Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

Who’s the best potential customer for your event? Your best customer is almost always the person who just attended your event. The previous phrase is borrowed from the sales and marketing world. If someone attended your event and had a great experience, they’ll probably attend your event again. It doesn’t matter if your event is free or you charge an admission. What you really need to focus on is collecting contact information from patrons of your event. At a minimum collect your patron’s first name and their email address. Always build your internal list (house list) of customers.

Events that sell out and do so early almost always have a dedicated house list. Two events that I recently case studied sold out more than 30 days in advance. The only reason these events advertised was for public relations purposes.  Since the events are recurring, event organizers go back to their house list year after year. One of the events sold out within 20 minutes of tickets going on sale to the public. How would you feel if you could sell out your event 30 days in advance?

Before Your Event – Leveraging Your Event Web Site
If you don’t have a list of previous purchasers or don’t have a recurring event you’re going to need to grow your own list. There should be a dedicated area on your event home page, and throughout your site, for people to leave their first name and email address.  Make sure your opt-in box is blatantly obvious and offers a compelling incentive to sign up.  After you have someone's contact information, engage your target market frequently and as early as possible.  During your interactions always try to front load the value of your event.

Online Ticket Sales
One of the biggest reasons I’m a fan of online ticket sales is that you have the opportunity to collect contact information from your event patron. If your patrons are buying tickets online you probably have access to a patron’s name and email address. This is your most valuable list if you have a recurring event. When it comes to any data mining, always make sure you’re collecting and using patron information ethically and legally. If patrons are OK with you sending them information, don’t squander the opportunity!

At Your Event
You can use customer feedback forms or contests to collect people’s contact information. Think in terms of the lifetime value of your customer.  If you have an event program, use a page to promote your list building efforts. In the program consider offering them a discount on your next event.

By building a dedicated list of event patrons you save yourself tremendous hassle and expense.  The bigger and better your house list, the less you have to spend on advertising to attract attendees.  If you SPAM people with useless email, you’re not going to keep patron trust.  Always focus on building rapport and relationships with people before trying to sell them anything. Building a dedicated house list for your event might be the single smartest event marketing technique in the world.

Want to get more great info? Check out the articles below:

• Simple Customer List Building Suggestions
• Start Building Your List Early
• Late Event Promotion - Big List Growth
• Building Your List Above the Fold
• Are You Opting-In Above the Fold?
• Form Placement and Growing Your List
• Turn Your Event Into an Experience

• The Event Promotion System
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