Outdoor Events & Advance Ticket Sales

If you are selling your event tickets offline (i.e., at a sponsor’s place of business, a local grocery store, a local business, etc.), you are most likely giving up your SINGLE MOST VALUABLE promotion resource—the customer’s contact information!



This mistake is an extension of "Ouch! Wasting Your Money on Something That You’ve Already Paid For ..." In that article the solution was to build and cultivate your customer database. The easiest, most powerful way to build your customer database is by selling tickets online. In most cases with online ticket sales, you will be able to collect your customers’ names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and telephone numbers, at the very minimum. That makes for a very powerful dataset.

Are you or your Board of Directors thrusting personal pricing opinions onto the consumer?

Over the years, I’ve seen this done time and time again by well-meaning committees and boards. As a result, thousands (or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands) of dollars are never realized!

Too many boards and committees make marketing as well as event ticket pricing decisions based on personal bias. Bias is a human condition that we all share. What this means is that even the best of intentions can result in lost revenue. In some cases, a significant loss of income.

Here’s a real-life example.

Yes, this phrase is like a broken record in the event industry: “You just have to charge more!”


Let's be honest, it’s easier said than done. For years, event organizers have given me a deluge of reasons why they can’t raise their ticket prices. Here are just a few actual event organizer quotes over the years:

• “Our sponsor would never approve of that price…a $20 General Admission gate ticket?”
  (Unless they’re covering all your event costs, sponsors should not be able to control what you charge for your event.)
  
  
• “I think we’re asking the public to pay too much. We can’t charge that much!”
  
  
• “If you think we can charge $100 for a VIP ticket to an air event in this town, you’re out of your effing mind!”
  (In this case, all VIP tickets for the event SOLD OUT at $100-$150 each.)

As with almost all monetary transactions, the price is rarely the REAL REASON that people don’t buy. A more significant reason would be if you didn’t establish the event’s value with your consumers and attendees. Don’t raise your prices unless you can get the consumers to agree (with their wallets) that they’re getting a great deal.

The greatest thing about social media is that it’s absolutely FREE. However, the worst thing about social media is also that it’s FREE. Being able to post anything about your event doesn’t mean that you should post everything. This issue is becoming progressively worse in both the personal and professional spheres. The worst transgressors are those people who post constantly post content, just to post.


Have you ever blocked any friends because of their annoying Facebook posts? e.g., Those posts about politics (regardless of which side they’re on). If so, you’re really going to understand the context here… Too much social media has become a SPAM fest, especially for events! For some events, it’s a contest of “How much random stuff can we post about our event in the shortest amount of time?” This will turn your prospective attendees off and make them ignore you. If you’re always posting subpar information, are people going to pay attention when you have something important to say? Probably not!

Fair Warning: what follows involves a sensitive topic for some. Please bear with me, because it’s vital for the future of your event.
Volunteers are the lifeblood of many events. Without them, some events wouldn’t exist!

However, I have to be brutally honest with you … Critical revenue roles at your event need to be filled by those with the appropriate and proven skill sets to successfully meet this responsibility. These critical revenue roles include anything to do with advertising, marketing, social media, and website creation. Some events could also include sponsorship as a vital revenue role.

Most event websites are the main hubs for online ticket sales. If not, they should be! As a part of the ticket buying process, most of your customers will pass through your site first, in most cases. An extra click or a distracting graphic on the page can significantly diminish your ticket sales. I've seen the change of even just two to four words on an event homepage can INCREASE customer lead generation by up to 24%! It's unbelievable, FOUR simple words that create at 24% DELTA in response.

What follows could be offensive to some and profitable to others, here goes!

Here’s an all-too-common event organizer phrase: “We have to get tickets on sale as quickly as possible so that people can buy early!” This “logic” gets applied constantly to event marketing campaigns. There is one major flaw with this thinking: it’s completely wrong!

I’ve seen seasoned event organizers flounder for months in the hope of generating advance ticket sales. Remember, just because your tickets are on sale doesn’t mean that people are interested in buying them. The biggest factor in poor ticket sales is the lack of a compelling reason for your consumers to buy right now! Specifically, this ...

One of the most expensive event advertising mistake is paying to reacquire previous customers. Over the last 20+ years, I’ve seen countless events waste millions of dollars to reengage previous customers.


A few years ago, I helped one client discover information on over 14,000 former customers hiding in a neglected database file. These customers were the result of an initial advertising expenditure of $100,000+ that took place over three years. On average, those 14,000 “lost” customers purchased about $30 per transaction.