Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

What to sell even more tickets to your event?

As you know, humans have incredibly short attention spans. Once you get online, attention spans get even worse. Here's the problem for event organizers and promoters - short online attention spans have a direct impact your ticket sales. When thinking of how to sell tickets to an event online - Beware of shopping cart abandonment! At it's simplest level, shopping cart abandonment is when people don't complete their online ticket orders. Abandonment happens in the time frame AFTER someone clicks your buy ticket link and before they complete their order.

Most event organizers NEVER consider the online ticket check out process and how it impacts their bottom line. Are you losing a ton of potential event revenue to shopping cart abandonment and don't event know it?

A few days ago, I critiqued a radio ad for an event promoter. Certain aspects of their ad were reducing potential ticket sales. Specifically, the ad directed people to buy tickets from two completely different web sites. That might seem like a good idea (diversifying), until you consider all the details a listener must remember in a 15 or 30 second radio spot. The more details you pass along in your radio advertisement, the less impact and retention.

Here are some radio advertising suggestions you can take away from example above . . .

Think About Your Radio Promotions From the Listener's Perspective
If you're using radio ads to promote your event, take the time to carefully think through the sales process. It's especially important to consider your radio ad from the listener's perspective. Your radio advertisement is most likely going to be grouped with a number of other ads. Therefore, you're competing against other advertisers for the listener's attention. The question to ask yourself is, "what do I want the listener to take away from my radio ad?"

Over the last ten years, I've hear the follow statement said by event organizers countless times, "We have to get our tickets on sale as soon as possible!" My rub with the previous statement is as follows . . . Too many event organizer think that because their tickets are on sale early, people will buy. That's rarely the case.

Here's a question to carefully ponder, "Are you giving people enough incentive to buy tickets early?" If you don't provide a compelling enough reason (that resonates with the target market) you won't sell many advance sale tickets for your event - regardless how early your tickets go on sale.

Six Months of Lousy Ticket Sales
Just the other day an event promoter was telling me about their advance sale ticket woes. Ticket have been on sale for over SIX MONTHS! But nobody is buying tickets.  A closer look at the promoter's event marketing shows that there is little reason for people to buy tickets early.  The event promoter now has to bank on last minute sales, which is a potential recipe for disaster.

A few weeks ago, I got into a spirited debate with an event producer on the topic of ticket surcharges. The main point we haggled about was whether to include the service fees in the ticket price. If you want to sell more tickets to your event, it’s important to consider how you present ticket price and service fees to your customer. What seems trivial on the surface can have a huge impact on how many tickets (especially advance tickets) you sell to your event.

If you want to lower your event marketing costs, you need to start collecting customer information immediately!

A HUGE Event Marketing Asset
Customer contact information (at a minimum name and email) is one of your greatest event marketing assets. If you have a recurring event, your customer data becomes even more important. It’s far less expensive to market your event to an established customer database.

Failure to Leverage Previous Customer Data
Oddly enough, far too many event organizers fail to collect customer information. Even worst - event organizers and promoters who fail to leverage their existing customer database. Are you making those same costly mistakes?