How Successful Event Organizers Sell More Tickets

How Successful Event Organizers Sell More Tickets and Attract More Attendees

As an event organizer, you’re probably always on the lookout for ways to sell more tickets and attract more attendees to your event. Developing an event marketing and promotion strategy that generates early interest among attendees and encourages them to register for your event can be pretty difficult.

In this article, we’ll share some tips on how successful event organizers sell more tickets and attract more attendees to their event. We’ll cover event marketing strategies and event planning best practices that you can execute at different stages of your next event.
Let’s get started!

Launching Your Event Site

Once you’ve decided to host an event, you’ll want to get it online for the world to see. Setting up a website for your event and going digital with your registrations is going to help you to reach more people and sell more tickets.  Having an event website will help you to:

• Share event details such as an event description, venue, date, etc….
• Make it easy for prospective attendees to find your event.
• Register attendees and sell tickets directly through your event website.

Here, we’ll look at what you need to do to launch your event site and how it can help you sell more tickets and attract more attendees to your next event.

Create an Event Ticketing Website

If you’re planning on selling tickets, you’ll need an event website that lets you:

• Automatically register attendees.
• Sell tickets and accept payments.
• Manage your events through a single platform.
• Market your events through various digital marketing channels.

Creating an event ticketing website that is well-developed, easy to use, and functional can be a daunting task.
The good news is that you can sign up with a hosted online event registration and ticketing solution (like Event Smart) that gives you all of the benefits of having an event website minus the hassle of creating one yourself.

Add Content to Your Event Ticketing Website

Once you’ve created your event ticketing website, you’ll need to add some content to it. It’s a good idea to create a checklist of the information you have to add to your site. At the bare minimum, this includes:

• A great event description that covers what your event is about and who should attend.
• Information about the event’s venue, date and time, agenda, keynote speakers, and sponsors.
• Event registration forms and ticket pricing information.
• A ticketing and registration system that makes it easy for customers to complete a purchase.

In addition to this, you can also add engaging images from previous events or video highlights to attract more attendees.

Pro tip: Using keywords in your content helps with SEO and makes it easier for prospective attendees to find your event.

Ticket Pricing Strategies

Setting your event’s ticket price isn’t as easy as you might expect.

There are a number of factors you need to take into account in order to develop an effective pricing strategy. Should you go with cost-plus pricing, comparative pricing, or perceived value pricing? How do you set an initial ticket price? And is it a good idea to adjust ticket prices?

There are a number of event ticket pricing strategies that you can implement to sell more tickets. These include early-bird pricing, odd-even pricing, tiered pricing, upselling, and anchoring.

Pre-Event Marketing

After launching your site, you can begin marketing your event through your event website and social media channels.

Social Media Marketing

Promoting your event on social media platforms – such as  Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest – is a great way to get the word out. By using the right hashtags, you can reach a wider audience which improves your chance to sell more tickets and attract more attendees.

When your event starts to gain traction, you might even consider creating an event hashtag in order to increase your event’s visibility. You can use event hashtags throughout your social media marketing including in promotional messages, bios, photos, and comments.

Use a hashtag that’s unique, memorable, and related to your event. For example, if we were to host an event, we might create a #ES2018 hashtag.

Offer Promotions and Discounts

As part of your pre-event marketing, you might consider offering promotions and discounts to attract prospective attendees. The great thing about selling tickets is that it gives you the flexibility to choose which type of discount you’d like to offer. For example, you could offer:

• Flat discounts e.g. $10 off tickets using this discount code.
• Percentage based discount e.g. save $10% with a discount code.
• Limited time discounts e.g. early-bird tickets.

At the Event

Savvy event organizers will tell you that there are many things you can do during your event to start selling for your next event. Here are some quick ideas for inspiration:

• Use your event hashtag. Set up a social wall and leverage Facebook/Instagram/Twitter live to cover your event. And remember to use your event hashtag and actively respond to attendees’ live tweets!
• Take photos and record videos. Ask a staff member or volunteer to take photos and record videos that you can share on social platforms later. You can also use this photos and videos to create event galleries that you can share with attendees in your post-event thank you emails.
• Incentivize attendees. During your event, you can organize Win a Prize type incentives (such as free entry to your next event) for a random social sharer that uses the event hashtag.

Post Event

As an event organizer, there are many things you can do after your event takes place to sell more tickets and attract more attendees to your next event.  

Email Marketing

If you’re using Event Smart, consider using the  MailChimp integration feature which automatically builds an email list of attendees after they register for your event. After your event takes place, you can use your email lists to thank your attendees and offer them discounts to your next event’s ticket.

Thank your attendees. Send attendees an email to let them know you appreciate their participation and look forward to seeing them at your next event. This makes for a great opportunity to offer them a discount on tickets.

Create hype for the next event. Share details about your next event in your post-event emails to create hype and generate attendee interest.

Remind attendees to spread the word. Send links to photo galleries, video highlights, and resources in your thank you emails along with a short message encouraging attendees to share them with their friends and peers.

And if you’d like to take things to the next level, you can segment your email lists into groups and use the segmented lists for follow-up surveys and email marketing.

Open Registration for Next Event

Another post-event marketing strategy is to open registrations for your next event right away and promote it through your event website, social media platforms, and email newsletters. You’ll want to directly connect with those that just attended your event and get them to register while they have that great event experience fresh in their thoughts. And, you can incentivize those registrations by offering them a limited-time discount offer for event returnees.

With Event Smart, you can offer early-bird discounts simply by creating a new ticket type.

Conclusion

Although there are many ways to sell more tickets and attract more attendees to your events, finding the right combination that aligns with your event brand and target audience requires a lot of planning.

We shared some tips on how successful event organizers are able to increase ticket sales and generate attendee engagement throughout different stages of their event. Hopefully, you’re in a good position now to take the next steps.

Have you implemented any event marketing strategies that helped you sell more tickets and attract more attendees? We’d love to hear from you so let us know by commenting below!