Now available: Control sales access to engage & grow your customer base

Many of the businesses we work with strive to deliver flawless exclusivity to their high-value, member, or tiered customer levels. For example, a museum may have members who get early access to tickets. Bands may reward their most loyal fans with presales. Online retailers may have shoppers who pay annual subscriptions for perks like exclusive product releases.

At the same time, some companies, especially small retailers, want to be more effective in growing their loyal customer base. And exclusive or early access sales is an efficient way to motivate customers to share their emails.

Behind these examples is a need to restrict access to a specific subset of the customers, based on their loyalty status, purchase patterns, and history. It’s important that entry is limited to desired visitors and that bots, non-members, and resellers can’t force their way through.

Organizations could engage their loyal customers, block bots & resellers, and incentivize loyalty program signups by controlling access to exclusive sales.

To help you control sales access to engage and grow your customer base, Queue-it has introduced the invite-only waiting room. The invite-only waiting room is a third, new type of waiting room offered alongside the “Scheduled” and “24/7 Visitor Peak Protected” waiting rooms.

You use a list of unique visitor identifiers – either email addresses or auto-generated random identifiers – to create links and specify who can access your invite-only waiting room.

You can distribute these links via email or make the links available only you’re your customers have logged into their profiles. When you open access to your sale, customers enter the waiting room with a secure access link that contains the encrypted and signed unique identifier included in the queue token. 

The invite-only waiting room offers several appealing benefits, letting you:

1. Control sales access for true exclusivity

• You can choose which customers to reward based on their loyalty status, purchase patterns, and history.
• You can block bots, malicious users, and non-members to add extra protection to your loyalty program and reduce bot mitigation costs.

2. Engage & grow your customer base

• You can strengthen customer relationships by granting exclusive or early access to your sales.
• You can incentivize email signups in return for exclusive or early access to your sale.

3. Analyze sale success & customer behavior

• You can evaluate your sale’s success without the noise of bot data and use what you learn to improve your future promotions.
• You can enhance your shopper behavior data with information on who joined and who didn’t join your invite-only sale.

You can learn more about the benefits of the invite-only waiting room in the webinar recording below.

You can set up the invite-only waiting room in minutes in the GO Queue-it Platform—no development resources are needed.

When you create a new waiting room in the GO Queue-it Platform, you’ll be prompted to choose the waiting room type. If you have the “Invite-only waiting room” and “Server-side / CDN Workers Connectors” features as part of your subscription, you can create an invite-only waiting room by selecting “Invite-only waiting room”.

You’ll then configure the start date and time and choose one of the three verification methods to create access to your invite-only waiting room.

Option 1: Email verification method

You can upload a list of visitors’ emails, which we verify upon visitor entry to a waiting room. That way you have only one link for all visitors, making it easier to distribute your invitations.

You have an option to enable or disable 2 factor authentication (2FA). We recommend enabling 2FA as it helps mitigate brute force attacks.

The uploaded emails are used for this one event only and are deleted from the GO Queue-it Platform 90 days after the event started.

Customer experience – visitor verification

When customers click on the invitation link, they’re asked to submit their email via the identity entry page. Customers receive a unique verification code which they use to gain access to the Invite-only waiting room.

1) The customer is asked to submit an email to enter the waiting room on the identifier entry page

2) The unique verification code is sent to the customer via email

3) The customer enters the verification code on the identifier entry page

4) Upon successful validation, the customer enters the Invite-only queue

Watch a walk-through of the user experience in the video below.

Option 2: Access links verification method

With this option, you specify the number of access links to generate for your waiting room. Visitors who receive an access link can access the invite-only waiting room.

Option 3: Custom verification method

Custom verification can be any token such as a coupon code, voucher or some other identifier. This method gives you the flexibility to upload your known identifiers or work with randomly generated access codes.

Analyze your shopper behavior

You can easily download data on individual requests from the GO Queue-it Platform under Statistics | Export waiting room data | Download CSV, which shows:

• QueueID
• Queue number
• Time when visitors entered the waiting room
• Time when visitors left the waiting room
• Email used to enter the waiting room
• Number of redirects
• Enqueue token ID

You can create a summary report directly from the waiting room Monitor that gives you a concise, visual overview so you can evaluate waiting room performance quickly and communicate with stakeholders in an easy-to-understand way.

Explore customer journey insights such as:

• Total count of uniquely invited visitors (visitors invited)
• # of unique visitors showed up and got verified with their "token"  (visitors verified)
• # of queue sessions were generated  by the verified visitors
• # who got redirected
• # who ended up seeing the confirmation page
• Inflow/outflow over time
• Max, avg. and min. wait time
• Geography and device details about the visitors in the invite-only waiting room

The invite-only waiting room gives you the control you need to deliver the exclusivity customers want. Generate unique links or upload your customer email list, allowing verified customers to enter the sale while controlling traffic flow and tracking their purchasing behavior. That way you can stop bots, resellers, and non-members from getting products that belong to your loyal customers. You can also incentivize email signups in return for exclusive or early sale access, helping you grow your customer base. When the sale is over, you can analyze sales success without the noise of bot data to improve your future promotions.

For more information on how you can start rewarding your VIP customers using an invite-only waiting room, contact your Queue-it support representative at support@queue-it.com.