How to Increase Ticket Sales for an Event Successfully?

As an event organizer, knowing how to increase ticket sales for an event is basic and essential knowledge. There will be some periods of time when sales become stagnant whether you want it or not and you may find it discouraging to move on. But do you know that there are many ways to help you market your event effectively and increase ticket sales besides using social media and advertising methods? Below we’ve compiled 6 ways you can apply to boost your ticket revenue. Stay tuned!

How to Increase Ticket Sales for an Event Successfully?

Convert Customer Loyalty into Revenue

To any brand, happy and loyal customers are the most sought-after because they are willing to introduce people around them to your products and likely write positive reviews about your event. That’s why having customers who engage with your brand and refer you to their friends is one of the business goals. 

Therefore, it makes so much sense to cherish those customers. If you are organizing a new event, it may not apply to you now, but it’s key to bear in mind. You might have heard of the 80/20 rule that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients and this is quite the same. Focusing on individual customers can make a big impact on your event sales. 

If you have to host multiple events in a year or annual events, then you will have regular attendees and these people are your most important customers and you should do everything you can to make them stay. 

It’ll be wise to show appreciation and respect to loyal customers by offering tickets at a discounted price. You can even go a step ahead and allow them to reserve event tickets in advance. This way enables customers to have a positive experience and later can increase their loyalty as well as engagement with your brand. 

How much can they get discounted needs depends on your business tactics. For example, if you sell a ticket to a frequent customer at half the price, they convince a friend of theirs to buy another ticket, you then will increase your sales through a new audience. 

Issue Early Birds Tickets

Do you know that selling tickets for early birds can bring many benefits for both your business and customers?

Offering a discounted price as the event is first publicized can create a sense of urgency and scarcity since you let your customers feel that you plan to sell out and standard tickets will be sold out quickly. This small tactic can somehow inform them that if they don’t make the buying decision soon, there won’t be tickets left in the future. 

When you are able to increase ticket sales immediately, you can use this income to market the event one step further or create extra value for your clients. You can also use the statistics figures to see how much hype your event can produce, how many people have an interest in it, and whether you need to put more effort into marketing or not. This allows you to gain valuable pieces of information and see who are your brand event advocates. 

Note that even though there are many positives surrounding this tactic, don’t let selling too many tickets at a low price make you lose out on profit. A smart organizer will take every element of their budget into account and find ways to save money. Figuring out how many tickets to sell is difficult and unless your audience is small, it’s usually impossible to get it right but the key here is trying to get a rough estimate of how many early bird tickets you should sell. A small visual representation in the picture below can illustrate our point here. 

It’s true that when selling a product at a lower price, you earn less profit but the key here is to ensure you sell the right amount to minimize any loss. If you misjudge the overall outcome and give more early bird tickets than necessary, it will prevent you from earning a substantial profit. 

The Powerful Impact of Referrals

Obviously, it’s not easy to target and gain a new audience and many businesses have spent thousands of dollars and even more on their marketing effort to reach more customers. You might wonder how to do that if you don’t have a big budget as they do. This shouldn’t be a problem because you still have your current customers and they are the strongest marketing tool. If you look into things carefully you can surely find customers who become loyal buyers and they don’t hesitate to share your event with other people, you just have to give them the incentive to do so. 

How could you encourage them to do that, it’s actually simple with a referral rewards system. The definition of referrals is when your original customer shares, introduce you to their friends and family members, they’ll get a reward if their friends buy a ticket that way. 

For example, Alex buys a ticket, then he refers to his friend, and his friend purchases a ticket, Alex now will receive a discount of 25% off his next purchase. Why are saying this is powerful? Because the customer is acting for his own benefit and they refer their friends because they have enough incentive to do so. They actually do not care much about your benefits and how much profits you can earn from that, they might but it’s not a big problem. 

Thinking of this practice as a domino chain, if Alex refers to a friend and that friend refers to many friends and so on, you will have like 4 new customers you haven’t thought you would have before and all of it comes from a little incentive you seed beforehand. 

To use this system effectively, offer the incentives and rewards in a clear list format so that customers will understand exactly what milestones they need to hit if they want to be given a specific reward, for example

• 25% of the next ticket order for referring to one friend successfully. 

• Free entry to your next event for referring to 5 friends successfully 
• Free entry to all events within the next 3 years for referring to 10 successfully

Remember these are just broad examples, you need to have a good set of parameters for the event you are running. Imagine you host more than 20 events a year then maybe offering free entries to all events is not feasible. In short, a referral system certainly is a good way to increase ticket sales but if you’re giving too much as a reward, it may be counter-productive to your original purpose. 

Raise The Price, Earn Greater Profit

When you raise the price, you may worry that it will scare your customers away and at some point, you are correct because no one likes paying more for anything unless they get some value. Doubling the price may be a hard decision but you will be surprised by how much your customers are willing to pay for incremental values.

By raising the price effectively and providing equal value for your customers, you can make them willing to pay more. With the increased revenue to spend, you have multiple ways to increase your brand image. For example, you can use the money to invest in improving customer experience, offer more to the events and heighten the value you can bring to your customers. Believe that more investment in marketing efforts can bring you more customers, and you can even change the price later while still maintaining value in the future. 

The host of events needs to decide whether it’s a suitable tactic to apply. For example, if your events are not big in scale, then any increase in the price may be easily noticeable and upset your participants. If you want to make some changes, we recommend that you focus on the final goal which is to create a premium brand and let your customers understand that you devote your profits only to improve the experience for your customer.

The biggest benefit coming from this method is you can make your brand more loyal-oriented. Besides, your customers gradually will care less about the price increase and trust that they will bring even more value. Although this can be achieved without raising the price, it will take you longer to reach the final goal without the additional funds. 

Double Your Most Valuable Assets Performance

Finally, make good use of your assets by using analytical tools to see what piece of content can perform best for your previous events. It’s very useful to use a tool like Google Analytics in order to monitor the performance of your website.

If you are not currently using social media then it’s next to impossible to monitor the important data you need to know about your web page. In other words, it’s extremely vital to identify what your best platform for marketing is so that you can increase your sales dramatically. You should focus on your top-performing channel for example, if your Facebook Page gets 10,000 likes and your Twitter only has 1000 followers then why should you devote an equal amount of time and resources to both? Clearly, Facebook in this case is going to take you further not to mention the best channel to help you get the best results.

It’s not applicable to every case as the differences in the example were exaggerated but we know that you get the point we want to make here. If a greater value is provided to your audience on a better platform, it’s surely a good thing. There are multiple changes you could try to make to improve your marketing efficiency

Social media

Social eCommerce is on the trend and even becomes dominant in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. To increase your ticket sales with social media, you can:

• Experiment with the times you send content, you will find one particular time that has more tremendous engagement rates than others. Once you found out, proceed to exploit that point and deliver the best content around that time. 
• Experiment with delivering content more frequently. Depending on your industry and audience, this may create a huge impact but remember never place quantity before quality or bridge the gap between spam and valuable content. If you want to increase the number of posts you must guarantee the quality remains as high as it can be. 
• Experiments with the frequency of ads if you are running ads. This can become a game-changer if you find a certain frequency and time that works best for your audience. 

Apart from those tips, you can consider some excellent social networking extensions to boost sales. With the widespread popularity of social networks, almost everyone has at least one social account, and using social networking integration tools allows customers to log in quickly with the safety of their personal information. Customers can also share posts or products effortlessly because the integration tool saves their log-in data. 

Email marketing

Some ways to can use email marketing to rocket your sales should be:

• If your strongest asset is email then you can experiment with the email content like the layout, images, and writing style. These elements can be dramatic changes and sometimes bring a strong impact on your marketing strategies. It’s key to constantly encourage customers’ feedback so you can know whether or not they prefer the changes you’ve just made. 
• Experiment with the subject lines of the emails and expect a big impact it may have on the click-through rate. If you are able to entice a great number of recipients to open your email, you can greatly improve the chances of them buying your products. 
• Test your Call to Action buttons like “Buy Now” or “Visit Our Store” and pick the best one for your emails. 

Email marketing is the tool of the new ear of marketing and the good news is it’s pretty simple to create email automation. When compared with advertising tools such as Facebook Ads, little time needed to create promotional emails that can work smoothly is so worth trying. 

Use an extension to increase ticket sales: Event tickets

Apart from the help of social media to reach more audiences, event planners can use a powerful extension to rocket their sales. And Event Tickets can help you do that by creating event tickets with flexible options and designing printable tickets with QR codes. Another great thing about Event Tickets is that admins can set up reminder emails to remind their customers about upcoming events. You can also find it easy to keep track of your event attendees via checked-in tickets. Everything will become much simpler for you to run a successful event.

Final thoughts

There is no guarantee that one of these methods alone will help you drastically increase sales overnight but the implementation of each can give you more opportunities to boost revenues, you just need to make sure the plan is reasonable to your goals and objectives. Before you apply one of these tactics, ensure you do proper research on your audience and plan your marketing strategy beforehand. 

Hopefully, this article is useful for you when it comes to how to increase ticket sales for an event. Check out our store blogs for other interesting tips to grow your eCommerce business and run events successfully like this.