Do you run an event where you sell tickets? And are you looking to increase your ticket sales this year?
Although you’ve had to be flexible with the way that events are run, there are still audiences out there who will love your event and who will be willing to pay for the experience. Read on for the best tips on how to boost ticket sales after a tough time.
1. Double your target and break it down
The first thing you need to do when attempting to double revenue is officially set it as a target when planning and then work back from your end goal to create a series of smaller, incremental targets.
Research continues to show that having a target, and then chunking it into smaller tasks and goals, is a powerful way to achieve your long-term goals.
So if your event currently brings in £60,000 and you’d like it to make £120,000, you know you need to make £10k per month and not £5k, or roughly £2500 per week and £500 per weekday.
Using an event ticket sales tracker can be a great way to keep an eye on how sales are doing. Every day you don’t hit that £500 target, you can ask why and how you can make sure that you hit it tomorrow. Having this kind of granular roadmap to success is an amazing way to focus your mind and help you to actually achieve your goal.
2. Double down on your most successful channel
Go back and look at your last event, and spend time understanding the numbers and analytics. Review your Eventbrite dashboard, your Google Analytics account, and any other promotional software that you’ve used to figure out which channel has driven the highest number of ticket sales. Setting up tracking pixels on your digital marketing posts is also a great way to see which of your methods are most effective.
Once you’ve identified your top-performing promotional channel, figure out either how to do more of it, or how to do it even better.
For example, if you find that email is your most successful ticket sales driver, and you send out one monthly newsletter, can you increase this to send out a weekly update instead via one of Eventbrite’s email integrations?
Or if you’ve found that social media marketing works well, can you double the number of posts you send (or double how much you spend on promoting the content)?
If increasing frequency is not an option (no one wants a daily email reminder about your event), then look at improving the quality and/or effectiveness of your most successful channel even further.
So once again if you’re looking at email, A/B test subject lines or calls to action (CTAs), try different send times, or adding/removing images until you find the optimal results.
3. Increase prices
Nobody loves a price increase, but you’d be surprised how often people will accept them. After all, inflation is a fact of life and part of a functioning economy.
It’s likely that your costs will continue to increase as venues raise prices to cover things like higher utility bills and lower booking numbers. So why not increase your ticket prices?
While 100% could be a bit too big of an increase to swallow, a 25% or even 50% increase might not dampen demand as much as you’d expect. (It’s also a useful strategy for making the most of a smaller event.)
With the additional revenue, you can spend more on marketing and the event experience, creating a premium brand that is less price-sensitive and has more loyal customers because of the quality you deliver.
4. Add a higher value experience to purchase
If you feel uncomfortable with a general price increase, why not add an additional ticket option for higher-value target customers? You can easily offer add-ons and other extras with Eventbrite. These could be a VIP experience, early access, a goodie bag, or any other kind of add-on that will give the buyers an elevated experience of your event.
Events with “premium” ticket options frequently enjoy higher revenues than those without one, so this is a great step towards doubling your event’s revenue if you don’t currently have a similar package available.
5. Create a lower pricing tier
While adding a premium ticket is a great way to capture wealthier or higher-value attendees, you could also take the opposite approach and add a lower ticket option to increase the volume of ticket sales.
This may be something like a half-day ticket rather than a full day, streaming digitally, or offering some restricted access to parts of your event. Your normal attendees and fans will no doubt continue to want the full experience, but multiple ticket options at different price points will allow more people to attend who are just curious and maybe don’t want to invest in the full ticket.
6. Appeal to a new audience
A classic way to double ticket sales is to find a way of appealing to a new – but related – audience, while maintaining the integrity of your core event and audience.
Many real ale festivals have done this, for example, with the inclusion of bars for cider drinkers, craft beers, and even wine to attract a wider demographic. Other examples could include a cooking class for busy mums to expand and include dads, an automotive exhibition to include planes and boats, or a membership conference to include the option of non-members attending.
7. Add a new marketing channel or tactic
Are you utilising SEO, social media, or content marketing yet? Do you need to get involved with Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube? Could you trial an event ticket sales app – one of the easiest ways to sell event tickets online?
Remember that you don’t double ticket sales by only sticking with the same channels and tactics. Pick one new marketing activity that you think will have the biggest impact, and throw some energy into testing it out.
It might be that you simultaneously try three promising ideas for a month, then just stick with the most successful one for the rest of the campaign, so you’re not committing to a single new channel without first testing its impact on your revenue.
8. Add more salespeople
This won’t be applicable to all events, but for those with high-value tickets, you could well be using a sales team to help sell your tickets. If this is the case, then a reasonably sure-fire way to increase your sales is to increase the number of salespeople you have on the team.
So long as you have a good manager to lead the team, and clearly defined targets and KPIs, the ROI on adding more salespeople should always be a positive one and immediately help you towards your goal of doubling revenue.
9. Use affiliates and partners
Affiliates are marketing partners that you pay a portion of your ticket fees to for every sale they make. If you don’t use them, then why not consider utilising their audience and digital marketing know-how to help boost sales for your event?
You’ll have to pay a chunk of the revenue to them (how much is up to you), but you’ll end up with a much larger pie, and so net-net you’ll be better off.
The alternative is to find partners who are willing to promote your event for you. While they may not act as affiliates (e.g. you don’t pay them for every referral they make), you will still need to find an incentive for them to help you. This could be as simple as free tickets to your event or being considered a sponsor so they enjoy exposure to your audience.
Just ensure you track how well they do for your event using custom codes. Otherwise, you may be offering more than you get in return.
Whether you use one or both, broadening out your support network is a great way to contribute towards doubling your ticket sales.
10. Ask for – and incentivise – referrals
Similar to using affiliates and partners, coming up with ways to get attendees to help spread the word about your event is a great marketing tactic. While many super fans will do this naturally on social media, some people will need a little push, so offer up an incentive.
You could offer anyone who refers five friends a free VIP upgrade or free drinks vouchers for every ticket they help to sell, or even a discount code for another event – you’ll just need to figure out what reward makes sense based on your ticket prices and audience.
However, if you can get to a point where each attendee tells another attendee about the event and helps to sell a ticket, you may very quickly double or even treble ticket sales, as the kind of network effects kick in that helped make Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp the giants that they are today.
Boost ticket sales for your next event
Whatever type of event you’re running, there are ticket sales promotion ideas to suit it. So why not try out a few to test what works for your brand and events?
Upping your social media or email marketing, adding a new channel, and getting brand partners or attendees involved can be great ways to bring in new audiences. Broadening the appeal of your event and adding different ticket tiers and VIP experiences helps to make sure there’s something for everyone. And changing your targets, team, and prices can make all the difference, too.
Once you’ve worked out what works, roll it out and you’ll be on track to double your event revenues this year.
Ready to boost your ticket sales? From flexible options to appealing landing pages, Eventbrite has everything you need to start selling more tickets online.
