Now available: Reward loyal customers with exclusive, invite-only sales & drops

Many of the businesses we work with have 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. Financial institutions may want to only allow verified customers to transact on their platforms to satisfy regulatory requirements.

Behind these examples is a need to restrict access to an invited list of visitors. It’s important that entry is limited to desired visitors and that bots or malicious users can’t force their way through.

Additionally, with limited-inventory sales like concert tickets or product releases, many visitors wait in line without having the chance to buy what they want. Organizations could improve the customer experience by offering these visitors invite-only access to future sales.

To help you manage access to reward loyal customers and re-engage customers who miss out, 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 specify who should have access to your invite-only waiting room.

Visitors enter the waiting room with a secure access link that contains the encrypted and signed unique identifier included in the queue token. You can distribute these links via email or make the links available only once visitors have logged into their profiles. 

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

• Reward loyal customers. You can strengthen your customer loyalty program with exclusive or early-access sales and ensure product gets into the hands of your most loyal customers.
• Re-engage customers who miss out. You can give customers who waited but didn’t get to buy a chance to sign up for future invite-only sales, helping you improve customer satisfaction, grow first-party marketing data, and assess future demand.
• Deliver a fair & smooth user experience. You can block bots and malicious users and provide transparent, controlled sale access to deliver an exclusive experience without crashes or slowdowns.

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 two options to create access to your invite-only waiting room.

Option 1: Upload visitor list

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.

On the “Visitor Access” tab, you can see your uploaded list, download it, and add more visitors.

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.

Visitor verification

When visitors click on the invitation link, they’re asked to submit their email. Visitors receive a unique verification code which they use to gain access to the invite-only waiting room.

1) Visitors are asked to submit an email to enter the waiting room

2) The verification code is sent to a visitor via email

Option 2: Generate visitor identifiers

With this option, you enter how many identifiers you’d like to generate for the waiting room.

On the “Visitor Access” tab, you can get a list of access links by clicking on the “Generate links” button.

Select the domain name you want visitors to use when accessing the waiting room to generate the links.

After a few seconds the links are generated and ready to be downloaded and distributed to the visitors.

The invite-only waiting room gives you the control you need to deliver the exclusivity customers want. Visitors access the invite-only waiting room using links with unique identifiers, letting you ensure only verified loyal customers access your sale. Also, when customers have waited but didn’t get a chance to buy, you can let them sign up for future invite-only sales, helping you improve customer satisfaction, grow first-party marketing data, and assess future demand.

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.