We’ve gotten the opportunity to do some pretty unique things here at Apex Current, but one of the most unique was building a bridge (or integration) between Eventbrite and Ticketmaster. From the outset, you might thing two things: 1) Why would anyone what to do that? and 2) What’s the big deal?
So, as far as #1 goes, I’ll go into more detail below, but to answer #2 it’s a big deal mainly because these are two competitors. They’re not supposed to play nice because they’re competing platforms used for event tickets. It posed an interesting challenge that we were game to tackle.
Our client the EDPA (Economic Development Partnership of Alabama) hosts an event called imerge every year. We were brought on for our specialty as conversion marketers to drive ticket sales for the event (I’m happy to report we ended up with over 1,000 tickets secured by attendees for the event).
One promotion that the executive staff wanted us to be able to take advantage of to increase sales was an alignment they had with Sloss Fest - a large weekend concert festival hosted here in Birmingham each year - for 50% off weekend passes if you purchased imerge 2018 tickets. The issue was that imerge tickets were being sold through Eventbrite and Sloss Fest tickets were being sold through Ticketmaster.
We were tasked with coming up with a solution to create a seamless experience for the user so that we could use the offer as a carrot to dangle in front of them to increase sales. This could have been something that ended up pretty clunky and we went through a number of scenarios. Even having our team or someone from EDPA’s team manually send an email to the ticket recipient with a promo code for Sloss Fest with each purchase. This obviously wasn’t ideal and would have created a great deal of unnecessary work.
Thankfully, our experience runs pretty deep at this point and we had already built a unique bridge for our client at Breakout Games that needed a similar solution. In this instance, we wanted to track unique purchases through our funnel so we integrated with their merchant services provider Stripe. But, we needed to provide a discount code that was part of our offer. So, we utilized a third-party integration platform called Integromat. This is based off logic and commands that we build through Infusionsoft - our CRM partner - to pull a unique promo code that would be embedded in an auto-generated email to the buyer after they complete their purchase.
We knew in theory this scenario would logically work the same way with the EDPA. We worked with the team at Ticketmaster to create a number of unique promo codes that would provide the 50% discount when someone purchased a Sloss Fest ticket. The key here is that each code is unique. If they weren’t it would make things significantly easier, but the obvious problem is that buyers could pass that code around to their friends. With a unique promo code, the user can only use the code one time and then it can’t be used again. This protects the promotion and doesn’t allow for repeat usage.
After building an integration with Infusionsoft and Evenbrite, we used logic through Integromat to automate scenarios so that these promo codes would fire off after each imerge ticket purchase. The command would pull the unique one-time code and send it to the imerge ticket purchaser using merge fields (information fields that pull into a formatted email unique information for that buyer).
This logic would also account for multiple imerge tickets purchased and the buyer receiving multiple discount codes for Sloss Fest. So, if the buyer purchased two tickets to imerge they would receive 2 x 50% discount promo codes to Sloss Fest and so on. By and large, this integration between Eventbrite and Ticketmaster performed without issue. There was about a 12-hour time period where one of the integrations we utilized went through some system updates that caused a lag, but other than that it performed beautifully.
When we find wins like this one we try to do whatever we can to leverage these key learnings for other opportunities. This custom solution is an anomaly, but it’s something we’ve found success in and built in the ability to replicate when needed for our client partners.
If you or someone you know needs an integration built between Eventbrite and Ticketmaster or if you have some other unique integration you need help with, reach out to us at support@apexcurrent.com. We’d love to discuss with you how we can help!
