Quick Start Guide

About Lily

Lily is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that enables your business to collect and manage customer data. The software is integrated with several of the leading ticket vendors in the Nordic region, and more integrations are underway.

Lily aims to create a seamless workflow where you sell more tickets and provide a positive customer experience by automating information and marketing for events and venues.

Overview

Upon logging into Lily, you will notice three main elements in the user interface: The top bar, the left sidebar, and the main content section.

The top bar includes:

  • The Lily/Home button is to the left.
  • A menu icon to toggle the left sidebar.
  • A menu for account settings is to the right.

Lily overview

If you manage multiple accounts in Lily, you will also find a skyscraper icon in the top bar, allowing you to switch between accounts.

The left sidebar contains the core functions in Lily, including “Push events” for sending out information and marketing and “Automations” for automated SMS or email.

In the main content section, you’ll find a collection of resources to support your work in Lily, including reports for your upcoming events and top customers. Additionally, several resources and guides are available to assist you further.

Account and login

When you become a Lily user, you will receive a username and password from the Lily team.

You may sign out from the left sidebar or from the personal menu in the upper right corner.

Key Features

The key features in Lily are Push events and Automations. Both are accessible directly from the left sidebar menu. You also find links to this functionality in the main content section.

You’ll find comprehensive guides to these functions in the Need help? section. Here’s a brief overview of each of these important features. 

Push events

“Push events” is the area in Lily where you prepare and send SMS and e-mail to your customers. There are five steps in this process.

In the Type step, you choose the type of message you will send to your customers and which channel to use – SMS or e-mail

You also choose what kind of message you are sending: 

Information is for when you need to send important information to all your customers, like changes in schedule or cancellations. 

Marketing is for when you want to send a message promoting other events, special offers, or additional services.

This distinction is essential to ensure compliance with marketing laws.

Key features

In step 2, you can select a Target group to send your message to.

You can choose from different audiences already set up in your account. Your choices in the first step may limit the available audience.

In step 3, you add the Content for your message. The options will differ depending on whether you are sending SMS, e-mail or both. It is possible to send the same message in both SMS and e-mail.

In step 4, you can Review the sender field, the e-mail subject, and the content of your message.

When you are ready to send, press Confirm and send. A new window will inform you, “Your batch is registered and will be sent shortly.”

In the final step, you will get a Receipt about the state of your sending. If it went well, you would get a success message: “The batch is sent!”

Automations

In this section, you get an overview of your automations. Thesescheduled messages go out at a specific time before your events, after eventsor after a ticket purchase. Lily can send out your automated emails to anever-growing list of recipients, streamlining this area of communication.

Lily groups the automations into three sections: Before event, After event and Thank you messages sent after purchase.

Before event is usually sent out 1-3 days prior to the recipientsevent, to inform about possible changes, opening hours and other necessaryinfo.

After event can be sent out tothank you for visiting your venue, inform about your upcoming events, specialoffers etc.

Thank you messages can be used to thank the recipientimmediately after purchasing a ticket, suggesting to bring a friend for adiscount, special offers etc

In each of these sections, you can review the following:

  • Date, time and other settings for the automations
  • The next scheduled automations that will go out
  • Recent automated campaigns.

How to set up an automation:

Step 1: On your dashboard you scroll down to "Active automations" and click on the "Set up new" button. Here you choose your automation type (before, after or thank you), and click on "Add".

Step 2: Then you will be redirected to the Automationedit page, where you firstly give it a name. Then, in the "Description field" shortly describe the automation and what it is for.

Step 3: If you want to send out an SMS in addition to the automated email, you can do so in the "SMS text" field, using thevariables [event_name], [event_date], [event_time], [event_location] asplaceholders.

Step 4: Upload your template, and make sure to preview afterwards to see if everything looks fine. Then you click save automation.

Step 5: Thereafter, you choose a send time, for instance 1 day before the event at 12pm, and click on save.

Step 6: In the "edit settings" section you can choose your settings for the automation. You can enable or pause, choose to send it out via e-mail or SMS, and also send out a test to yourself. When you've chosen the settings you want, you click save and the automation will be up and running!

- Test email: To send out a test e-mail, you have to go to the Automation section on the left hand side in Lily, find the one you created, click on the arrow next to the automation title and click on "show campaigns". Here you can preview one of the campaigns Lily have created and scroll down to the "send teste-mail" section.

Reports and analytics

Lily makes available a large amount of data about your customers. Here are the reports and analytics sections that are available out of the box:

Upcoming events

This section displays updated ticket sales data about your upcoming concerts.

It is much easier to prioritize and take action based on this overview.

Your top 5 customers

In this section, you’ll find data about your most dedicated customers and how many purchases they have made.

We encourage Lily users to benefit from this information by making their best customers feel special – by reaching out to them, giving them discounts, or some other offer.

Numbers last 6 months

 This section makes it easy to track how your sales are going filtered by days, weeks and the last 6 months. 

You can view the number of orders and tickets sold over the last 6 months, the past few weeks, and each day within the last month.

Numbers last 6 months
Numbers last 6 weeks
Numbers last 30 days

Resources

We are committed to helping our customers get the most out of Lily. 

In addition to user documentation like this guide, we regularly publish relevant content on our blog. We offer guides to different aspects of marketing, customer dialogue, customer data and more.

You will find these guides in the Need help? section, in our blog and via different links in the main content section of Lily. 

Automated processes

When you become a Lily customer, we integrate Lily with your ticket system, making customer data available six years back. Your data in Lily is being updated daily through this integration.

More than 30 different types of metadata are scraped from the ticket system and become structured in Lily.

One of the most important pieces of data is the marketing consent – helping you keep your customer dialogue on the right side of the marketing laws.

Summary

Our recommendation for new users is to get familiar with the navigation quickly.

Next, we suggest you use a test audience to go through the Push events process. For most of our customers, this is the most impactful tool in Lily. Mastering it will give you superpowers in reaching your customers with the right message at the right time.

Finally, check out your automations and try adding a new one. 

Read more

You will find all the additional resources you need in the Need help? section in the personal menu in the upper right corner.

We regularly add to our resources on the Lily blog and make the most useful posts available directly on the Lily website.