Case studies
Here at Backline, we understand that the music industry is driven by results.
So, here’s a little overview of some of the things we’ve achieved through our work - both within Backline and as expert in-house staff or contractors - for a handful of key clients within the music, media, and technology sectors.
It’s not an exhaustive list, but we think it serves as a pretty solid overview of how our skills, insights, and observations have helped convert casual consumers into active, engaged, and purchasing fans of our clients’ brands and products.
Streamlining ticket buying
One of our clients was putting on a major one-day music event and wanted to sell as many tickets as possible in a short amount of time.
So, we tried to find a way to engage their (healthy) existing user base with this flagship live music event.
On the day that users were directed to our client’s app to buy tickets, all new users to the platform (and those who accessed the platform via a social media ad promoting the concert) were targeted with a popup linking them straight to the ticket purchase page, ensuring they didn’t have to find the ticket link themselves. We’re aware that users are anxious about queuing and missing out on tickets in these scenarios, so why not make things as easy as we can for them?
And spoiler alert: it worked.
8k+ users were reached in less than 12 hours with the pop-up, with tickets selling out shortly after. More than 40% of these users clicked to be directed straight to tickets, with 3.4k users being taken directly to the ticket queue and seat selection after accessing the page for the first time from the pop-up or social media ad.
If you ask us, that’s a win.
A major global tour - digital guide and engagement drivers
We were tasked with increasing fan engagement on a well-known music-based app platform ahead of a major indie-rock tour.
In the lead-up to the world tour of a major artist, the band’s content was promoted on an app-based digital media platform - and at the point a user engaged with it, they were prompted to fill out a questionnaire to ask if they were attending the tour.
Once the city and date of attendance was collected, users were entered into a month-long countdown to the night they were attending the tour. Via email, push notifications, and In-App Messages, users were served exclusive content, personalised images to share on social media, and a live dynamic image showing the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until the show, as well as a wall calendar asset striking off the nights of the tour as it progressed and daily weather and traffic updates.
In total, there were 11 personalised countdown sends, powered by zero-party data offered by the user. This provided the app with 11 opportunities to promote their and the artist’s content - and more importantly, drive the users back into the platform to browse other content and further attach themselves to both the band as a superfan and the app as an entertainment platform.
These were the flagship campaign results:
28.7% of the campaign’s signed-up users visited the platform 7 days a week, significantly more than the platform’s average Recurring Daily User metric of 16.2%.
Signed-up users also showed a 62% increase in retention on the band’s content in the platform.
Users who weren’t attending were able to register interest and were prompted with opportunities to win tickets throughout the tour, allowing the app and the band to gather invaluable consumer and marketing data.
After all, on a human level, it’s usually the simple ideas that are the most effective.
Like offering special incentives to your most active subscribers, or finding a way to remind your active users about a cool feature of your product or business that they might just have missed.
These might seem like minor changes, but when actioned properly, they can have a real and tangible impact on your consumer engagement - and thus, on your business’s bottom line.
Remember that major one-day music event we talked about?
Well, a few months ago, we were tasked with driving post-event marketing and consumer retention after this major activation point for our client, a digital media company.
So, we prompted users to opt in to push notifications at the optimal moment in their journey through discovering our client’s product.
As a result of this activation, an additional 180,000 monthly users opted in to receive push notifications, and the total percentage of Monthly Users Opted In increased from 17% to 27%.
On average, users who have opted in to receive push notifications on their device have a 20-100% increase in sessions per week on this app.
This graph shows the stages of experimentation in the bumps upwards, with opt-ins reaching a peak in the last few months where the rate of optimisation and experimentation accelerated.
And remember that digital tour guide we mentioned earlier?
Well, as a follow-up activation, we worked with our client to develop and launch a limited edition re-stock of a previously sold out - and highly in demand - merch item.
And, of course, we only made it available to signed-up users of the digital tour guide. We thought that this might go quite well - and it turns out that we were right. The re-launch generated some serious buzz (and thousands of pounds in additional revenue), and offered a special bonus to the actively engaged superfans of both the brand and the artist.
Not a bad day’s work, really.
Of course, that’s not an exhaustive list of every Customer Experience optimisation we’ve ever implemented.
And it’s certainly not a complete list of every optimisation and tweak that we’ve ever suggested our clients make to help engage their users, optimise their platforms, and increase conversions.
After all, every brand is different, and every product has its own features and goals. What we hope this deck did do, though, is give you a few concrete examples of Customer Experience optimisations we’ve made on real-world platforms that real-life consumers have responded positively to. The changes outlined in this document have tangibly increased conversions, driven revenue, and turned casual consumers of products into active, engaged, and returning fans of world-class brands.
Who knows what we could do next?