in size to Ticketmaster, but has built a steady client base in the United States and now in Canada. It hopes that the new program will win it new clients, and solidify its relationships with existing ones. In total, 92 percent of Fanbase beta clients told Ticketfly they expect to use the program multiple times each week.