How Party Headphones uncovered revenue opportunities through CXA

Keep the music playing, quietly

Founded in 2012, Party Headphones is revolutionizing the entertainment industry through Silent Disco Rentals, specialized equipment rentals, and now, Selfie Station photo booth rental, and Remote Silent Disco Experiences.    

At this point, you are probably recalling that three-day outdoor music festival where you rocked out with your friends under those trees by the beer garden. Well, you get the idea, but that’s a very small fraction of their business. Think college graduations, virtual team building events, guided tours, or even bar mitzvahs, and you understand their target audience varies. Party Headphones clients include churches, universities, corporations, and also private individuals and private parties. They support everything from backyard movie nights, to corporate events, and everything in between. 

When Alec Mitchell acquired Party Headphones two years ago, it was a business that needed some work and dedicated attention. So Alec brought it from where it was in the Northeast down to Arizona and rebuilt the company to where it is now. Choosing the right tech stack to support that growth has been critical.

One of the biggest challenges that Alec’s team encountered was being able to accurately attribute conversions across the customer lifecycle. “When I picked up the company,” said Alec, “conversions were being tracked based on clicks, instead of through to the finish line. Adding those additional tracking elements has been key.” 

Alec and his team went back to the whiteboard to map out how they wanted to track attribution across the whole business line. With smaller clients, the attribution is easier to identify. Tracking larger clients across the lifecycle is a little more complex given that there could be multiple contacts from the same company, coming through different channels. 

“Being able to attribute as many of those larger clients as possible back to a single source item is the most valuable thing, whether it’s from a blog post, from an ad, or from a music video that we ran.” Getting to that one source of truth is like gold to Alec and his team. 

Once Party Headphones identified their conversion events, ActiveCampaign enabled them to automatically measure the traffic sources, campaigns, keywords, and other components of the engagement and campaigns that lead to that conversion. “Being able to track across the whole lifecycle is very important to us,” said Alec.

“It’s very helpful to be able to drill down to an individual client and watch their exact path. If you can’t truly attribute where someone came from, there’s no point in paying for advertising because you have no idea what’s working. And that’s where we felt ActiveCampaign had the strongest capability.” 

Other touch-points in the customer journey that continue to prove valuable for Party Headphones include the ability to engage with prospects and clients at a moment’s notice, using ActiveCampaign’s Conversations feature. “Having reminders, and the CRM capabilities are very helpful for following up with folks” says Alec. “ActiveCampaign does what most CRMs do, but the chat integration and the call integration is definitely what makes that engagement easier.” Being able to chat with customers where they are, allows his team to field those incoming messages across channels and offer timely, impactful support.  

ActiveCampaign’s sales automations also help the Party Headphones sales team stay on top of prospects and customers at every step along the customer journey. “Once a client has requested a quote, and the quote has been sent, they will be moved into another pipeline, and an automation for a task will be generated to ensure that the deal owner gives the customer a follow-up call in X amount of days. This ensures that we are thorough as a sales team and no follow-ups are missed, and the customer receives the best possible service.” Party Headphones is leveraging some key CRM workflows that ensure nothing gets missed, which can happen easily with high-volume sales organizations. “We have a number of automations set up to help the sales team manage their load, like automated tagging for repeat customers in our pipeline and automated emails that are timed to go out 9 months after the customers’ event has passed to see if they are planning to rent headphones again for their annual event, and prompting them to the rental quote request form.”

The impact of implementing these CRM workflows includes time savings, improved marketing efficiency, and, ultimately, more revenue. “Having these CRM automations has ensured that our sales team doesn’t miss follow-ups with customers who are in the booking process. Tasks for follow-up calls are being set by the automation. We don’t have to manually update each customer’s file with task reminders. The combination of ActiveCampaign Marketing and Sales also allows us to re-engage our contact lists with email campaigns and automated annual emails, making our marketing very efficient.”

Your silent experience fulfilled

The fundamental business model for Party Headphones was founded on rental equipment, which has a relatively complicated fulfillment process. The upfront transaction for the client is pretty simplistic, but behind the scenes, a whole series of date-driven logistical operations kick into gear to get that order out to the client on the day they need it, and the date span leading up to that event matters a lot. 

“We used HubSpot before, but ActiveCampaign has a lot more logical flow to it. This has allowed us to create a more complicated set of automations based on people moving through that pipeline.” 

Party Headphones has the standard inbound pipeline that you would expect for the sales cycle, but ActiveCampaign allows them to set up additional pipelines to manage other workflows for each part of the organization. “The fulfillment pipeline was not something we were able to do with HubSpot without generating a second deal, which really throws off all of the data,” said Alec.

Using ActiveCampaign’s Deal feature, Party Headphones is able to track orders as a single unit across the entire fulfillment process, triggering emails that used to all be done manually. “And it was relatively intuitive to get all that set up with you guys,” said Alec. “It took us a couple of weeks, working a few hours a day, and that’s been a very big time-saver for us.” If a client doesn’t return their equipment right away, we can move them to a different pipeline, assigning tasks to team members to follow up with a call, and everyone is always on the same page. “It has certainly cut down a lot on the back and forth tremendously, allowing us to focus on other priorities.” 

Another feature Party Headphones is seeing value from is the Conversations feature. “The Conversations feature has been very helpful,” Alec commented, “and it goes right to our phones. Being able to respond within a minute of a client chatting with us at 9 pm on a Saturday has been invaluable. It’s great to have actual humans on the other end for them, available whenever. Those kinds of touchpoints are definitely big wins for us.”  

Changing tunes with the times

Being flexible with changing customer needs has been an essential practice for companies in the events and entertainment industry. Private parties and corporations alike are doing a lot more of their events virtually rather than in-person, creating that opportunity for entrepreneurs like Alec and the team at Party Headphones to innovate. And innovate they have. 

Party Headphones still provides equipment for large events, implementing new practices specifically around equipment cleaning and providing for social distancing. They even offer longer-term equipment rental and leases. 

“Being flexible with a changing business model definitely provided hurdles to overcome.” As they transitioned into doing a lot of smaller events and creating that process workflow in ActiveCampaign to create quotes faster, “we were able to turn things around a lot faster than we were before. Between ActiveCampaign, Invoice Ninja, and Zapier, we get a lot done,” said Alec.

In giving back to their DJ community, Party Headphones has been keeping their DJ network busy with Live Virtual DJ. “We were able to employ several DJs, and allow people to gather virtually and safely. To our surprise we even had multiple Fortune 100 companies reach out and book events,” Alec noted. “The customer gets what they want, and we’re able to help out some local and regional DJs that we know. I think it’s a big stress, social relief kind of thing. They also have a ton of fun.” 

Another innovative solution the team at PartyHeadphones delivers on is the Selfie Station rental. It’s a totally new type of photo booth experience that’s focused on each individual user and is available for short-term rental or long-term leases. Every aspect of the selfie station photo booth can be customized for your brand or theme.

If you want to book Party Headphones for your next event, large or small, private or corporate, head over to partyheadphones.com to choose your experience. I’m betting you won’t be disappointed. 

Also, if you want to learn more about the features Alec and his team are using, head over to the ActiveCampaign Platform page and browse the possibilities.