How Event Data Can Help You Sell Out Your Event
Photo by Igor Ovsyannykov on Unsplash
Planning ticket sales for an event becomes easier with data collected from past events. Each time a consumer visits a website or makes a Google search, information about his or her behavior gets collated. If this data can be correctly analyzed and optimized, behavior gets collated. If this data can be correctly analyzed and optimized, boosting event marketing efforts and selling out an event becomes that much easier!
Here are some ways to use data to sell out your event and gain better event ROI.
- Consolidation: You may have access to a lot of data from multiple sources but these may be haphazardous. You need a marketing platform which can take data inputs and integrate these to give you actionable strategies. Then you can take the best decisions targeted to your event to make sure all the tickets get sold out fast.
- Social Media: The new millennials are not likely to attend an event simply by looking at a poster. So, the best strategy for event promotion is using data from social media networking tools to understand what events people are attending. Based on data from earlier events, you can send targeted ads to them for the event or offer them and their friends’ attractive discounts on ticket prices.
- Remarketing: Social networking now allows you to follow people who may have been to your website earlier but not made any purchases on it yet. Email remarketing, for instance, is a great way to re-engage visitors; for instance, you could send cart abandonment messages and upsell messages and site visitor re-engagement messages to your subscribers. These are people who may have got your emails for an event; followed links in these to get to the ticket sales web page but left.
- Retargeting: This is a good way to send ads to target visitors that have visited your site in the past and looked at specific event tickets. So, the event-related advertisement follows these individuals as they browse other websites, constantly reminding them of the event. Many of these people may actually be driven to return to your event page.
- Beacons: You can use these tiny wireless transmitters powered by Bluetooth technology in hidden places during events to detect behavior of attendees. Data collected when their smartphones are traced helps you identify the “hot spots” where most attendees went. This information is then used to increase traffic in the less-frequented places and sell the “hot spots” more.
How it works: Beacons can be used for generating additional revenues and when any user passes by a particular zone in any event, he can get a notification urging him to check out a booth closes to him. You may offer this premium service to your sponsors, for example. You could also use these to accelerate the registration process for event attendees because waiting in long queues can be quite frustrating.
- Analytics: You can use this to convert visitors into event attendees as it allows you to track buyer behavior. Your first task is to create an account and then add this event page to it for which you get the tracking ID.
How to use Google Analytics:
- You need to inform your “goal” to Analytics to make sure you get visitors to buy your event tickets. Google Analytics charts help you track which people are buying tickets and how they are accessing your web page.
- If you click on the “Audience” option and “Behavior” under it, you will find the “New Vs Returning” visitors category. Using this, you can see whether these visitors had come to your event page before this. When you find many new visitors, it indicates you have expanded your reach successfully. Many returning visitors indicate tickets buyers coming back for venue directions, or repeat attendees, or even prospective attendees who are now convinced to buy event tickets.
- When you click on “Frequency & Recency” option, you get to know how regularly unique visitors come to the site and when they have last visited the site. Returning visitors may be repeatedly coming to your site to check for updates. If visitor frequency is low, an update of the site may help; so, you could include discount coupons and teaser videos to generate interest.
- When you click on “Audience” followed by the “Mobile” option and then select “Overview”, you get to view a pie-chart which shows traffic breakdown according to the type of device. So, you can optimize the event page depending on how the viewers are accessing it, whether it is through smartphones only or other devices as well.
- Finally, you can use the “User Flow” option to see which web pages the visitors have visited and the sequence in which they have visited them. A graphical representation of viewer path will inform you when conversions are taking place and also when they are abandoning the site.
- Marketing Channels: To ensure a full house, you can identify marketing channels which attract most visitors to your ticket sales page. For instance, retargeting and paid social media sites are costly channels but they have targeted capabilities and a higher reach compared to organic social media which is cheaper but with low reach. You can use previous event ticket sales data to see which channels have been most effective in drawing visitors to your event.
- Offering Discounts: Using data from ticket sales on your page you can know exactly when there is a lull. At this time, offering discounts is a great way to promote sales. For instance, you can offer discounted tickets for people buying in bulk, offer special deals to groups like early event-entry, send final-call emails with attractive discounts just before the event or time-limited discounts during certain times of the day.
Taking ownership of event ticketing becomes easier when you can use data correctly. So, you need to know exactly how many people come to your site, where they come from and what links they click on. Without this data, any ideas about marketing strategies will only be guesswork.
Event planning is not child’s play and ensuring that your event is fully sold out is possible by optimizing data from previous events.
Guest Author Bio: As an academic researcher & private tutor, Bella guides the new age professionals and students with their career. A graduate from Monash University, Bella organizes free coaching workshops for Essay Help and promotes free sharing of knowledge. She is also a consulting editor at Assignment Provider.
Plan better, more automated events for your attendees, exhibitors, staff, and yourself! Stay informed on the latest trends and education in the event community: