To gauge how your fans are spending (and for the system to calculate an average fan value), connect your merch store, or import Sales Data.
This Sales Data can be historical data from merch, physical music, ticketing, Patreon/subscriptions and more!
Correctly formatting the data for importing ensures the most accurate reflection of fan spend across the database, enabling you to see:
Which items are being sold?
How many of each item is being sold?
Which fans are buying items?
This is key for identifying your top spenders and super-serving them.
💪 Top tip: Connect your e-commerce store via a web hook so that transaction data comes in and populates the database and fan records in real time, saving regular manual imports. For connecting e-commerce, see here.
This article is focused specifically on the importing of sales data; for importing basic mailing lists, see here.
Before you start
A couple things you should know...
All fan records must have either an email or phone number attached.
Unlike fan data, duplicates aren't filtered out - the same transaction appearing multiple times will be represented as multiple transactions within Openstage.
⚠️ Please note: You must ensure data that's being ingested is being uploaded to the correct artist account.
Great care should be taken to avoid the cross contamination of fan data among the artists in your roster. Failure to do so will result in:
Inflated fan numbers that aren't representative of your data set
Greater chance of complaints from unhappy fans
Greater chance of fan unsubscribes
Step One: Prepare the data
It's important that data is prepared properly before attempting an import. The key points for Importing Fan Data are also relevant here.
Use a blank sheet in a spreadsheet program like Excel or Sheets, exported as a comma separated value (CSV) file.
Be sure each fan record includes either an email address or phone number.
Freeze your column headers.
Remove any blank lines.
For dates, ensure they are formatted for the UK, or select US dates within the import window.
Transactional data
As a minimum, transactional data requires the following data points:
Name
Email/phone number
Transaction Description
Transaction Date
Transaction Value
Transaction Volume
Currency (Must be it's own column and 3 characters, GBP, USD, AUD etc)
Note: Data generated for demo purposes only.
Additional fan data can be ingested alongside transactional data - simply assign the headings to the relevant field within Openstage during the import.
🙌 Best Practice: Create custom tags for ticketing data.
For the data in the product description field within Openstage when ingesting ticketing data, merge the columns for:
Venue
Show date
Ticket type (general admission, VIP, etc)
Once done, you should have something like:
Wembley Stadium 01/11/2021 General Admission
This allows you to see all information relevant to the ticket purchase in one place.
Step Two: Upload
Go to the Fans section and click "Import Fans." Choose either "Upload multiple fans" or "Create a single fan" based on your data.
Adding a single fan doesn't require a .CSV file.
When uploading multiple fans, the 'import tag' field is applied to all fan records present in the upload.
You will also need to specify the type of transaction:
Merch
Ticketing
Physical Music
Digital Music
Subscriptions
Donations
🙌 Best Practice: Separate transactions into the above types and import them separately.
This ensures the transaction type is accurate across your analytics and provides the richest data set!
Step Three: Match fields
Match each data field in your .csv to the correct Openstage field (e.g., email, name, product description). You can also create any custom tags to help organise your fanbase. Once mapped, click "Import."
When all fields show in gold at the bottom of the window, they've been mapped successfully. This doesn't mean they have been mapped correctly - it is always worth a double check.
💪 Top Tip: If you've distributed unique codes through Openstage for the sales data you're ingesting, these can be mapped to the relevant field in the system as well.
This allows you to see which fans utilised a code for their purchase!
Step 4: Validate
The system validates your data in three stages: "Validating," "Ready to Upload," and "Errors." Review and fix any errors, such as misspelled email addresses or wrong country codes.
Common errors include:
Misspelled email addresses (e.g., @gamil.com, icolud.com)
Wrong country codes
Fields not mapped to the correct tag
Step 5: Finished
Once validated, click "Upload Fan Records." Your data will process, and your transactional data will be added to Openstage!
Please Note: If numbers don’t add up, check for duplicates, invalid records, or compounded transactions. For help, contact us at hello@openstage.live.
Transactional Import Key
