Eventbrite’s community of event creators sold 284 million tickets in 2022. Want to know how?
Creators using Eventbrite have access to the top strategies, incisive analytics, and the most advanced event promotion and event ticket sales tools available.
Want in on their secrets? Thought so.
Well, you’re in luck! At Eventbrite we love to help event creators succeed. So, we’ve outlined them all in this article, along with real examples you can learn from.
Discover proven strategies and tips to help you design a multifaceted ticket sales approach that works. Read on for our ticket sales strategies and how to sell tickets with ease every single time.
Table of Contents
Plan for the whole ticket sales life cycle
Turn email addresses into “yeses”
Lock down your social media strategy
Master the art of early ticket sales
Optimize your website and ticketing for mobile users
Get found with Google’s “events in Search” feature
Get scientific with your advertising
How to sell more tickets
Understanding how to attract people to an event is the first step in hosting a sold-out experience. Your multifaceted ticket sales strategy should leverage online tools, such as email marketing, SEO promotional campaigns, and social media to target a broad audience. Engaging with sponsors can also increase event ticket sales. Discover these strategies and more as you learn how to sell more tickets.
Plan for the whole ticket sales life cycle
Every event has a sales curve that tracks when people buy tickets. For most events, sales soar when you first put your event tickets up for sale thanks to built-up anticipation from announcing the event. Then, you’ll see another hike in ticket sales during the last few days before the event. In between those two periods is a relatively stable “maintenance” stage in ticket sales.
It’s important for event promoters to understand that timing is critical for selling tickets to an event. You don’t want to flood the market with all of your messages simultaneously, but you also don’t want to deliver important information too late. Consistent messaging throughout the ticket sales life cycle keeps your event in the spotlight and can help increase sales.
Your audience has different motivations at each stage of your ticketing life cycle. It’s your job to nurture their ticket-buying intentions until they’re ready to buy.
Map out the stages of your campaign, and think about when your marketing tools will best serve your objectives. For example, Eventbrite’s email marketing tool makes it simple for you to perfectly time your emails for when they’ll be most effective. That means you can plot out your entire campaign months ahead of time and automatically send the emails whenever you want.
Turn email addresses into “yeses”
Despite being in the age of apps and social media, email event marketing remains incredibly effective. But between spam filters and overflowing inboxes, sending an email doesn’t guarantee a registration or even a click.
Here are five tips to help you stand out and drive traffic from your emails to your event listing.
Retarget past attendees
If someone has attended one of your past events, reach out to them when you plan a new one! Collect email addresses from people as they come to your events, and use them to create a loyal fanbase that loves your events.
Keep it short
Lead with the single most compelling piece of content and include a clear call to action. Use single-column, thumb-friendly designs to engage mobile users. Research suggests that emails below 200 words have the best click-through rates.
Make it mobile-friendly
Because 61% of emails are opened on mobile devices, you need to be sure your emails are mobile-friendly. Ensuring mobile-friendly emails means maintaining the layout, design, and formatting across all screen sizes, preventing any loss of crucial information due to poor readability.
Don’t rely on images alone
Create a message that is legible with or without images in case it’s viewed as text only. Spam filters are also more likely to block emails with no text, so don’t drop a flyer into the body of an email and call it a day. You should also bear in mind that images can take longer to load than text if users have limited internet connection.
Use a tool integrated with your event technology
If you’re using Eventbrite’s email marketing solution, you can send up to 10,000 emails a day right from our platform. We also offer a MailChimp integration, allowing you even greater flexibility when sending email invitations and follow-up messages.
Before you launch your email marketing campaign, make sure you know how to grow your email list to market your next event.
Lock down your social media strategy
Your social media strategy should depend on the size and scope of your event. If you’re hosting a one-time gathering of local food trucks without an entry fee, you can probably get away with a simple Instagram page and a Twitter account. But if you’re looking to expand your reach and build a brand, it’s time to go all-in with a comprehensive social tool like Eventbrite, and explore our event marketing platform, which can help you easily and effectively spread your message on social media.
Here are a few key ways to make a splash on social.
Create custom content for your event
It’s more time-consuming than social media posts with text and an image, but making original videos, Instagram reels, TikToks, and livestreams can extend your brand reach and visibility. You may consider hiring a freelancer or agency to help create the right content for your audience — with so many platforms to post your content on, it’s not as simple as uploading the same video to multiple streams. Each platform has its own set of rules.
Work with your event partners
Draft a formal agreement with your event’s talent, hosts, and sponsors to cross-promote your event to their networks. For example, United Tribes of Africa partnered with a venue, 811 Parliament, to cross-post social media posts on both of their Instagram accounts. That expanded both brands’ reach to an even wider audience.
They even partnered with Eventbrite to promote their brand too!
Tap into your loyal fans
Encourage attendees to promote the event on their own social media channels. You can even incentivize them by offering a discount or swag if they get a certain number of referrals from their user-generated content. To connect directly with your community and spread your promotion even further, take advantage of Eventbrite’s social media marketing tools’ ability to advertise your events to a precisely segmented audience.
Consider contests to sell more tickets
Social media contests can engage your existing fan base and increase event ticket sales. Encourage fans to tweet out your event hashtag to be entered into a random drawing for free event tickets. Or have fans post a picture of themselves attending a previous event or wearing event swag to receive a discount code on tickets.
Partner with influencers or micro-influencers
Brand ambassadors can be a great way to reach new audiences as you build your brand. To reduce your costs (and up your authenticity), look to local “micro-influencers” who have a smaller but highly engaged following.
To identify them, look for people in a relevant industry with a high ratio of comments and likes on their posts compared to their followers. These influencers don’t need to have millions of followers to make an impact: When Eventbrite partnered with New Women Space, they had about 18,000 followers on Instagram, but the joint reel was played over 172,000 times!
Remember to track results so you know who is pulling their weight when it comes to event ticket sales.
Sell tickets everywhere
People spend most of their time on only a handful of apps and sites, so it’s critical to make sure they see your events wherever they are — and can buy tickets there, too.
This is why the key to selling out an event isn’t necessarily driving more people to your website, but rather selling across the web to reach your audience where they are already browsing.
Let’s face it: views on Instagram reels don’t always translate into attendees. It’s a common frustration to see people mark themselves as “interested” in an event while your ticket sales stall. Often, people are interested in an event when they see it on social media, but put off a purchase until the last minute.
When Eat Drink SF faced this issue, they knew exactly who to turn to. They utilized Eventbrite to convert their social media audience into in-person attendees and saw a 28.5% increase in ticket sales. For example, simply adding a “Get Tickets” button to their Instagram page made it easy for interested followers to take action right away.
It’s also important to offer as many payment methods as possible to encourage people to buy. Fortunately, Eventbrite’s payment processing system lets you take all the major types of debit card and credit card, as well as PayPal and in-person payments all from one platform.
Master the art of early ticket sales
Whether you’re hosting a one-night pop-up restaurant or a week-long conference, it’s probably not the only event of its kind. The event space is increasingly crowded across genres, and it’s easier than ever for event-goers to find new competing events.
So how do you get ahead in a saturated market?
Top event directors agree: more time equals more ticket sales. Start selling tickets as soon as possible to make the most of your on-sale period.
To master early ticket sales, follow these steps:
- Nail down your venue. Book your venue and dates as soon as possible — this is the minimum you need to start selling. Remember, choosing the best event location is key.
- Give the early bird the worm. Kickstart your sales by incentivizing early bird tickets. You don’t always need to offer a discount: give early birds a free drink, event swag, or access to a different type of ticket like a VIP experience instead.
- Launch pre-sales for your upcoming events shortly after your last. Direct email is a great way to capture a loyal fan base with targeted marketing while the excitement is still fresh in attendees’ minds.
- Set up a pricing schedule. Ticket prices can fluctuate during the sales life cycle. Let your target audience know when ticket prices will increase to create a sense of urgency and speed up ticket sales.
- Sell tickets fast by creating scarcity. Offer a limited number of tickets at certain price points to encourage attendees to purchase tickets before they run out.
All of this is easy if you’re using a ticketing platform that’s fast to set up and easy to use. Fortunately, you can create a wide variety of ticket types and discounts directly in Eventbrite, the most popular events platform in the world.
Optimize your website and ticketing for mobile users
More than half of the web traffic in the US comes from mobile users. Optimizing your event page and ticketing for mobile isn’t just about the experience — it’s also about a wider reach. Here are two reasons why mobile optimization will skyrocket your sales.
98% of Facebook’s daily active users are on mobile
If you promote your event on Facebook (who doesn’t?), there’s a very good chance people are looking at your event or ad on a mobile device. This means if they click the link and get taken to a site that looks clunky or doesn’t have mobile-optimized ticketing, it’s going to hurt your sales.
That’s just as true for Instagram and TikTok. These primarily-mobile applications are redirecting mobile users to your site, so you should be sure it works just as well on mobile and desktop.
People expect to be able to buy on mobile
As mobile usage increases, so does the expectation that people can do everything they need to on the fly, including last-minute purchases and acting on spur-of-the-moment decisions. The Digital 2023: Global Overview Report revealed that the average mobile user spends five hours a day using their phone with 42.4% of that time using social and communications apps.
Smartphone users spend trillions of dollars annually on e-commerce, so it’s important that you make tickets accessible via mobile for a public who likes to buy online.
To be sure that your event page’s visitors can easily navigate your page and buy tickets, you can make an Eventbrite event page. They’re mobile-optimized, make checkout simple, and sold over 284 million tickets last year.
Get found with Google’s “events in Search” feature
Using search engine optimization (SEO) and event discovery in search tools lets you attract more of your target audience. SEO is an important digital strategy that helps ensure your website shows up when people do an internet search.
Here are some quick tips on how to power up your website’s SEO:
- Choose your domain name wisely. If you’re creating an event website (and you should), keep it simple and try to match it to the name of your event as closely as possible. Google and other search engines give a lot of weight to site names when serving up search results. That’s why the ERE Recruiting Conference website, for example, is simply ERERecruitingConference.com.
- Think about keywords. The words you choose to put on your homepage and in your content should align with what your potential attendees are searching. So, in the case of a marketing company that is having a conference in Miami, you might think about including phrases like “South Florida marketing conference” or “marketing conferences near Miami” in your copy.
- Keep the content flowing and regularly updated. Adding authentic, valuable content to your site gives it more authority and therefore better search rankings. Add a blog and post regular updates as your event grows. Keep web content updated with event details, including sponsors, headliners, or social opportunities. Write blog posts that highlight different elements of your event, or interview keynote speakers and sponsors to build interest in the event.
Does that sound complicated and time-consuming? SEO isn’t for the fainthearted. If you want to skip all the work and still rank at the top of a Google search, there are a few shortcuts you could take.
For example, Google’s events in the Search feature makes it easier for users to discover events. By partnering with a handful of ticketing providers and event listing sites (including Eventbrite), Google provides event recommendations for anyone searching for things to do, such as “events near me” or “free concert.” You can even list your event directly in your Google My Business Dashboard!
This feature is a huge advantage for event organizers, especially those who don’t have a dedicated SEO strategy. You don’t have to be an expert at keywords and content marketing to help people find your event. You just have to have an event listed on one of the participating ticketing providers’ sites, such as Eventbrite. For inspiration, search for events like yours on Google to see what keywords are used to populate event listings.
To further improve your chances of online discovery across all search engines, you can also use an SEO cheat sheet. This simple guide will tell you how to research keywords and what to do with your findings.
Get scientific with your advertising
Don’t just do the basics to check social media off your marketing list. Social media platforms and event search engines like Eventbrite can let you reach a lot of people, but using them successfully to reach more attendees and sell out an event requires a considered approach.
You don’t have to have a huge ad budget to make an impact with a sponsored event post. Not even close. In fact, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden recently spent $50 to sponsor a post and saw a 61x return on their investment. It became a sell-out event in two-thirds of the time it normally would have.
One of the best ways to achieve cut-through without blowing your budget is to increase your Facebook Relevance Score. When you run an ad, Facebook quickly analyzes how well the audience is responding to it by measuring clicks, likes, shares, and comments. Facebook then uses this data as an indicator of how relevant your ad is to your audience, giving it a score of one to 10, with 10 being the highest. Higher scores make your ads cheaper.
You can also use the ad targeting and A/B testing tools built into Eventbrite’s marketing suite. They’re custom-built for event creators, and they’re automatically integrated with the rest of Eventbrite’s tools.
Another way to advertise directly to an audience already looking for events is by putting ads directly on Eventbrite’s search engine. Because Eventbrite is the most popular event search engine, you can be certain that plenty of interested people will see them.
Create a mobile-friendly event page in minutes.
Strengthen ties with sponsors
The right sponsorships add more than just money to your budget; they can attract attendees and help sell out your event. When you’re negotiating sponsorships, go beyond logo placement and encourage brands to enhance your attendee experience with experiential marketing.
To identify great sponsors, search Eventbrite for similar events in other areas and see what sponsors worked with them!
Work with your sponsors to create mini-experiences (in the form of brand activations), adding richness and unexpected elements to your event. In return, brands will see higher engagement and find your event worth partnering with again and again. Successful brand activations immerse event-goers in an experience that can include everything from interactive art installations to virtual reality and livestreaming.
Track your marketing efforts
If you’re going to invest in promotion, you need to know what’s working and what’s not. The most efficient way to increase your sales is to identify which channels drive the most revenue, so you can ensure every dollar is used wisely.
Here are two ways to track conversions to optimize your marketing spend.
1. Promotional tracking links
Tracking links (also known as affiliate links) will help you find out where your ticket buyers come from. For example, if you’re working with social media influencers, provide them with a unique link to use to see how much traffic they’re driving to your event page.
If you’re using Eventbrite, you can set up tracking links for any number of campaigns with a unique URL — including email marketing, social media posts, and any marketing you do with affiliate partners or sponsors.
2. Tracking pixels
Advertising platforms show you how many people saw or clicked your ads. What you really need to see is whether or not those ads are driving event registrations and ticket sales.
To do this, you need to use tracking pixels — a code that lets the advertising platform you’re using know when a web page is accessed by their ad. If the tracked web page is an order confirmation page, you’ll be able to see every time your ad results in a completed order. Track the success of your advertising efforts by using simple image pixels or tracking pixels on your site.
Event ticket sales FAQs
What is the best way to sell tickets to an event?
Fast ticket sales rely on an impactful marketing strategy that incorporates various tactics to promote your event. Design a multifaceted approach that includes email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, and contests. Incentivize early ticket sales to sell them quickly.
How can I promote my event offline?
Use these strategies to promote your event offline:
- Advertise in printed materials, such as the local newspaper, magazines, or mailers
- Promote your event in person at networking events with other businesses
- Give away swag featuring your event information at local events
- Use a direct mail campaign that targets potential attendees in your area
How do you sell out a show?
If you’re promoting a show or concert, highlight your top acts in your advertisements to generate buzz. You can advertise a variety of VIP benefits like the exclusive seating and refreshments like the Argenta Downtown Council did in their local concert series to attract more attention as well. To encourage early ticket sales, build early-bird ticket prices in Eventbrite’s ticket-selling platform. You can also work with sponsors to enhance your event and cross-promote through other businesses.
Sell tickets online with Eventbrite
If you’re wondering how to sell tickets to an event, consider Eventbrite as your ticketing partner. Our event technology platform allows you to sell tickets online using reliable, customer-friendly ticketing software.
By partnering with Eventbrite, you can offer promo codes, create group ticket discounts, and design a free event page to promote your event and ultimately increase ticket sales. Learn more about our ticket sales platform for ways to sell tickets online at your next event.
