Volleyball Empire is one of South Florida’s top volleyball clubs, with a member base of 3,000+ players. From Open Court Play, 1:1 Private or Group Lessons, to Tournaments & Leagues, they’re something for every athlete to experience. The organization is led by Casio, the President & CEO, who is also a full-time fireman in the Sunny Isles area, with short-term plans of beginning his retirement. He has been growing the Volleyball Empire community for many years using primarily WhatsApp groups, Venmo, Cash App, or cash in person. We met during a Volleyball Open Court Play event, while I was living in South Florida and after attending some events, I noticed there was an opportunity to take his business digital and build a scalable platform for all types of volleyball events.
Problem Statement
• Too much time dedicated to running the business and little to no time to grow the business
• Sending manual daily event reminders
• No ability to easily visualize business metrics
• No ability to track the customer journey / customer loyalty
• Desire to create an automated platform, unlock affiliate sponsor partnerships, drive business scalability
Opportunity
• Patrons can book volleyball events digitally, plan ahead and purchase in advance of upcoming sessions
• Increase operational efficiency (reduce effort for sending daily event reminders via WhatsApp; reduce effort required to handle money)
• Secure credit card transactions, simple booking and check out flows
• Easily distribute communications via a CMS, send one link with all pertinent information about upcoming events
• Send automated upcoming event email blasts to all booked customers (reduce effort on managing attendance)
• Monthly subscriptions for player memberships to encourage customer activation and user retention, while increasing monthly recurring revenue
• Member social groups, built into the site to drive community user engagement
• Analytics on sales / monthly recurring revenue, customer activation & retention, customer churn rate, user engagement (DAU/MAU)
Overview
I built Volleyball Empire a website with a short landing page, with primary call-to-actions to enter the booking flow for their services: Open Court Play, 1:1 Private Lessons, Group Lessons, Tournaments & Leagues. These flows enable the customer to pay and reserve their spot for an upcoming event. Upon successful purchase, the customer receives an email with their purchase confirmation and information about the event, with an ability to add it to their calendar.
Upon landing on the website, the user is prompted to sign up to join the community. If they are already a member, they can easily log in with email/password or via Google or Facebook. If they forgot their log in credentials, they are able to request to reset their password.
Once signed in, users have access to a members only Newsfeed, where they can create/edit their profiles, post on a community wall, share documents/images/ videos. Logged in users are also able to easily view their order history, manage their bookings and subscriptions, securely save a credit card for future transactions, and view notifications about upcoming events, messages, posts. To drive user loyalty, we introduced Empire Points, which users earn after attending events and can ultimately redeem for free access to event(s).
To drive monthly recurring revenue, guests are able to select from 3 tiers of monthly subscriptions.
For any questions guests may have, we created a simple contact form.
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