Umbel: Get To Know Your Fans Better

Umbel: Get To Know Your Fans Better

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Umbel: What Is It?

You probably already have much of the data you need to sell tickets, engage fans and ensure your event provides everything they want, whilst getting the ROI you and your sponsors need. Accessing and using that data effectively is another story altogether. That’s where Umbel can help. Umbel gives event planners working with large sports and entertainment audiences the power to access and act on attendee data from multiple, normally siloed touchpoints and data sources relating to entertainment events and their fans. In simple terms, it answers the question, “Who are my fans?”. That knowledge can be used to improve the attendee experience and provide deeper demographic and behavioral insight for sponsors and event stakeholders, who can, in turn, use these insights to deliver concessions, merchandise, and lineups that their fans will love.

Umbel collects data from multiple sources including ticketing, check-in, social media and marketing tools, combining and sorting it with a focus on the customer. This allows event planners to gain powerful insight into exactly who their fans are. Umbel supports many different integrations across many different software solutions commonly used by eventprofs, from ticketing, through to CRM, and marketing automation. By combining this data in a customer-centric way, event planners can easily create customer segments based on demographics, brand affinity, event attendance and more. Event planners can also use the segment data with external marketing tools. Umbel includes outbound integrations with Salesforce, MailChimp, Eloqua, and others, and campaign performance can be viewed within the platform. Using the data to create customer segments in Umbel, event planners can easily create data-driven online engagement campaigns that can be delivered directly to fans on their preferred channels, such as social media or email. These campaigns can also collect more customer data, giving an even deeper understanding of the audience.

The Main Categories of Features Are:

Customer acquisition. Collect and visualize detailed first party social data about customers and create custom engagement campaigns that use social authentication to collect first-party fan data when a customer engages online or at a live event. Growing both your data on existing customers and gaining net new customers.

Data access. Combine existing customer data from all your sources such as ticketing, CRM, and social media to create rich fan profiles complete with detailed demographics.

Data analysis. View the combined data of an event in a visual dashboard and create custom segments for A/B comparison. Segments can also be exported directly to Facebook or email for targeted campaigns. Brand affinity across your audience can also be measured against the millions of profiles in the Umbel index.

Actionable data. View campaign performance from within the platform and send data and custom segments directly to other tools for reporting and targeting.

Review

The main purpose of Umbel is to help event professionals better understand fans and engage with them in an efficient way, throughout the whole event lifecycle. This is achieved through gaining insight into who those fans are by acquiring and accessing detailed data from multiple touch points along the fan journey. Eventprofs are drowning in data that is fragmented, siloed and difficult to understand. Umbel takes the data from those disparate sources, combines it and turns it into something event planners can use to create a better event experience for fans, create attractive opportunities for sponsors and produce ROI for the organizers. Umbel takes away the need for hours and hours of spreadsheet work and manual data wrangling, leaving event planners to get on with running the event. Within the Umbel interface, the data is presented in the form of easy to read charts and graphs tailored to highlight only the important information.

Acquire

As well as acquiring fan data through its data integrations, Umbel also has engagement tools built in which can help build an even clearer picture of who your audiences are. These tools include custom-built web-based fan zones and engagement campaigns such as competitions, games and quick surveys which use social authentication to collect first-party fan data before, during and after the event. This includes interests, likes, preferences and brand affinities.

Access

Umbel’s strength comes from the data it handles. That data is harvested from multiple sources via direct integration with other event apps, marketing applications, social media, and websites. If an integration isn’t supported, the Umbel team can make a custom connection to just about any software that has API access. For data sources with no API access, Umbel supports manual CSV data imports. Umbel can take care of making sure those data sources work together by cleaning and sorting the data for you. Analysis of the data takes place within Umbel’s interface, with all the hard work taken care of. All of this information is collected and presented in a fan-centric way, building rich fan profiles, enhanced by third-party demographic data.

Analyze

The thought of data analysis can strike fear into the heart of even the best event managers and event marketers. To assuage that fear, Umbel does all the hard stuff in the background so you just see what you need to see when you need to see it. Users can create custom audience segments by using simple logic statements which can be used directly for targeting or to provide information to stakeholders and sponsors.

The platform has a built-in function for making A/B comparisons of data from various sources and segments. This allows event planners to take two distinct parts of the audience and compare various statistics, for example, you could split your audience by those who like a particular artist or beverage brand compared to another and see who bought the most tickets to your last event. Umbel can help you take this one step further by offering a predictive analytics service to help identify trends and opportunities in the collected data.

Along with this, users can also use lookalike lists to target fans of events and brands with a similar fanbase to their own, giving a head start on audience intelligence.

Users can also calculate how unique a brand affinity is to their own audience compared to millions of profiles in the Umbel index. This is not only useful for targeting but where a particularly strong brand affinity is present, this data could indicate an ideal sponsorship partner for your event.

Act

Umbel isn’t just a place for storing and looking at information, all of the data within Umbel is actionable. Users can view campaign performance across multiple channels to gain insight into what is or isn’t working and tweak campaigns based on that information. Custom segments created within Umbel can be sent directly to other tools for reporting and targeting, saving the need to manually set up those segments again on each respective platform. For example, with Salesforce integration, users can view interests and demographics for individual fans on their lead or contact record.

Features

  • Data Acquisition
    • Custom engagement campaigns that use social authentication to collect first-party fan data online or at a live event via WiFi, screens, apps, etc.
    • Web-based Fan Zones with multiple engagement options.
    • Collect and visualize first-party customer data from social media, including interests, likes, preferences and brand affinities.
  • Data Access
    • Combines existing customer data from multiple sources including CRM, marketing automation, ticketing and more.
    • Data integrations with a broad range of event and marketing software.
    • Enriches fan profiles with 3rd party demographic data.
    • Collects behavioral data from websites and mobile apps.
    • Data science and engineering.
    • Data hygiene, de-duping and ingestion.
  • Data Analysis
    • Create custom segments of customers from multiple data points with Boolean (AND/OR/NOT) logic.
    • Push segments of customers directly to Facebook for targeting – Facebook matches email addresses of users in the segment against its own users’ database.
    • A/B comparison view to compare and contrast two segments.
    • Calculate how unique a brand affinity is to your audience compared to millions of profiles in the Umbel index.
    • Lookalike lists and lead scoring (Salesforce).
    • Built in cohort analysis.
    • Data Science and hygiene.
    • Lifetime Value (LTV) by segment (if transactional data is available).
  • Actionable Data
    • Integration with Salesforce to view interests and demographics for individual fans on their lead or contact record.
    • Send data and custom segments directly to other tools for reporting and targeting.
    • View campaign performance on various channels within the platform.
    • Data-led media planning.
    • Individual or calendar/season-based campaigns leveraging Umbel data on various social media platforms.

Who Is It For?

Umbel is primarily designed for sports and entertainment organizations and events or more simply put, any event whose audience is made up of fans. Umbel helps event teams, marketers and sponsors understand and engage with fans in a way that informs and drives the right kind of engagement to sell tickets, make sponsorship decisions and provide the best possible experience for attendees.

Pros And Cons

Pros

  • First-party social data (likes, interests etc.) provides deeper demographic information.
  • Eliminates the need for spreadsheets and manual manipulation of data.
  • Compliant with privacy standards required to conduct business globally.

Cons

  • Doesn’t directly integrate with software external to the event lifecycle like effective resource planning (ERP).
  • Organizations that are solely dependent and reliant on traditional third-party data, and aren’t willing to collect first-party data will not see a benefit.
  • Data sits outside your main event suite application (but can be integrated).

Pricing And Plans

Umbel is a highly customizable solution with options to suit a wide variety of event budgets. Pricing is dependent on the number of integrations and amount of data in the application. Contact Umbel for a bespoke quote.

In Conclusion

If you lack useful data about your fans or if you’re drowning in event data and you’re not a data scientist, Umbel could be just what you need to make sense of it all. By combining first-party and third-party fan data from sources throughout the customer journey and turning it into actionable data, Umbel gives you more power to target the right people and make more informed decisions.

Disclaimer: Reviews are paid for placements. While Event Manager Blog receives a fee to extensively look at the tool and review it in detail, the content of the review is independent and by no means influenced by the company. If you have any questions please use the contact us section.