Hi everyone,
We are in the situation where we had to go onsale with 4 digital events before knowing which platform the events would be streaming on. Since we didn't have specific access instructions at the time of sale, in the order confirmation emails we said that they would get an email before the premiere date with instructions on how to access content.
For those of you who have done this already, and are using the gated content feature, how did you communicate access instructions to your patrons? Did you put the link to the TNEW gated content page in the order confirmation email?
My concern is that if we use the gated content feature, I will have to pull a list of those patrons who have already purchased to send access instructions to, but I do not have a way to pull the specific e-mails associated with the orders, and in the case of households, I think it would be confusing to send an email to the household, but tell them to use the web login they used to make the purchase to access their tickets. Will all primary members of the household have access to the content, or only the initiator?
Any ideas or experience you've had that can help give me some ideas?
Many thanks in advance.
Charlotte
Owner and initiator have access to gated digital content, so you're good there. Whatever the scenario, you will get a lot of access issues, so have staff ready to take calls and emails and help people get in, much like you would have with a new access protocol for live performances. We have built some FAQ pages for helping patrons understand how to get their content, and we have set up pre-event videos on our digital content pages in advance of our premiere in order to give patrons a chance to try out accessing the page and playing the media so that they can work out as many issues as possible before the actual event.
We send out specific access instructions to customers shortly before the event premiere, we may also do rolling emails for new signups afterward (we have a premiere and then video-on-demand for a period afterward), not sure. We were definitely in the same boat of selling shows before our delivery method had been finalized, so initial confirmation emails did not have event access information, though they do now.
We have the same issue especially with households where their email/login used to purchase lives on the individual level.
Unfortunately I don't have any great ideas to pass on. It would be great to be able to pull emails directly tied to the order.
Thanks Gawain! Very helpful tips regarding having staff ready to provide guidance for patrons to get acccess. Ours will be a video-on-demand situation, so staffing customer service for that 24-7 is a little problematic. But I like the idea of an FAQ page. Will recommend that to the team.
The issue I am struggling with is for those patrons who are members of a household who purchased before we could include the access details in the confirmation email, I have to pull a list of purchasers to send the access instructions to, but there is no way to pull the list (because the order is at the household level) and output the email address of the individual member of the household who made the purchase (ie the initiator) and whose email is associated with the order. If I pull a list of customers that have the event, I can't output the email of the initiator specifically. Or maybe I missing something.
Hi Thomas - yes, that is exactly the problem I am facing. There is no way through extractions to pull a list of patrons who have the event and then output the email address of the individual eaddress associated with the order. I submitted a support ticket about this, but the only option seems to be to create a custom output element that requires a custom view - but we are not able to do that.
So, either a household or an individual login can access the content, so you could just send out the email to all members of the household using the affiliate functions in List Manager.
Charlotte Hussey said:Thanks Gawain! Very helpful tips regarding having staff ready to provide guidance for patrons to get acccess. Ours will be a video-on-demand situation, so staffing customer service for that 24-7 is a little problematic. But I like the idea of an FAQ page. Will recommend that to the team.
I would just be prepared to get a lot of emails, but also you will make the content available at a certain date, and will mail out information about accessing the content at certain times, and having staff available for those moments will help.
We considered this but did not as we didn't want to email members of the household that didn't make a ticket purchase. We manually went through households and added the individual who made the purchase. It was not ideal and fine as we only had one small event but not something that is practical for ongoing purposes.
Apart from households we also have the issue where a customer has multiple emails and only want to send to the email they made the purchase with. This is held in the alt address field of the order but aren't able to pull this without having a customisation.
We have this issue all of the time. So, what we do is in the email confirmation we do provide the link to login to the digital content page. We have had some confusion from patrons about this, however, so far, it's only been a handful of folks. For the most part, it's been pretty successful.
Yes, once we have the digital content page setup, we will include the link in the email confirmation and hopefully that will reduce confusion. Do you know, does the email order confirmation sent from the client ignore the dynamic email settings for TNEW? It would be great if it picked up those settings, because if a patron can't find their original email confirmation, it would be a great solution to just send it to them again.
I think it depends which email order confirmation you are using but we use the same email confirmation that our TNEW site uses and it does include dynamic content that we've setup.
If you need to find only the initiator email, SQL in a list will get this (handy if this is the only SQL access you have, otherwise you could use straight up SQL).
If accessing from a list then you can get their email in a standard output set.
Try updating the values in bold below and give it go - you can easily find the perf_no from your ticketing set up.
When you have the values for your org, create a new list, go to the show query option in the top right hand of the list pane (near add criteria) and paste the below SQL into your list (CTRL + V). Make sure that the query starts on line 1. or you will get an error saying the provided list has no criteria. (see screen show example for how it should look in lists).
Select distinct initiator_no as customer_no
From T_ORDER a with (nolock)
where a. initiator_no is not NULL
and a.order_dt between '11-06-2020' and '11-09-2020' --- date filters in american format
and a.order_no in --- sub query to only find orders with an initiator in them linked to the performance) (Select distinct order_no from T_TICKET_HISTORY b where b.perf_no in (2456))
--- The perf_no value (ID) can be found in ticketing setup under the performances tab of production elements. 2456 in this example. Beware of deleting closing brackets )) or ' when updating values.
This is exactly what we do. We send a performance reminder anyway, so we have rejiggered that to focus on the digital content experience. In the email we include the link to login as well as some streaming FAQs we've compiled.The only tricky thing is that step-by-step instructions differ depending on where you are logging in. If you read the email and click on the digital content login page, it's simple. But the directions are different if you're logging on elsewhere and need to click "My Account" first. So that has caused a bit of confusion but for the most part it's been okay.