ECAL Launches Free Product with Branded Offers
Another Calendar Marketing Innovation First
Melbourne (Australia) – 12th December 2017 – Aussie-based tech company, ECAL (ecal.com), the world’s leading calendar marketing platform has launched another industry first, a free version product featuring ‘Branded Offers’.
Launched by leading AFL and A-League teams including Hawthorn FC, Geelong Cats, Gold Coast Suns and Adelaide United FC, ECAL’s free version ‘sync to calendar’ technology keeps fans up-to-date with the latest games and events, with access to amazing competitions and great offers from well-known brands.
How does it work?
In partnership with Melbourne-based ‘ad tech’ company Opentop, ECAL has successfully integrated their ‘post-transaction advertising platform’ into the ‘success’ flow of the ECAL widget experience.
Following a successful ‘sync to calendar’ with ECAL, the user can now also enter an amazing free prize competition, managed by Opentop. The user can also access a series of ‘opt-in’ offers from leading brands in travel, retail, insurance, utilities and more.
Importantly, no offers or advertising of any sort is displayed anywhere else, especially not the calendar, a space ECAL holds sacred.
What competitions and what Branded Offers?
High value competitions are run across the network. Currently, users have the chance to win $10,000 cash. Other competitions include the chance to win a trip to New York, a tropical holiday, or even a new car.
Branded Offers currently include 10% off at Peter Jackson, 10% off a holiday cruise from Royal Caribbean International, $20 hotel voucher from Travel Online, Ladbrokes betting bonus, plus discounts from Kogan and Foxtel. Opentop’s post-transaction advertising platform analyses the user’s demographic, location, time of day, plus millions of layers of behavioral data, to present the most relevant offers to each user.
Participation in any of the Branded Offers is completely voluntary and not a condition of entry for the free prize competition,
Why a free version?
ECAL Founder & CEO, Patrick Barrett explains: “We are responding to a segment of the business market that want to deploy our ‘sync to calendar’ technology for free, and are happy to forgo access to certain features and customer data that the paid enterprise product provides.”
“The challenge for us as a business was to develop a free product that was viable, whilst protecting the intimacy and security of our end-users’ personal calendar, which for us is an entirely sacred space.”
“The teams at ECAL and Opentop collaborated to develop an awesome product that doesn’t impact on the core ‘sync to calendar’ experience, and returns the revenue we need for it to be viable.”
The future for ECAL’s Branded Offers looks bright. As Mr. Barrett explains, “With a successful licence-based model already in play, and now an alternative free model, we can be ultimately more flexible for clients that want to use ECAL. For clients with significant audience networks, we can also work in close partnership with them to provide new revenue sharing opportunities, which is a major business advantage.”
Aaron Woolf, CEO of Opentop added “this partnership is fantastic for all involved – the customers get fantastic offers from the world’s leading brands, the calendar partner gets access to the fantastic ECAL platform at no cost, and the advertisers generate some incredible consumer engagement with their brand! Everyone wins!”
About ECAL
ECAL, founded by technology entrepreneur Patrick Barrett in 2010, is the world’s first purpose-built calendar marketing platform delivering ‘rich’ communications to the personal calendars of users.
ECAL’s ‘sync to calendar’ technology is used by hundreds of major brands globally, across sports, ticketing, media, banking and payments.
ECAL is an important communications, marketing and data feature for the likes of AFL, Cricket Australia, NBL, NRL, Fox Sports, The Australian Ballet National Australia Bank, Optus (Australia), Premier League, Arsenal FC, Tottenham FC (UK), Barclaycard, Paciolan, Major League Soccer, NFL / NBA / NHL teams, College and Olympic sports (US).
ECAL is globally headquartered in Melbourne with US headquarters in Los Angeles.
Contact:
Patrick Barrett
Founder & CEO | ECAL
E: Patrick@ecal.com | M: +61 (0)411 650 445
Published by Laurie Sullivan; MediaPost, 1st September 2016.
Organizers for COPA, the South American international men’s soccer tournament, wanted to catch the attention of soccer fans in the U.S., where the games were being held for the first time in the tourney’s 100-year history.
The global fan base also needed help tracking 32 matches across 10 cities with 16 teams, from June 3 through 26.
So COPA’s organizers used ECAL’s technology, which creates calendar-based digital marketing campaigns.
There are other calendar widgets, admits Patrick Barrett, CEO at ECAL, but he says his company provides data, targeting and tracking. “The calendar notification can completely bypass the email box,” he said.
The goal for COPA meant creating awareness and anticipation for the U.S. audience ahead of the Tournament Draw. It also was aimed at building a connected calendar audience of passionate fans, driving early and advanced ticket sales, and collecting profiled data for new fan acquisitions and conversations began in February 2016.
The campaigns required fans to opt in through a sync-to-calendar button on the brand’s Web site. The technology integrated across Facebook, Web sites, calendars, even email.
The consumer chose the tournament schedule, and the technology populated the fan’s personal calendar, alerting them when a Tournament Draw became available.
A tracking URL in each link followed the consumer through the purchase. ECAL knows how much consumers spent, when they made the purchase, and in which category it was purchased.
Before the tournament was announced, there were more than 53,000 calendar subscribers.
The campaign drove total registration of 91,470 consumers; opt-in rate of 73%; active users of 59,456; and an active user rate of 65%.
Overall, the campaign drove 17,201 click-throughs, at a 0.68% click-through rate.
The emerging channel drove $90,042.36 in sales, with an average order value of $441.38. COPA earned fan preferences in event times, ticket purchasing, merchandise, TV vs live attendance, interaction, opt-ins and more at an average CPM of $20 and cost per click of $5.
View the article here
By Eric Fisher, Staff Writer
Published July 18, 2016
eCal, an Australian developer of calendar-based digital marketing products, has struck a multiyear deal with the EPL to develop the “Premier League Digital Calendar.” The product will allow fans to sync team schedules, local broadcast details, ticketing links, and other match-related data into their digital calendars, either on desktop or mobile. The calendar-based platform then communicates to fans a variety of reminders for match times, ticket on-sale dates, last-minute seat availabilities and other related messages. The EPL deal, nearly a year in development, represents a substantial increase in scope for eCal, which works with more than 300 sports and entertainment clients, including the Patriots, Redskins, Celtics, Pacers and MLS. “This is a really important deal for us,” said eCal Founder & CEO Patrick Barrett,. “You’re obviously talking about one of the leading sports leagues in the world, and this is one that really shows how sports organizations are really beginning to budget for calendar-based marketing.” Financial terms were not disclosed, but the deal is a vendor-based contract. The eCal digital calendar product will be included in the EPL’s mobile apps in time for the beginning of the ’16-17 season next month, and will be available in 14 different languages.
Patrick Barrett, Founder & CEO, ECAL.com
In an increasingly fragmented media landscape, personal and profitable interaction with consumers can feel like a marketing goal that’s just within reach and at the same time as elusive as the Holy Grail.
The introduction of each new communications channel presents an opportunity to finally reach that goal. Yet, even with the unprecedented popularity of highly interactive social media, it has been difficult for most organizations to foster direct connections that convert to profitable action.
Like many innovations, the solution behind ECAL now seems deceptively simple, but achieving it required the patience to nurture an idea and the ability to recognize when technologies had finally aligned to support it.
To turn the introduction of this new tool into an award-winning marketing product with global appeal, we followed a simple three-step strategy.
Identification strategy: The critical first step to identifying market need and opportunity
It was 2001—no one was talking about working “in the cloud” and cell phones weren’t yet “smart.”
I was a sports marketing professional finishing a successful major rebranding campaign for the British Horseracing Authority in London. We used the new consumer website to augment traditional advertising methods, but the inefficiency of printing and mailing track schedules left me wishing for an easier way to share the most up-to-date information with fans.
That seemingly tiny niche market need actually set me on course to develop the first online scheduler that would sync events into a personal calendar.
While it was sports organizations like the British Horseracing Authority (UK), Major League Soccer, New England Patriots (US) and Hawthorn Football Club (Aus) that first recognized the value of the technology, their early adoption established a need and an even wider market for the product.
Engagement strategy: Breaking through the missing piece in the market place to connect with the customer
The best solution isn’t always the one that seems the most obvious. To find that missing piece of the engagement strategy puzzle, we had to look beyond traditional advertising paradigms.
Each hot new social media channel has been targeted by advertisers because of the highly interactive nature and widespread adoption of these sites. But each new social media channel is simply another media channel, ultimately serving only to further fragment the advertising landscape. According to Smart Insights, ad CTR across all formats and placements is a disappointing 0.17%—less than 2 clicks per 1,000 impressions.
The same can be said of email—essentially the digital version of the stacks of direct mail consumers regularly toss directly into the trash. Consumers have been inundated with email to the point that major providers auto-sort email into pre-set folders, reducing the number of messages a consumer sees, much less opens. Remarkably, open rates on such emails can still average around 16%, but click-through rates have remained discouragingly low, around 1.3%.
Aside from email, there is another app that nearly every person on a desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phone uses at least several times every day: the personal calendar. The average smart phone user checks their phone up to 150 times per day and 75% of consumers age 18 to 64 report that they rely upon their digital calendar to manage their life schedule.
Being able to book a piece of time directly into a consumer’s personal calendar is an incredibly powerful marketing tool that had never been used to its full potential.
With calendar marketing, brands place the power of content selection into the hands of the consumer, who chooses what they want to see in their personal calendar—sports and entertainment schedules, special offers, even payment reminders—so content relevance to the consumer is nearly 100%. For comparison, the scattergun approach of email marketing is available to anyone who may come across your email address, and may deliver 15% to 20% content relevancy.
Consumers choose to sync an organization’s content to their own personal calendar, delivering not only increased sales and loyalty, but which also works to ‘self-profile’ your audience and provide invaluable contact and preference data that can be used to deliver better communications and make smarter business decisions.
Built as an enterprise-level system to augment any marketing automation suite, ECAL clients own and maintain control of their customer data, and access further insights from behavioral analytics. And that data is rich, working to fuel a more ‘dynamic’ CRM framework. As a valuable CRM component along the entire ‘customer journey’, the ECAL technology contributes to all stages of the value chain, from acquisition to engagement, monetization, and loyalty.
Defining niche: Few products can be all things to all people
Developing a strategy to right-focus a solution to a particular market pain is crucial. By entering the market with a niche focus, ECAL was able to establish a clear market need and demonstrate the platform’s usefulness across a spectrum of industry verticals.
Early adopters have given rise to significant global brands adopting ECAL as a key element of their digital marketing strategy, including Live Nation (Ticketmaster), Copa America and Premier League. Enterprise clients of ECAL are experiencing up to 90%+ opt-in rates, 70%+ mobile subscriptions rates, 84% new customer acquisition, and increases in revenues driven by consumer responses that have effectively doubled the normal ‘purchase rate’ for some brands, especially for tickets.
The experiences of the early adopters helped prove the wider market value of communications targeted directly into personal calendars. For any organization looking for a deeper relationship with its customers, partners, and others, the use cases go well beyond the original sports schedule niche market: education, retail, transactional, and media, to name a few.
Published by Logan Bradley; SportTechie, 5th July 2016.
Everybody has signed up for an email list at one point in their life and regretted it, it’s almost like a rite of passage. You end up deleting the majority of the messages you get and receive almost no benefit from subscribing.
In fact, according to Patrick Barrett, the CEO of ECAL, email open rates are as low as 5%. That’s why Barrett came up with the idea of delivering user-specific content directly to the consumer’s calendar. “Communications are always seen at the right time through the alerts and reminders that you set through the calendar,” said Barrett. “As opposed to hoping or waiting for someone to open their email.”
The goal of ECAL is to “beat the inbox,” as Barrett puts it, and to be able to communicate to their consumers when it’s most appropriate about the things that are most relevant. One of the reasons you will get content that is most relevant to you is because nobody knows your calendar address like they do your email. Due to this, nobody can spam you, and only you can control what information you select to have sent to your calendar.
ECAL works with a variety of leagues including the recently concluded COPA competition. “We delivered the digital match calendar for COPA,” said Barrett. “That was a very key tool for COPA in its business strategy.”
One of the key things that ECAL was able to do for COPA was build an audience for them very quickly, even before the tournament draw was released. Fans were able to choose their favorite team and have their entire schedule synced straight to their personal calendar. They also provided additional incentive for people to download the calendar by offering a chance to win two tickets to the official COPA draw in New York City.
That’s not all that ECAL offers through its partnership with multiple leagues and tournaments like COPA. They also provide the ability for fans to buy tickets in advance of their favorite team’s game. According to Barrett, through the use of the COPA ECAL, over $83,000 worth of tickets were bought.
COPA isn’t the only large soccer enterprise that ECAL associates with, they also just recently (June 15) launched the Premier League digital calendar. “What’s really important about that (the partnership) is that big brands like Premier League, COPA, MLS and others have calendar marketing as a key part of their marketing mix,” said Barrett.
Clients like the Premier League own the rights to the customer data that they get through the use of ECAL. They have instant, real-time access that they can sort and use to their benefit.
ECAL is based in Australia and works with pretty much every major league there, as well as in New Zealand. In the U.S. they work with Major League Soccer along with teams like the New England Patriots and Washington Redskins of the NFL and theBoston Celtics of the NBA. Given the globalization of ECAL, they do displays in 14 different languages by using widgets that have geo-detection technology to serve every market.
However, their biggest client in the U.S. isn’t a sports team, it’s Ticketmaster. “If you look at the Ticketmaster site for the U.S. now, every event for the U.S. has an ECAL enter calendar link on it,” explained Barrett.
He also said that partnering with Ticketmaster has pretty much doubled their purchase rate from tickets in the calendar.
The days of mindlessly sifting through emails in search of something relevant to you is over. Get exactly what you want and care about directly to your personal calendar with ECAL.
View the article here
Published: Eric Fisher; Sports Business Journal; 28 September 2015.
Evolving technologies are changing the game in fan engagement.
ECAL: Getting on the calendar.
“Most every platform within digital media from Web pages and email to social media and mobile alerts, has long been mined for marketing purposes, many to the point of user fatigue. But the element on any smartphone or computer that many users rely on and use the most on any given day – the calendar function – has stayed largely untouched.
Until now.”
Read the full article below to see how ECAL is changing the game in consumer engagement!
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