Regulars will know that we’re big fans of Seth Godin, the man who literally invented Permission Marketing.

He’s making a very rare trip to London on 17th February and giving a talk in Central London – we’ll be there! Even better, eTickets.to are handling the ticketing for the event To find out all about it and grab a ticket before they’re all gone click here.

I’ve been a little quiet on the blog lately but I’m now back in the country and just about over my jetlag. To kick things off I thought I’d post a quick update about what I’ve been up to…

Straight after our Christmas party I jumped on a plane to New Zealand (26 hours…) to oversee a project for our sister company, eTickets.to, managing the ticket sales and redemptions for the awesome Rhythm & Vines festival in New Zealand.

The festival ran for 3 days ending on New Year’s Eve and had over 20,000 guests – all with eTickets, which we had been selling through eTickets.to for the previous 6 months and which we validated, redeemed and exchanged for wristbands at the event.  I’m pleased to say the whole process went exceptionally smoothly, thanks in no small part to the great team that we had to assist us.

Held in a vineyard just outside Gisborne, the most eastern city in the world, R&V is the first festival in the world to see in the New Year – and it was quite an experience. After working solidly on the event for 5 days I managed to sneak off just before midnight and catch the New Year’s fireworks display and then see the first dawn of 2009.

With the event successfully concluded I took a few days to recover and tour around the amazing North Island of New Zealand and then celebrated with a skydive!

The latest edition of VIP Magazine has a 2 page feature on eTickets.to and our views on the future of ticketing. You can read it online here – flip to page 28.

We’ll be exhibiting at the Business Startup Show at London’s Excel on 25th-26th April along with our sister company Sign-Up.to if you’re in the area, come along and say hi!

We have a number of trade shows coming up over the next few weeks – if you’re around come along and meet some of the team!

• The Event Show – Olympia – 23rd & 24th January – Stand 622 -  Register for free tickets
• International Confex – Earls Court -  12th – 14th February – Stand G102 – Register for free tickets

Woo hoo! On 31st October we won the ‘Innovative Business of The Year’ award at the Natwest Startups Awards. We collected a lovely trophy from Sky News’ Adrienne Lawler (see below) at a big ceremony at London’s Kensington Gardens Hotel.
The judges said some very nice things about us:

“The Judges feel that eTickets.to is an example of having the passion, belief and tenacity to take on the big boys. They have taken a very different approach to selling tickets with technology that allows tickets for a school play or church fete to be sold alongside those for a three day rock festival.”

Below is our Founder, Matt collecting the award from Adrienne Lawler of Sky News (left) and Alison Dwyer from The British Library.

For a while now we’ve had tools in place so let you gather more information from your ticket purchasers. It might be that you’re selling seats at a dinner dance and need to check for dietary requirements, or you need to know the ratio of gents and ladies attending your night – you just need to ask!

When setting up or editing your event, you’ll find ‘Ask extra questions?’ in the ‘Advanced Options’ box:

Having checked that box, you’ll be able to add up to ten questions to your event using the simple tools. We provide support for check boxes, drop lists, date of birth selectors, and plain text entry boxes (single and multi-line). You may make these questions optional or mandatory.

Your purchasers will be asked these questions as part of the ticket buying process.

When you download your ticket data, the answers that your purchasers have given will be stored in the Excel file. If you’ve integrated your eTickets.to account with a Sign-Up.to account (well worth doing!), your questions and responses will automatically find their way across to your permission marketing account too.

It’s worth noting that we currently limit you to a maximum of 10 questions as we feel that any more will make the form rather large, and in our experience this tends to discourage purchasers from completing their transaction. However, if you’ve got good reason to ask more than 10 questions, or if you’ve got any questions about this or any other eTickets.to feature, please drop us a note to hello@etickets.to and we’ll be pleased to help.

Customer feedback is vital in the world of web applications, but perhaps almost as important is the result of that feedback. We’ve been listening diligently to our clients, and over the last few weeks we’ve unveiled more than a few new features that we’d like to shout about.

• We’ve integrated our payment process with Google Checkout. Just feed your Google merchant details into ‘Payment Processing’ under the ‘Settings’ tab, this can be enabled for events and anyone buying your tickets will have the choice between paying by Google Checkout and Paypal.
• On the final screen of a ticket purchase process we’ve added buttons to ‘Print’, ‘Close Window’, ‘Add to Outlook’ and ‘Email a Friend’.
• We’ve integrated the ticket purchase process with social networking sites Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Facebook and StumbleUpon.
• We’ve added tools to allow you to customise your ticket purchase pages to fit in with your site and tastes, including a great new rich text editor.
• There’s now an RSS feed available, so you can use your RSS reader or modern web browser to notify you of how well your ticket sales are going.
• We’ve added a pile of integration features for our sister product Sign-Up.to. You can now have ticket purchasers’ details instantly added to your Sign-Up.to database, and if you’re using Sign-Up.to to market your event, the Goal Tracking feature will allow you to track ticket sales from your email campaigns.
• We now support ticket sales for events that run over more than one day with some fairly tasty options. This means that eTickets.to can now be used for festivals supporting single and multi day passes, or theme parks with recurring dates etc.
• We’ve launched an ‘Advanced Credits’ feature (found under the ‘Billing’ tab) to permit the advanced payment of ticket download credits. Of course, in return for buying in advance in bulk you’ll receive a lovely discount.
• We’re currently piloting an allocated seating plug-in for advanced accounts. Here’s a sneak preview screenshot.

Some of these features have been available for a while; others are more recent. All of them are the result of feedback from you, our valued clients, so we’d like to give you all a genuine pat on the back and ask that you keep the ideas coming.

We’ve just found out that we’re finalists in this year’s Startup Awards, in the ‘Innovative Business of The Year’ category. Cool! We find out if we’ve won on 31st October – we’ll keep you posted!

eTickets.to started from a desire to provide an alternative for promoters who don’t want to charge their customers the high booking fees usually levied by ticket agents – it seems that others are finally seeing things from our perspective as well!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6657179.stm