It’s been a huge year for DICE and you can see that in how our app has grown – let us give you the highlights
A lot happened in 2021 at DICE. From growing our team to welcoming Boiler Room and our continued investment in changing ticketing for the better, 2021 has been one of our biggest yet. Throughout it all, our talented Product team have been hard at work, dreaming up big ideas and building new features to help venues, artists, promoters, and of course, fans.
One of our priorities this year was understanding how you work and what we can do to make your life easier. Integrating DICE with other platforms is a great way to do that. Instead of needing to import data or build the same events on different platforms, we focused on creating connections that will save you time and effort.
Effective email marketing is all about reaching the right audience with the right message at the right moment. To do that you need to be able to segment your audience with ease based on behavioural, demographic or purchase data. Looking to send a targeted mailer to fans who’ve attended an event in a specific genre? Or want to contact fans with follow-up pictures from the night? We’ve got you covered.
In 2021, we made it possible to connect your Mailchimp account to DICE, importing all your fans as contacts with relevant tags about their purchases and demographic information.
Making your events a success means reaching the fans that aren’t already on your mailing list or on DICE. To that end, we’re always looking for ways to connect with the best third-party platforms to reach fans wherever they are online. Two of the biggest platforms we connected with in 2021 are Spotify and YouTube.
Now, when fans are listening to their top artists or discovering new favourites, they’ll be able to see listings for events and follow a link to buy tickets from DICE.
The fan data that you’re collecting on your events is essential in helping you better understand your fans so you can plan for the future. So, in the interest of helping you put all that data to good use, we’ve given partners the ability to access it via our Ticket Holder API.
By connecting DICE to your other tools, such as business intelligence software or access management systems via the API, you can easily manage your relationship with each fan on a more personal level. Whether you’re looking to create segmented audiences for a targeted mailer, manage attendance for an event or see total sales, it’s now even easier to figure out what your fans want and how you can give it to them.
Another priority for 2021 has been expanding the ways fans can discover events on DICE. Discovery is one of our most-loved features, and there are so many ways that we make relevant recommendations to fans from tailored emails to curating their Discovery feeds. This year, we added even more ways to search for and find events.
Venues have their own profiles where fans can find out key information about their location, capacity and upcoming events. These profiles are a great place to show off gorgeous pictures and your top-tier programming, so we wanted to give fans that same experience without them needing to search for a venue.
Now, fans can follow their favourite venues the same way that they follow artists. They can keep track of their local as easily as they keep track of artists. Events from venues that they follow will appear more prominently in their Discovery feeds, so it’s good for fans and it’s good for partners, too.
If there’s one thing we’ve learnt, it’s that fans have very different ways of looking for a night out. Some prioritise location, some prioritise price, and some are up for anything. They might be having an impromptu night out, or they might be planning for when they’re in a different city next week. That’s why we introduced a few new additions to fans’ Discovery feeds this year.
One is a searchable map to help fans see exactly what’s going on in a specific area. Fans can choose a location and a time and get an overview of everything that’s happening. It’s a great way to see events they might not have known to search for. This is just one more string in your event discovery bow, especially if you’re running a club night and hoping to reach fans who are looking to go out out on a whim.
We also created two brand-new sections in the Discovery feed: New and Upcoming. These are in addition to the swipeable rails in the main feed, so there’s plenty of places to explore. As curated, scrollable lists, these new sections are a great place to see what’s going on in a bit more detail. The New section highlights events that have just been announced, and Upcoming shows fans what’s happening in the next seven days. Artists and venues that fans follow are prioritised in both sections so that no one misses out on a great night.
After it became possible to start running events again in 2021, it was even more important than ever to get the word out. Marketing your events is an essential part of this, so we focused on this and also created incentives for fans to purchase tickets. With no extra marketing spend, you’ll be hitting 2022 with even more tools in your arsenal.
Whether fans have the DICE app downloaded or not, scanning a QR code will take them directly to the purchase flow. This keeps up the momentum as they get excited about your event. Share these in emails, print them out and stick them on walls, do whatever you want with them and you’ll be able to simplify your purchase flow and streamline queue management, too.
You can also track your sales with tracking links, which show where fans are purchasing from and adjust your allocations accordingly: your marketing spend reduces while your sales increase.
In July, we made a big change to the way special promotions such as presales or offers work on DICE: in the past we built them for partners, but now you’ve got total control. With Promotions you can drive interest and move more tickets by creating a flash sale, or reward your most loyal fans with an exclusive presale.
In the months since we introduced this functionality we’ve seen so many partners taking control of their events and reacting to sales trends with adjusted offers. We’re going to keep creating new promotions, too, so watch this space in 2022 for more additions.
We wouldn’t want to spoil all the amazing things we’ve got planned, so keep an eye out for our next product round-up in the new year where we’ll share some updates. And if you’re interested in working with us, just get in touch.