How an insurance broker solved their event registration and check-in challenge with Acoustic's marketing automation
Company
Footman James
Company
Financial Services & Insurance
Skills
Acoustic / Email marketing / Umbraco / Process design & implementation / Web design / Marketing operations
Footman James is one of the leading classic and specialist vehicle insurance brokers in the UK. They organise and host a series of free car and bike meets across the UK. Coffee & Chrome is a registration only meet open to car and bike enthusiast to attend.
The meet sees approximately 5000 attendee and 3500 vehicles per year.
The challenge
It’s only normal that attendees expect instant acknowledgement of their registrations, right?
Yes, they do! But how do you create automated communications with a content management (CMS) and email service provider (ESP) that don’t natively communicate with each other?
Footman James’s Coffee & Chrome required an automated solution to send confirmation and check-in emails to attendees. They wanted attendees to receive their confirmation email within a few minutes of registering.
Due to the popularity of these meets growing exponentially over the years and venues having very limited space for parking Coffee & Chrome also needed to be able to digitally validate if an attendee was registered when they arrived at the meet.
That’s where my solution of utilising the functionality of the existing email marketing platform (Acoustic) and its capabilities came in.
The solution
I investigated the marketing automation and data capture capabilities of the existing email service provider, Acoustic to diagnose and implement the right solution to automate this type of email communications.
Acoustic had both solutions required to make the automated confirmation email work. Deploying a new database and web form in Acoustic allowed for registrations to be stored and accessed separately from client policy data.
Now, how do you implement the Acoustic web form to be customer-facing? Acoustic web forms can be hosted via the platform or deployed onto a webpage using a custom-built web form linked to the Acoustic database and web form.
For the check-in process utilising Acoustic’s native functionality within databases and web forms was key to providing the check-in solution.
Creating new Acoustic web forms with a series of hidden fields to hold attendee data such as email address, vehicle registration, check-in date and Coffee & Chrome meet location to update the database once the attendee has completed the check-in process.
An email will be sent to attendees with instructions to check in on the day of arrival they will be required to follow the instructions and check in thus allowing the team to see if they are registered or have already entered the meet.
The result
The new registration process decreased queries around a registration being successful or not receiving an email confirmation by 98% after the new process being live for just one meet. The new process also allowed the team to be able to query if the email was sent, delivered, bounced, or opened.
After one meet it became apparent that the check-in process worked but needed some fine tuning. I improved on the communications, copy and the web forms by creating a web form for those who needed to print their confirmation before the meet and a form for those who would be checking in on the day of the meet.
The forms would then display dynamic messages to the attendee/ team member that would indicate whether the check-in is valid or not.
