Considering Cashless? The Questions You Need to Answer
As a result of the pandemic, consumers are moving away from cash. There has been no better time to consider taking your club cashless, and if you address the right questions, taking a stadium or team cashless can be easy. With major sporting clients from over 20 countries, including EFL, NFL, NBA and Formula 1 – Tappit, the cashless experts, have some insights into the things that a club should consider.
Do you know your fans?
While going cashless with the right solution can make transactions faster, minimise waiting times and reduce risk of COVID-19 from contact, only closed-loop solutions can provide the customer data on fan behaviour – what they purchased, where they purchased and how frequently. Whilst email sign ups and ticket purchase details provide some insight, what venue owners don’t actually still know is who is actually attending the venue. Ticket purchases may be made by a parent or given as gifts and typically fans buy at least two tickets for an event. What becomes really clear is that there is a real gap in understanding who is entering the venue, who is making purchases and what they are actually buying. This information enables clubs to completely understand their fan, enabling tailored communications and incentives and ensuring fans stay loyal and engaged, no matter how their team is performing.
Are you hosting events across the year?
Increasingly clubs and stadia are looking at ways to ensure that they are hosting events and maximising revenue for as many days across the year as possible. Concerts, conferences and weddings are becoming important revenue streams for clubs. Whilst a varied and continual flow of events, fans and consumers through venues supports the bottom line, it becomes increasingly challenging to understand every audience, their preferences and behaviours. This is where the power of understanding your fan gives venues a huge advantage (and creates an even greater risk if this isn’t captured).
Credit cards, bank cards and third party mobile pay solutions don’t share this data. This means that venues stay in the dark about their audiences, limiting their ability to cross sell and improve the fan experience. This is where choosing the right cashless solution can add real value to your organisation. Using a closed loop solution – eg RFID wristbands or a white label digital wallet, clubs can understand who visited their venue, when and what they purchased – helping improve fan experience and drive revenues from operational efficiencies, ease of transactions, reducing queues, tailored partnerships and targeted marketing.
Do you understand the power of data?
Closed loop data, if it is properly captured, stored and analysed, gives clubs incredible insight into fans’ behaviours and preferences. This data not only provides huge value to teams, but to partners and sponsors as well. However, to properly reap the rewards from the data – it is important to translate the information into actionable insights and to pursue highest-opportunity applications of this data in a strategic fashion.
Without this data, there is a huge risk to your plans. If the only information you are tracking is that of your season ticket holders, you may miss the opportunity to sell last -minute tickets to a game to someone who came to the venue three times for a summer concert series. You may miss the opportunity to convert casual visitors into lifelong fans.
Using the data enables venues to reward loyalty and encourage visitors from one type of event to try new experiences. Maybe there is a way to ensure that a concert sponsored by Budweiser can give away free tickets to the regular Bud drinkers across your team’s season? Whatever challenge your venue faces in ensuring a vibrant community and a healthy bottom line – you can be assured that the data and insights generated by a closed loop solution can support them.
Are you looking to grow sponsorship revenue?
If your club is focussed on driving additional revenue through sponsorships and partnerships, then it is worth considering a closed loop solution for two reasons. Firstly, your team will have ownership of your fans’ spending data, which means you will be able to demonstrate impact of partnerships, reach out to fans who have consumed the product and reward them, or incentivise new potential audiences to trial consumption. Secondly, by creating a white-label digital wallet or RFID product – you create new categories for sponsorship and partnership.
How advanced is your club’s digital strategy?
Does your team have an app with high engagement, is digital ticketing popular with your fans and do you want to ensure you maximise in-app dwell time? If so, then you should consider a white-label digital wallet. However if your digital strategy is still in development and your fans are not considered to be ‘early adopters’ of technology – then incorporating RFID into your season ticket may well be the best bet – to help fans discover and adopt cashless payments. It is predicted that mobile payments will be the second most common payment method after debit cards by 2022 – but some fans do take longer to adopt new technologies. When you’re choosing to work with a cashless payment supplier, it’s important to understand their technology approach and whether they are able to support the evolution of your digital payments and data ecosystem. Being able to move from RFID through to mobile wallets is an important transition – especially if you want to keep the data.
Have you considered implementation, hardware and integration costs?
If you’re thinking about going for a bank-based contactless payment – the costs will be for the contactless card readers. These can be bought or rented, and you will have to factor in a processing fee for transactions. With contactless white-label mobile pay, the solution is integrated with third parties and POS systems and dependent on your mobile pay partner, there may be costs involved.
If your contactless payment solution involves QR codes eg white label mobile pay – the hardware costs are typically lower. Often existing POS and 2D scanners can be used to implement white label mobile pay solutions meaning that only simple integrations need to be implemented to go contactless.
How much support will your club need to make a smooth transition to cashless?
Whilst some cashless suppliers offer product or software, others will also provide additional help. Understand what is available to you in terms of account management, best practice guidance, support in implementing the solution and training the staff as well as customer support for the end users. Don’t underestimate the value of working with people who really understand what ‘best in class’ looks like.
At Tappit, we know that one type of cashless solution does not fit all. Unlike others in the market, we’re proud to offer a selection of cashless solutions – white label mobile pay solutions, cashless RFID options as well as the insights and data platform that aggregates all this data in one place. By choosing a hybrid solution, you can choose the right cashless option for each different event. This enables clubs to understand all their visitors, their behaviours and incentivise them to become even more engaged with the brand and ultimately help teams to become even more profitable – even in the most challenging of times.
