Publishing a ticket sales page online is just the first step to a sold out event. Once your web page is ready, you need to invest time and money into strategic event marketing, and you need some very specific ticket sales features to drive the best results.
Below are five essential ticket sales features that will help you drive traffic to your online ticket sales page, boost digital word-of-mouth marketing so more people are aware of your event, and motivate people who aren’t ready to buy yet to do so before it’s too late.
1. Integrated Email Marketing for Buyers
The power of marketing is in your list these days – your email list that is. It’s the one point of access to your current, past, and potential customers that you control. You should be developing email marketing campaigns for your ticket buyers to keep your event top-of-mind and encourage them to talk about your event with other people. You can also use email marketing to upsell other products and services!
With that said, email marketing is great, but when you fully integrate your ticket sales page with your email marketing, your life gets a lot easier and your results will be so much better. That means your ticketing application should integrate directly with your email marketing program.
For example, AttendStar integrates with MailChimp, so when people purchase tickets to an event through the event’s AttendStar ticket sales page, their information is immediately captured in the event manager’s MailChimp account for email marketing opportunities. There is no double entry or redundant work for the ticket seller.
Alternately, your event ticketing application might have email marketing features built-in. As long as email marketing is integrated with your ticket sales application in some way and you use it effectively, you’ll see your ticket sales increase.
2. Automated Reminders
Another important marketing feature that should be built into your chosen event ticketing application is automation. Most importantly, you should be able to set up reminders that are automatically sent to ticket buyers by email and text message.
For example, you can schedule reminders that include useful information about the event. Not only is this information meaningful to recipients, but it also gives them another reason to talk about your event and share it with their friends and family.
You can also use these reminders to boost customer satisfaction by including helpful parking tips, inclement weather rescheduling notifications, and even traffic updates on the day of the event. People are far more likely to buy tickets to your future events if their entire experience with your current event is positive. Automated reminders help to do that by getting attendees excited and giving them peace-of-mind. This is one of that ticket sales features that you simply must have!
3. Social Media Discount Campaigns
Yes, you should offer early bird discounts and other tiered pricing and discount opportunities on your event tickets, but traditional discounting is only the first step. These days, social media discounts can make a significant difference in the number of tickets you sell to your event because that’s where people spend so much of their time on a daily basis.
Your event ticketing application should make it easy for you to create social media discount campaigns, so people who share your event to their Twitter or Facebook profiles automatically get a discount on their ticket prices.
Keep in mind, the application should allow you to choose which ticket types the discount applies to, what the specific discount is, and when it’s available. Furthermore, the software should authenticate that the message was actually published on the buyer’s social media profile, and it should track the number of clicks and sales conversions from that buyer’s social media post.
4. Opt-in Email Marketing for People Who Don’t Buy
How do you market to people who visit your event ticket sales page but don’t immediately buy tickets to your event? Your event ticketing application should allow you to create campaigns targeted specifically to this audience of interested people who haven’t purchased yet. They’ve already expressed interest by visiting your page, so you don’t want to lose them! They might just need a little nudge to buy.
First, you need to provide an email opt-in form that invites people who leave your page before buying to sign up for email reminders and information about the event (an exit pop-up form is a great way to do this). Once they’re signed up, you send them email messages reminding them about the event and providing other interesting and useful information.
In addition, the emails should include social media sharing buttons, so recipients can easily share the event on their own profiles. For example, AttendStar’s Remind Me Email Marketing feature lets you set all of this up in advance and automate the entire process. Set it up once for your event, and you’re done! This is one of those ticket sales features that not only boosts ticket sales but also saves you a lot of time.
5. Data
Your event marketing and ticket sales efforts are useless if you don’t know what’s working and what’s not. It’s imperative that you identify which investments aren’t driving an adequate return in the form of ticket sales.
For this reason, your event ticketing tool must allow you to download all buyer data – preferably in a .csv file that you can open in Excel, open in your preferred spreadsheet or database program, or upload into your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Once you download your buyer data, you can use it to crunch the numbers.
Not only can you analyze results, but you can also use this data for more event marketing programs. If your data includes buyer names, street addresses, email addresses, mobile phone numbers, and so on, you can use it to create direct mail programs, targeted Facebook ads, text message marketing campaigns, and more; but without it, your marketing options are very limited.
Your Next Steps
Your first step is to confirm that your event ticketing tool offers all of the ticket sales features included in the above list. If not, you’re limiting your sales before you even have a chance to sell out your event!
Next, you need to configure your ticketing application, your email marketing campaigns, your automated reminders, your social media discount campaigns, and your opt-ins for non-buyers. From there, you can promote your event effectively and analyze your data to make tweaks along the way so you truly can sell out every event.
