New-Age Digital, Bookingplatform Uses Social Data to Help 1,000,000 Small Businesses Use

New-Age Digital, Bookingplatform Uses Social Data to Help 1,000,000 Small Businesses Use

New-Age Digital, BookingPlatform Uses Social Data to Help 1,000,000 Small Businesses Use Ecommerce by 2020

With some 67 million "service"businesses globally adapting to an increasingly digital world, business owners face multi-faceted problems from unintuitive and outdated technology, to the inability to manage multiple online channels to engage customers, to multiple back-office software that needs to be stitched together, the combination of which results in increased class vacancy, lost sales, and wasted time. Today, businesses face tremendous demands on their time and the emerging trend of consumers wanting to interact online.Businesses must not only be efficient with their time but also be master online marketers. Enter Occasion, a revolutionary ecommerce tool for the ~10MM class and SAAS-based businesses that cumulatively gross some $900BN in annual revenue.

Occasion, anecommerceplatform that helps small to mid-sized service businessesbook classes online with customers, helps customers find the best, localclasses by browsing detailed profiles, reviews, and class availability givingconsumers the simple and flexible experience they demand and making bookings more personableand accessible.

CEO and Co-founder, Aksh Gupta, says Occasion gives service businesses a better way to manage their customer and grow their revenues. "Occasion is first in market to NOT use a shopping cart-based checkout flow. Our Conversational Checkout FlowTM converts 65% of consumers during checkout in one step, 4x better than any other provider in the market.," said Gupta.

“Occasion offers an integrated mobile experience for businesses to give to their customers to checkout, and staff to manage operations, “ says Gupta. “We enable businesses to easily connect other software ultimately allowing them to reduce vacancy and wasted time associated with paper calendars, haphazard marketing, etc., and increase sales.

“Consumers are interacting among dozens of online channels so business owners have to be present on all those channels too. Occasion makes this possible by optimizing all these interactions and making owners’ time more efficient. “

When Occasion first marketedits bookings discoveryplatform to businesses, it sold via ads, email, phone, etc., to virtually any business that would buy. But Guptarealized that, “businesses with an established digital presence comprise the lion share of customers.”

Today, Occasion’s growth manageris obsessively focused on improving its success KPIs. The team determined two key KPIs to bethe biggest drivers of a small business success with Occasion… (1) a minimum level of bookings, and (2) a digital-savvy owner.

“Once we determined digital presence to be a leading indicator, we spoke to Sidewalk. Sidewalk gave us social data about Businesses that was relevant, accurate, and hyper-targeted. We used other data sources before, and even scraped the web to aggregate data on businesses, which was highly manual, time consuming, superficial, inefficient and frankly a huge distraction. We just couldn’t get specific, accurate data, especially contact name and email,which we determined was crucial to targeting prospects that we knew would benefit from our platform.”

Sidewalk, a provider of social, very small business data, provided Occasionbusiness data based on specific verticals (e.g. Art studios), features (e.g. contact name, email, phone), geographies (e.g. city), socialattributes (e.g. with website or Facebook page), and technology (e.g. uses appointment booking). With Sidewalk’s data, Occasion ran individualized social campaigns to get the word out about digitalbookings. When Occasion combined Sidewalk with its’ new email marketingmethods (see minute 20), the teamsawa significant rise in the number of accounts closed.

“We’ve been able to close rates by75%of SMBs that sign up for a demo with an acquisition cost of 40% of next the most efficient booking vendor,” states Gupta. “We attribute this success toSidewalk’s custom data.” Ultimately, this “translated into 3x revenue growthand 6x LTV/CAC.”

Bottom Line

Tech-savvy consumersare forcing businesses to adopt technology and approach interactions in a whole new way. Occasion, an industry leader in booking discovery,provides a platform that givesconsumers a simple,streamlined, booking experience,and helpsbusinessesget found online, improvecustomer loyalty, and increaseoverall sales.

Author: Mo Yehia, Crossing Guard of Sidewalk

Contributor: AkshGupta, CEO and Co-Founder of Occasion