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Marquee Tents develops app that keeps clients up-to-date.
There’s an app for everything these days, and tent rental is no exception. Marquee Tents of Austin, Texas, released an app in August for professional event planners that features all of the company’s tent styles plus decorating, lighting and climate control options.
“Some of the key functions are that you can request a site visit and send up to four photos of the site with your request,” says Narcy Martinez of Marquee Tents.
The app also links to venues where Marquee installs tents as well as special event vendors the company works with, such as power generation and lighting design.
“The best function is push notifications,” she says. “We will keep our clients up-to-date with our ever-growing inventory. They will be the first to know about new tents, chandeliers and flooring styles. We will also send out weather alerts with reminders on what to do in damaging winds and rain, and keep clients in-the-know with local event news and any pricing specials that relate to events.”
With the app, users can quickly find photos to build a design board or place photos in a quote. The app also helps to support Marquee’s own sales staff.
“Photo management is really important, and now our sales team can use the app where all the best photos are stored,” she says. “They don’t have to spend their time trying to manage all our photos themselves.”
User-friendly app creation tools with various fee structures allow businesses to create an app in days or even hours. (Google Play and the Apple App store review apps prior to publishing them, which may take up to two weeks.) Using the Como™ app tool, Martinez estimates that the app and the marketing dollars spent to advertise it have been less than $1,500. One of the features she looked for in a creation tool was the ability to update the app easily.
“You can snap a photo with your smartphone camera and update the app in a couple of minutes,” she says. “It will then update all the users apps without them even knowing.”
Martinez says the only thing she would have done differently would have been to organize photos first, which would have made building the catalogs in the app even faster.
“There are still other features we want to add to make it an even more detailed resource,” she says. “We would love to add fire rating certificates, installation and troubleshooting videos, spec sheets and forms we use on a regular basis.”