Scott Handsaker and Andrew Edwards founded event registration service Eventarc in 2008. Offering a solution to event organisers who previously tracked attendees in tiresome manual excel spread sheets, Eventarc is constantly being refined to provide features appropriate to its users.

“We’re about to launch our new platform in a week or two with things like pay by invoice, discount codes, email marketing, all that kind of cool stuff. iPhone app version 2 has gone up, so you can do barcode check in on the iPhone app as well,” says Handsaker.

Competition

Newcomer Eventarc is standing up well beside US leaders in event registration, especially for Australian clients. “When we do get asked to pitch against them, we probably win about 80% – 90% of the jobs,” says Handsaker, highlighting four key competitive advantages.

“The first one is when you need support we’re here. We answer the phone in business hours, you can speak to us, we can come and see you, and that’s really important for a lot of people. When they come to their moment of need and they pick up the phone, we’re going to answer.

The second one is because we understand the Australian market; we understand what’s required from a tax office perspective, so we can issue tax office compliant GST receipts, which is a bit harder to do on international products.

The third, and this is important for Government departments, is because we’re an Australian company we’re bound by Australian privacy laws. Therefore you don’t have to worry about overseas customers not worrying about the integrity of your data  and not being bound by the same regulations.

The fourth is that with a lot of overseas products, when someone buys a ticket to your event they will consider that person who bought the ticket to be a legitimate marketing target.  They’ll take that person’s email address and they’ll push their own product out to them and try and convince them to sign up, so basically you’re helping contribute to the database of that product. We don’t do that. If you’ve signed up as an event organiser, we consider you to be our customer, but if people buy tickets from you we don’t consider them to be our customer. So we don’t market to ticket buyers and we don’t use their data. It’s there for your use as the event organiser and we don’t touch it. So those four things are really quite strong in getting people to consider our product.”

User testing

Whilst the product is very much functional, it is constantly being improved. Handsaker says, “We use a service called usertesting.com and what that allows you to do is give a user a typical example of how you use the product, and in return you get a fifteen minute video of them using the product,.  You also get them talking about it as they’re using it and you get a real stream of consciousness. We can see all the mistakes they make and know if the interface still isn’t quite right. It helps us really understand the metrics of our product and what the important things are that really drive our performance. And then knowing what to tweak, tweaking those things and then watching what happens when you do.”

Ad spend decision making

Eventarc invests a significant amount of time considering how people come to find the site, its conversion funnel and performance of various marketing spends. “It’s interesting because we also go to the level of assessing how you came to our website, whether it was by Google with a keyword search or whether it was via a pay per click ad or a referral from someone else, and then attaching that  to your account,” says Handsaker. “You can then track whether the customers from AdWords are more valuable than the customers from Google organic results. It’s really revealing to do that kind of stuff and that’s something we’ve added in this year. I wish we’d had it in from the start. I certainly recommend other people put it in from the start, because it allows you to work out where you spend your money. You might think each channel is performing equivalently to another, but it’s just not true. You might find that you’re wasting a lot of money on Adwords that you don’t need to spend, so you could put it elsewhere.

“We also have a really good understanding of what a typical customer makes us per year and what a typical customer makes us over a lifetime, so what that means is we can look at every channel and work out which ones are cost effective; so you can look at AdWords and say, ‘Okay, I spent $5,000 on AdWords in the past three months, how many customers did I get out of that and how much has that $5,000 made me over the lifetime of those customers?’ It’s very easy then to work out, ‘Should I be spending $5,000 on AdWords in the next quarter?’”

For Eventarc, Handsaker has discovered that word of mouth referral far outperforms any form of advertising or search investment. Accordingly, Eventarc has recently rolled out a revised referral scheme offering a $50 gift voucher to Amazon or iTunes for referrals to any paying customer, plus entry into an end of year draw to win over $4,000 worth of prizes. Equipped with a greater understanding of what drives traffic to the Eventarc services, and the demands of users on the services, Handsaker is in an excellent position to guide Eventarc to further success.

www.eventarc.com