How we improved Concert Window’s retention & revenue
B2C • RESPONSIVE WEB / IOS
Concert Window was a streaming video platform that helped musicians broadcast live and earn money for over nine years.
They had a great thing going and were making smart moves, but couldn’t compete with the big social platforms who were rolling out their own “live“ capabilities.
When their team reached out, they were enjoying a monthly increase in scheduled shows of 10%. Great stat on its own, but it hid the fact that most of those were first-time shows by new signups—rather than recurring shows from existing users. Although they had great acquisition, their retention was suffering and blocking true growth.
Our task was to learn why their monthly churn was high and help bring it down.
“Simple Circle handled all the messiness of user testing and taught our team a ton in the process! 🔥”
Our retention analysis revealed that new signups who broadcasted a show with a fan-engagement rate above 57%, had a “new fan” rate above 20%, and suffered a max of one broadcaster restart, enjoyed a low monthly churn of 7.3%. This was over 2X lower than their aggregate monthly churn rate of 13%.
This gave us a blueprint for what we had to do. Meaning, we had to increase show engagement and fan acquisition while making broadcasting more reliable.
With our activation events defined, we analyzed Concert Window’s signup funnel and activation metrics, giving us further direction for the upcoming user testing and design phase of the project.
Concert Window was a two-sided platform, meaning it served as a venue for both musicians and music lovers.
At the time, they were focusing on show discovery for fans and were getting by fairly well with minimal artist-centric messaging.
This seemed to work OK because artists were inferring what a show of their own may be like based on others they’d seen. However, after surveying churned artists and conducting user tests, we realized many prospects were bouncing due to unanswered questions and confusion.
Our solution was to create a persuasive pitch page that answered their key questions and eased them into signup, rather than dumping them directly into the form sequence.
We then fixed issues discovered during user testing and provided an explicit path to activation via their dashboard (rather than leaving them on their show page to figure things out).
Artists love having well-attended shows, but the platform was missing opportunities to help boost attendance. We added sharing controls in strategic areas and explicitly called artists and fans to action. The tweaks felt predictable, but they boosted average show attendance by over 21%!
Based on user testing and learnings from Concert Window’s artist support team, we put together a clean one-pager that helped artists get up to speed and feel confident about the show they were about to perform.
Being prepared before going live is the best way for artists to nail a show. Although Concert Window had some basic sound and video pre-flight tools, they didn’t instill enough confidence or answer artist’s pressing questions.
To that end, we upped the profile of the test vs live experience and developed an entire Q&A wizard that addressed questions and concerns from user testing.
Fortunately, Concert Window had no problem with artists failing to conduct scheduled shows. So that was an issue we didn’t have to address.
Increasing show engagement, however, was a charge. Getting fans to comment, tip, and share the live show were valuable actions, and played a big role in an artist's success on the platform.
To that end, we designed a system that emphasized the actions we wanted to occur and highlighted them via real-time audience-wide chat broadcast—implicitly calling the entire audience to do more of the same. The approach worked, and took Concert Window’s average fan-engagement rate over the 57% target we’d set.
Our work with Concert Window helped them improve several KPIs–leading to increased revenue and happier artists. The added income and artist retention helped them hire more talent, develop native apps, and enjoy sustainable growth—until Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram devoured their market.
“We’re thrilled! Simple Circle found things we missed and their pragmatic designs didn’t beat up our dev team.”
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