It’s no secret that planning and hosting an event is difficult, however, marketing and selling enough event tickets are often the most challenging aspects of organizing an event.
You’ve planned your perfect event with the best venue, headliners, and date and time.
However, if you can’t sell enough tickets to your event, then the event is basically a failure.
Event ticket management: the discipline of managing your event ticket pricing, selling, and promotion efforts, is one of the key aspects of promoting your event that shouldn’t be overlooked, and it can be easier said than done to execute.
Event ticket management should provide enough versatility for your target attendees; ensuring it’s as easy as possible for your attendees to buy tickets for your event. We should also consider selling different ticket prices to cater to different attendees’ preferences and economic capabilities (i.e. VIP tickets vs general admission tickets), and we should also consider when and how to offer discounts (i.e. early bird) to attract more attendees.
In this guide, we will discuss all you need to know about implementing event ticket management for your event to maximize the number of attendees.
Event Ticket Management: 3 Main Pillars
When discussing event ticket management, we have to consider three different pillars that are equally important:
- Registration: ensuring optimal registration and ticket purchase to make sure it’s as easy as possible for attendees to purchase your tickets. Online registration is a must these days.,
- Pricing: planning a pricing strategy for your tickets to ensure we can attract as many attendees as possible
- Payment management: ensuring the security of online payment and integrity of customer’s data, while at the same time offering versatility in payments.
Below, we will discuss them one by one.
Optimizing Event Registration
You may have offered some online event registration capability with a platform for event management in hand, but enabling online event registration alone isn’t enough. It’s crucial to have a professional event ticketing system to maximize ticket purchases.
Here are a few tips:
- Streamline your registration form
Only ask for the information you need. Ask too little, and you might not get enough information, ask too much, and you’ll risk ruining the registration experience which may discourage a potential attendee to register.
Make sure to choose an online event registration solution that allows you to customize registration forms for this purpose.
- Optimize the registration page
Your website (or dedicated event registration page) must be mobile-friendly and load fast. According to Google, website visitors will leave from a website that loads in more than three seconds. You wouldn’t want potential attendees canceling their ticket purchase just because your registration page does not perform well.
- Consistent branding
Your whole event registration experience should maintain branding consistency as a part of your overall marketing strategy. For starters, the registration page should be a part of your website’s domain, even if you are using third-party solutions and APIs. This can also help in establishing credibility. Make sure the whole registration process uses consistent branding elements like logos and brand colors.
Ticket Pricing and Promotion Strategy
A unique aspect of promoting an event is providing a tiered ticket pricing strategy as a key part of the promotion. Here are some of the most popular ticket pricing strategies to consider:
- Time-based discounts
Time-based discount is selling different ticket prices based on time frame: the nearer the ticket purchase is to the event’s D-Day, the more expensive it will be. You might be familiar with the term “early bird” ticket, and it is a very common example of this strategy.
This strategy is popular since it allows you to get more revenue upfront, so you can manage your event’s cash flow. Also, this strategy triggers the potential attendees’ sense of scarcity and FOMO.
- Premium VS affordable ticket prices
To cater to as many potential attendees as possible, we should consider offering multiple ticket prices.
For premium tickets (VIPs), the secret is to provide your potential VIP attendees a reason for them to spend more: better seatings, backstage access, unlimited food/beverage access, and so on.
You should also offer affordable pricing tiers to accommodate those who can’t or don’t want to spend more. If it’s a multi-day event, you can offer a one-day ticket that is cheaper than your normal ticket, or you can even sell tickets only for a single session.
By offering tickets at different prices, you can potentially attract new markets with a lower budget or higher expectations. Also, for those who aren’t sure yet on whether they should commit to your event, they might be willing to pay if there’s a cheaper ticket available.
- Group packages
This method is effective in encouraging attendees and potential attendees to bring more people to purchase your tickets: their friends, family members, peers, and even followers.
You can, for example, offer a 10% discount when they purchase a ticket for two or even offer something like “buy 3 for 2”.
Alternatively, you can also run a referral campaign by offering commissions to those who can bring people to purchase your ticket. This can come in the form of promo codes: when people register with a promo code/affiliate link, the owner of this affiliate link can get a percentage of the ticket’s price.
Online Payment Versatility and Security
It’s crucial to provide some form of versatility by offering different online payment options, at least popular ones like bank transfer, credit card, PayPal, and Stripe.
However, it’s also crucial to ensure security.
Make sure attendees can make their payment without leaving the registration page. It’s important to make sure your event registration or online processing platform allows this feature.
Also, ensure your event registration platform is PCI compliant to ensure the security and integrity of your customer’s financial data and personally identifiable information (PII).
Wrapping Up
Having a comprehensive event ticket management strategy is crucial to maximizing attendance by considering:
- An optimal and streamlined registration process
- Optimal ticket pricing and promotion strategy
- Secure and flexible online payment options
By following the best practices we’ve shared above, you can start implementing your event ticket management strategy to start getting more attendees to purchase your tickets.