100+ of the Best Strategies to Increase Ticket Sales for Your Event

There is not one single way to increase the ticket and registration sales for your event, rather hundreds of ways and ideas. In this article we can provide you with 100 different ways to maximize your revenue from events. There are likely several hundred ideas but we’ll do our best to share our top ideas here. 

15 Best Messages to Sell Event Tickets Online

No matter what your event is about or what: tool, price, promotion or marketing channel you use to increase ticket sales to your event, you have to use the right message. Over the lifecycle of an event there are a lot of different messages to communicate, from your origin story to your post-event review. These messages will help you attract an audience and retain them for events in the future.

A Relatable Origin Story

Very few life experiences are truly unique. Rather, all of us have similar experiences to other people. These shared experiences help us understand and learn from each other. When you organize your event, remember to articulate why your event exists. Illustrate to your audience that you have been in their shoes and you have created this event to help them move forward. The better you can describe your event in terms that your attendees can relate to, the more likely they will trust that they will benefit from your event.

Attendee Stories, Use Cases and Testimonials

Who can better tell your prospective event attendees how great your events are than someone who has already attended your events? Attendee stories can help you relate your events to your attendees’ situations. Attendees will believe their peers more than they will believe you, especially if other attendees have experience with your event.

Sponsor Stories Use Cases and Testimonials

Sponsors are an important part of an event. Sponsors help finance and promote the event. New sponsors will be greatly influenced by other sponsors who have participated in your events. The sponsor stories, use cases and testimonials from past sponsors will help you relate to and give confidence that new sponsors will be successful sponsoring your event.

Content (videos and pictures) From Last Year

You will want great images and video footage of your events to use when promoting future events. The best time to capture video and pictures about your next event is at the current event. Someone (or a team) should be responsible for capturing pictures and videos of the venue, speakers, presentations, sponsors, attendees, activities, meetings, networking, etc., which can be used to promote your next event. Remind your staff to take some pictures themselves so that you have user-generated content to share too.

What’s in it for me or what’s in it for them (WIFM)

Any time you sell anything you have to communicate what is in it for them. Describe what your attendees will get from attending your event. Will they become better at something, will they know more, will they have better relationships or more skills. Give them a testimonial or use case to look at as an example of what they can become or what they can experience by attending your event.

Agenda

The event agenda is often overlooked. However, attendees like to have an outline of what will be included as part of the event. You can include event agenda items by timeline or just a general sequence of events. For more professional events, the agenda should be in the form of a flyer that attendees can use for approval or permission to attend the event.

Eventizers (an event appetizer)

Okay, so this may not be a real thing but the point here is to help you first think small before thinking big. Showcase bite size parts of your event that people can digest in 60 seconds or less. These eventizers will give you the more opportunities to publicize your event more often and let attendees focus on one exciting benefit.

Presenters

Showcase the experts, instructors, artists, staff and others who will be the keynote facilitators at your event. A lot of times attendees want to trust that they will be taught by a true expert or professional in their field. Be sure to communicate the experience and capabilities of your staff to give attendees confidence you can deliver on your promises.

Staff

Your team’s experience and credentials can help attract a crowd. When possible, showcase everyone on your team that will be able to help attendees have a great experience. Don’t be hesitant to share a profile of all the members of your staff from the keynote speaker to the intern and event volunteers. Introducing yourself and your team to your audience will help to build a relationship with attendees and help them trust you.

Vendors

Everyone likes food, and there are other types of vendors that people look forward to. Consider whether it would be noteworthy to let attendees to know if the event is being catered by a certain food vendor, or entertainment group, etc. this will help people look forward to your event.

Entertainment

Did you hire a prominent comedian, entertainer, or performer who will entertain the audience or emcee the evening activities or panel discussion? If you have someone special involved people will have some idea of what to expect, and that excitement can bring them in from the halls to the main event.

Location

It’s no secret that the most popular medical conferences are in tropical locations or places with great weather and activities. If your location is special for any reason you should highlight those advantages. Perhaps you have a foodtown, or sports community, or great winter sports, etc. No single location has a claim on all the advantages as the best place for everything. If there are special events taking place during the event you can suggest that as a benefit too. So, whatever your location can be proud of, you should promote.

Venue

Are you hosting your event in a special building, park, or historical monument, etc? Even if attendees are not familiar with your event venue, you can still educate them what makes that place unique. Describe how this location was chosen, how the venue will contribute to making the event better, etc. If you choose the venue of the event for no specific reason, you might reconsider choosing another venue.

Networking

Events are powerful networking opportunities because you can physically or virtually connect with people who are similar to you. Networking with other attendees who have the same interests, goals, and ambitions as you can help fuel your ambition. 

Fear of Missing Out (FOMO)

If you can effectively communicate all the benefits we listed above, people will have a very good understanding of your event, what to expect and really want to attend your awesome event. But after all is said and done, you should take the opportunity to tell people that they don’t want to “miss out” on this opportunity. Fear of missing out isn’t intended to be a mean strong-arm tactic, rather it’s about helping people evaluate whether they will be better off not attending the event or if they would have regretted not attending.

Storytelling is a powerful tool for selling your events. Your story is unique and powerful and everything you do to deliver a powerful event experience should be driven by your story, goals and reinforce your brand message. Communicate your story and the story you expect for your attendees to experience.

10 Best Marketing Channels to Sell Event Tickets Online

There are always more and new ways to market your event online. Seems like each year there is a new social network or new way to catch someone’s attention. Some of these marketing channels will be available for a long time while others will change a lot in the near future. We offer advice on how to use these channels now.

Increase Ticket Sales with Your Event Website

Someone must trust you and trust the ordering process before they will register or purchase tickets online from you. If you are selling tickets online for your brand, there is almost no more trusted source than your own website. Having your own website allows you to communicate your brand experience, your terms and conditions, your policies (such as refunds), and get in contact with you if any trouble or customer service issue arises. If you don’t have your own website, then attendees must subject themselves to a third-party’s policies and procedures which can make people nervous about who they are dealing with. Setting up a self-hosted website using WordPress and Event Espresso can be very affordable and easy. However, if you don’t want your own website you can use hosted website services such as Event Smart.

Increase Ticket Sales with Search Engines

Search engines have the potential to give you a lot of exposure to your events for free.

• Search engines need to have the details of your event in a certain format before they can index and display your event as a result in search engines. This format is called Event Schema. The Event Schema for search engines includes the title of the event, location, start and end dates, description, image, venue name and address, special offers, pricing, availability, performers, etc. If your event information is using the event schema properly then your event can appear as a result in the event carousel, eventpack and rich snippets too. The event dates are especially important so that Google and other search engines can deliver timely results to attendees for events that are coming up soon and are not past. You can use the Google Webmaster rich snippet testing tool to see how well your event will be interpreted by search engines.
• It’s important to try and execute some fundamental search engine optimization techniques such as writing great content with relevant keywords, keyword rich URLs, location-specific keywords, building backlinks, and promoting your event across the internet to get it more authority and exposure.
• Advertising. Referred to Cost per Click or CPC advertising, you can target keyword or phrase-specific keyword searches by your audience. This can almost guarantee exposure to your event but it can be costly.

Social media marketing is popular to reinforce your brand experience to existing customers and to expand your reach and get introduced to new customers. If your event isn’t happening physically, you can still get people involved virtually. So, whether live or virtual events you can still let your audience and customers experience your brand.

Increase Ticket Sales with Facebook

Facebook has such a large audience that it’s hard to ignore that social network when marketing your ticket sales online. Here are several tactics you can use to increase your ticket sales to your events.

Building an event page

Creating a page for your events can give you something to work with on Facebook. Without having a brand or event page you won’t be able to do anything else such as advertising or engage with your audience and potential attendees.

Choosing a cover photo that sells the event.

Don’t just put your logo on the cover photo. Use a Facebook cover photo that shows the best activity that happens at the event with the attendees showing their emotion.

Sharing your Facebook event calendar.

Publish a post with a preview of your event with a date and time and click share event button to publish it to your timeline and elsewhere.

Choose the correct event category

When publishing your event on facebook, be sure to select the type of event so that it can be displayed and promoted appropriately.

Use a Hashtag

When describing your event, be sure to add a hashtag to the description. This will allow the post to be found among the posts with that similar #myawesomeevent hashtag.

Organize your Sidebar

You can showcase your event at the top of your profile page sidebar. This will make your event more visible on your profile page and give the event more attention. You can do that by going to your settings page and drag and drop the event widget to the top of the left column menu.

Ask attendees to share your event

People are often connected to other similar people in their network. So, when people do sign up for your event, invite them to share your event to their network. It’s likely that they’ll be able to introduce your event to more potential attendees.

Ask sponsors to share your event

It is in the best interest of the sponsors of an event to help spread the word about your event. The more people they can help invite to your event the more likely they will be noticed by new audiences. So, while a sponsor may feel like they don’t have a way to introduce themselves to a new audience, just publicizing their involvement may encourage their audience to share with their network. This can help create a flywheel of registrations compounding growth.

Advertise

Facebook paid advertising is popular and more affordable than just search engine advertising. Facebook allows you to promote photos, videos, posts, etc. You can use Messenger ads, run campaigns to collect interest/responses/RSVPs, retargeting ads, ads based on demographic information such as location or gender or age, or target audiences based on interests. Facebook advertising can be affordable if the price or margins of your event has a budget for advertising.

Facebook groups

Keep people talking about the event when it’s over. Lastly, when you have an event, keep the momentum going for as long as possible by re-engaging with attendees after the event is over. Ask attendees to post their photos, videos, questions, comments and connect with other attendees in your Facebook Group. Post to the group to thank your sponsors, volunteers, and staff for their hard work to make the event successful.

Increase Ticket Sales with Linkedin

LinkedIn is one of the largest business social networking sites. If your organization is targeted for professionals, business-to-business or business-to-consumer attendees then LinkedIn will be a valuable place to spend time marketing your event.

Set up an event on your Linkedin Profile(s)

The first place to start with marketing your event on LinkedIn is to create and post the event to your profile page. This can be your personal profile or business profile, etc.

Note: When creating an event on LinkedIn, there is no “draft” feature. So make sure you have the information about your event ready before you start creating your event. Otherwise, you will have to abandon your changes and start all over again.

To create an event from your personal page, click the + button in the left-hand side navigation on your profile page:

If you are creating a page from your company page, you use the dropdown menu:

The Create event popover will appear where you can provide the details of your event. You can select your event organizer, provide a location. If you’re hosting your event online or a virtual event you can provide the country as your location. 

Include your logo, a great event photograph, a memorable description with the best types of messages (as mentioned above with as much detail as possible). The LinkedIn event description is supposed to be rather thorough because you have 5000 characters (about 800 words, or 1 and ½ pages of content). You can use emoji, stars, symbols, etc. to describe your event and draw attention to how exciting the event will be.

Set the event to be public or private depending on your situation. Private events are harder to publicize.

As mentioned above, event pages are one of the most effective and accessible ways to promote your event. A dedicated event page and even better website will give you more chances to engage with attendees. So, provide a link to your event page/website in the LinkedIn event.

After creating your event on LinkedIn, you will need to do some work to give the event exposure. You can promote your event on LinkedIn in several ways.

Invite Your LinkedIn Network Connections to Your Event

By Individually – When you create your event, be sure you provide the information for speakers, etc. who will be invited when you publish your event.

You can also send invitations to your 1st degree contacts directly, one-by-one. You cannot send invitations to anyone 2nd degree contacts or further. But you can also send connection requests (more on that below).

By Industry – When you start to promote your event to your connections, you either have to do the invitations one-by-one or by industry of your connections.

Send Connection Requests

In addition to publishing your event to your existing network of contacts, you can also search out new contacts for new connections. Once connected to another contact, you can also invite new connections to your event directly. 

Share with Your LinkedIn Network (Post to the LinkedIn Feeds)

The posts that you publish in the event feed on your personal profile or company page will not receive much exposure without help. Only attendees will see the new posts. But if you’re going to use any of the content below to promote your event, you should be sure that you ask people to share your posts too.

The popover will give you a chance to set the visibility of your post, provide a custom message and add a hashtag. We recommend that you do not add more than a few hashtags to your event post otherwise it’s overwhelming to attendees and looks spammy.

After you publish your post, you can click the “Share” button to share your post elsewhere. This can be useful if you want to promote LinkedIn as the final destination for your event attendees. If your audience needs to go to an external website to register (such as with WordPress and Event Espresso), then you’ll want to share that page link rather than the Linked in URL..

This information will only be visible to the individuals that have replied “yes” to confirm they plan to attend your event. You and attendees will be notified of the activity in your event feed. Those notifications can be managed within the profile and notification settings if you’d like to receive fewer messages..

Here are some of the types of content you can publish about your event on LinkedIn event feed. 

• Announcement (pre-event marketing). Obviously, the first post will announce the event. Highlight all the best details and succinctly as possible and use a range of messages (mentioned above).
• Call for Questions – Calling for questions from your network can guide the type of speakers and activities that your attendees need at this time. Asking for questions and calling for speakers is good content to do together or closely after one or the other.
• Call for Speakers and Staff. Inviting your network to apply as a speaker can be a great engagement tool. You can also ask your network to spread the word that you are looking for speakers and ask them to share this opportunity with people they admire. This can give you exposure to the peers of your audience and thought-leaders too.
• Call for Sponsors – Your network is very much like yourself. So, attendees who might attend your event likely work at businesses that are complementary to your firm. Because your business and complementary businesses share similar customers, you’re likely to be successful in calling for sponsors from your own network. See this post on How to Get Sponsors For Your Event.
• Call for Volunteers – Registered attendees who have participated in your event a number of times have the experience they need to help other people at your event. You can offer volunteers the opportunity to participate for free in your event in exchange for their service. Most people have a few friends in their network that want to help at the event rather than just attending like everyone else.
• News and Updates. When you have good news, bad news, changes to your event or make progress, take the opportunity to communicate what is happening and what attendees can expect. This can help people feel comfortable. These posts to your event feed will also facilitate discussion with your audience to make sure they have their questions answered.
• Registration/Ticket Sales Open. Registration and ticket sales is obviously an important part of a successful event. There are bills to be paid. Even if the mission or purpose of the event is to gather people and attendance is free, you will want to let people know that the event is now open for registration and ticket sales.
• Speaker Posts (tag speakers). Give your speakers and staff a little love and exposure by posting about those who are helping to deliver a fantastic experience. Give the speakers and staff some love, and tag them so they can pass along your praise about them to their network. Your speaker’s network might also see your announcement and want to attend your event.
• Sponsor Posts (tag sponsors). Give your sponsors a little love and exposure by posting about those who are helping to pay the bills for their experience. Give the sponsors some love, and tag them so they can pass along your praise about them to their network. Your sponsor’s network might also see your announcement and want to attend your event.
• Final Opportunities to Register. We’ll discuss this later, but the last: month, week, days, day, hours, and chance are fantastic opportunities to get the bulk of attendees. Don’t forget to publish pieces of content to your LinkedIn network about each of these important dates and milestones.
• Wrap-up. During the event, capture some great pictures, videos, social media posts that you can use to promote the experience people had at the event. This will help to solidify the experience people had at your event. You can use this same information for promoting your next event.

Groups

LinkedIn groups are like-minded people. You can promote your event to existing groups or create new groups.

• Promoting Events to Existing LinkedIn Groups. Before you go creating new groups, it’s smart to look for existing groups that relate to your event. There might be one of dozens of events that would benefit from knowing about your event. Consider all the topics that will be taught at your event and consider all the benefits to your attendees. You will come up with a lot of topics that will be covered by your event. You can search for existing LinkedIn groups by clicking on the search bar at the top of LinkedIn and selecting Groups.
  
  Join those existing groups and see what’s being discussed. When you join a new group be courteous and professional. Think of joining a new group like walking into a room full of strangers. You won’t earn this group’s respect by joining just to drop links to your registration page. Participate as anyone naturally would and contribute to the group, follow the group rules. Consider introducing yourself to the group administrators, ask them how you can support the group, introduce your event to them and how it would help the group, and then ask them how you can best get your word out about your event. Sometimes a little money, prize, or trade can help keep the relationship.
• Creating New LinkedIn Groups for Events. Linkedin groups are a great way to establish relationships with audiences whom you will engage with again and again, such as recurring events. Recurring events can be as often as daily or weekly events to as infrequent as annual events such as conferences. Either way, having as many ways to connect with your audience as possible the better. And having a LinkedIn group for your event will allow you to connect with past and future attendees in one place. You can facilitate discussion, polls, ask for feedback, etc. Group members will also be able to network with each other which can add more value to your event.

Influencer Marketing

Social media influencers exist because they have taken the time to become experts in their respective areas of expertise. Invest in a little time to connect with social influencers that share an audience with your prospective event attendees. You can ask them to help and use their influential position and help to promote your event on their social channels.

Targeted Ads and Marketing

Navigate to the Advanced People Search and look for people to connect with based on geographic location, company, titles, skills, industry, school, company, language, etc. This can be a good way to see that there are likely a lot of people you can connect with.

Paid advertising & marketing. Sometimes you need exposure to a larger audience to sell out your event. Sometimes you can’t get enough eyeballs or people don’t take enough action. LinkedIn has several sponsorship opportunities that can help you engage with your potential clients.

• Promoting content can help drive awareness of your event. You can promote text, images, image carousels, or videos in the feeds of your target audience. LinkedIn also has the ability to a/b test which content performs better.
• Sponsored InMail drives conversions. You can send personalized messages to LinkedIn users inboxes. This can be a powerful tactic to drive conversions.
• Dynamic Ads allow you to drive a personal connection. Your ads pair imagery from your event (like a keynote speaker picture) with the LinkedIn user’s own profile picture to personalize the ad.

The power of LinkedIn really comes down to relationships. People’s professional or educational experience doesn’t change a lot so these relationships are likely to be longer-lasting than just “friends” or “followers” that come from other social networks.

Increase Ticket Sales Using Twitter 

Twitter is great for engaging in a storm of conversations with a wide audience. Nearly everything you post about your event on Twitter will be public. This means you can have a lot of engagement (good or bad). The layout (timelines) and format (character limit) of Twitter can make conversations seem fleeting. So, our word of caution with Twitter is to try and make the engagement with people via Twitter more genuine and meaningful. Do your best to make each character count.

Dedicated account or using a brand account?

The first thing to decide when using Twitter to promote events is to consider if you want to use your main brand account or a dedicated account just for your event.

For example, do you want to use your @brandname account or do you want to use @eventname account? Generally speaking, if you host very few events each year, we recommend using your brand name. If you host many of the same types of events you should go with a specific account for your event(s). E.g. @eventespresso vs @medconf. The @eventespresso handle is our brand name while an account like @medconf might be just for medical conferences generally.

Choose a good #hashtag

A hashtag is like a category or a tag for each of your tweets/posts. Selecting an appropriate hashtag can help you promote your event and make it easy for your audience to find and engage with you too.

The right hashtag will be concise and descriptive. For example, #TeslaCon could be a hashtag for the Tesla conference. That is short and sweet and descriptive. While this #teslatconference2022 is redundant compared to the first example.

Involve everyone

The more people that you can engage with on social media the better. The more people you have will spread your message across a wider network of connections. Create a plan for how you can engage all types of your staff, speakers, sponsors, vendors, attendees, media, influencers, etc. Don’t just ask people to re-tweet what you’re saying. Give each person a plan of what and how. If you don’t have a clear plan for how they can participate then don’t force that interaction. But spend enough time thinking about how each of these groups can promote your event on Twitter that they have a clear purpose (or not).

Questions online

People naturally have questions, so inviting attendees or your audience to ask questions can be an easy way to get more social media posts about your event. You can invite your attendees to post questions about customer service issues such as where to get help with lodging or invite attendees to ask questions to speakers as they give presentations, etc. 

Check-in attendance tracking

Another way you can engage attendees on social media and help promote your event is by asking attendees to check in to the event or sessions of an event, etc. via social media. When attendees check in via Twitter, they can use the hashtag to spread the word about your event to their network. This is not just a marketing tool, but it can be incredibly easy for attendees to do.

Engage and reciprocate

When your potential audience or attendees engage with you on Twitter, be intentional to respond. Social media is a tool for establishing and cultivating relationships.

Images

Use images throughout your tweets to communicate the experience of your events. Showcase the venue, people, activities, processes, and experiences to draw people into your brand.

Live Tweet

Live-tweeting about your event is having a person, or people, to If possible, take the opportunity to live-tweet about the proceedings of your event. If you’re hosting a cooking class, tell the world when you’re beginning, what you will teach, and send a picture out to your audience. Again, if you’re hosting a cooking class, take pictures of the ingredients and what the final product was. This can be entertaining and engaging for your potential customers.

Influencers

If you know influential people in your industry that are participating in your event or are aware of your event, then ask them to join you in promoting your event. You can offer them compensation for their time or reciprocate something for them in turn. But don’t be afraid to ask people for help to bring attention to your event.

Post-event tweets

Once the event is over, take the opportunity to send several messages to your audience. Take the opportunity to 1) thank everyone who helped to make the event successful, 2) ask people to share their experiences of their event, 3) invite people to sign up for the next event or sign up for a newsletter to get updates about the next event. Since the source of revenue for your business is current customers, you want to retain those customers at your next event, and sometimes that only requires an invitation (maybe offer a special price).

Increase Ticket Sales Using Instagram

Instagram is geared toward photography. So, as with Twitter, pictures will be even more important. One advantage of using Instagram to promote your event is to share attendee content, also called user-generated content (UGC). With Twitter, it can be easier to miss attendee posts, but with Instagram, it will be easier to follow attendee posts and share those posts.

And because Instagram is a more graphical platform, try and provide opportunities for attendees to take their own photos and share them on social media. For example, you can have an opportunity for people to take pictures at a photo booth, or take pictures with staff or speakers or sponsors, which attendees can share. You can also take these pictures for attendees and send the pictures to attendees via social media.

When you have several pictures or videos to share, use Stories and convert those stories to ads to further market to your audience. 

Increase Ticket Sales Using Pinterest

Pinterest is also a very popular and visual platform. The format is unique in that pins (content) can be cataloged into collections called boards. Your attendees can help curate the content into these board collections. 

Increase Ticket Sales Using TikTok

Tiktok is another multimedia-rich platform. You can follow some of the other recommendations given above for other social media platforms (sponsors, hashtags, advertising, etc.). TikTok is relatively new and trendy, and you’ll want to jump on those trends. If there is a trendy “challenge” to support a cause or do a certain dance or “thing”,  you can ask your attendees to get involved too. You could even try creating your own “challenge” for your own event. Who knows how far this will go to introduce your brand to new audiences.

Increase Ticket Sales UsingSnapchat

Unique to Snapchat is geofilters. Geofilters are illustrations or camera/photo “filters” that can only be used in certain locations for a certain period of time. This can enhance the value and experience of the location of your event or attending life. You can submit your illustrations to Snapchat and anyone who takes videos or photos at your event can also use the fiter. This is not a free service but it is engaging and valuable and likely worth the experience.

Increase Ticket Sales Using Online Classifieds

While this might seem “old fashioned” or “old school” online classified websites are among the most used websites in the world. You likely live in a location covered by Craigslist or another classified website. Posting your website to the local classifieds websites can give your event more exposure than you’d expect.

 

Social media sounds complicated, but try to make it fun and engaging. If you’re not having a good time promoting your event on social media then you’re probably doing it wrong. Take a little time to plan what would be fun, and ask for help if you get stuck.

19 Best Tools to Sell Event Tickets Online

Tools that help you sell tickets online fall under two categories: facilitate transactions and reach audiences. If you don’t reach the right people or large enough audience then you can’t make sales. Focus on tools that give you new opportunities to reach new audiences then convert on that exposure.

Event Website

One of the most successful ways to sell more tickets online is to market your brand website. Your event website will be the single best source of information about your event. You will have the opportunity to create unlimited amounts of information to sell, educate and serve your audience. Your brand (or a specialized event website) can be a tool that keeps on being useful each and every you host your event.

Search engines can have a record of your past events and information about your event so attendees can easily find information about your event. You can re-use information from one event to another. With Event Espresso you can duplicate your events, making it even easier to get started on your next event. Once duplicated, simply adjust the date and any other details as needed for your upcoming event. 

If you’re using your own website with Event Espresso and WordPress, you can retain all the attendee information in one place and own all your data, the look and feel of your website, and anything else.

If you don’t have your own website, you can also use a hosted platform like Event Smart. You can add a blog, pages, registration and payment all from one site.

You can add social media buttons to share content, or social media feeds to pull in the latest activity on social media.

With your own website you can also get analytics about how much attention your event receives from website traffic, and measure performance of your website marketing campaigns.

Mass Email

Collecting and retaining a list of leads and customer email addresses might be the second most valuable thing you will have to market your event. Having the contact information for your customers and leads lets you do marketing on your own terms and your own timing.

Email marketing is a communication tool that allows you to initiate activity when it’s best for you. There are a lot of strategies, techniques and ways to be successful using email marketing and we’ll let you research that on your own, just search the internet for articles about “best practices to email marketing” to get the latest information. But you can trust people like MailChimp and others about how to do mass marketing well. But here are some general tips to use email marketing to sell tickets to your events:

Generate a list of leads and customers.

You will want to take as many opportunities to build this list as possible. Put email sign up forms anywhere you can. Be sure to import your list of customers to your marketing list too so they are notified about your event when you send out messages.

You can send messages such as: “save the date”, “introducing staff”, “introducing sponsors”, “introducing speakers”, location, and “register now” and newsletters to your marketing lists.

Segmentation

Segmentation, or organizing your contacts into types by leads, customers, vendors, sponsors, etc. is also necessary. Once a lead purchases with you they are considered a customer. Leads should receive messages that encourage them to purchase. When someone is a customer you should not send customers the same message that you send to leads. Customers should receive messages via transaction emails like event confirmation emails, and newsletters about updates for your event. If you do not segment your list according to at least a few groups such as leads, customers, and sponsors/vendors, you’re likely to get people complaining about receiving emails that are not applicable to them, or even worse they can unsubscribe to your email list or mark your email as spam. This can hurt your email reputation and limit your ability to send and/or deliver email in the future.

Confirmation Emails

Any touch point with customers provides a chance to reinforce that their decision to attend your event was a good choice, and to up-sell them on your next event or upgrade their registration. We’ve recently published our own  in-depth explanation to help you understand the power and purpose of event confirmation emails, so don’t miss out on how valuable event confirmation emails can be to selling more tickets.

Widgets

A ticket option widget is useful to promote your event among various places both within and outside  of your own website. You can place the ticket options widget across your website in the sidebar, forums, blog posts, etc. as a quick and easy way for attendees to register for your event. Likewise, you can use the iframe widget to put your ticket options across the internet so everyone can select their ticket or registration options and begin registering quickly. This is particularly handy if you employ affiliate marketing for your events.

Live Chat

We live in a world where people expect instant service and resolutions. With Live Chat for your event you can provide nearly instant and simultaneous customer service to your potential attendees and customers. This can help convert leads into customers because people have experience with your event and know they can get the help they need when they need it.

Countdown Tickers

Countdown tickers or timers are intended to incite a fear of missing out (FOMO) and encourage people to take action now. This can be a powerful message especially as the time gets short. Remember that you can use this strategy or tactic several times. You can use a countdown timer anytime you have a deadline, such as when ticket prices will change, or when promotions end, etc. All deadlines are chances to incite a sense of urgency to act.

Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is useful for promoting your message generally, but less likely to get people to immediately click and register. When people see your advertisements they are usually just browsing other sites or your site and not specifically intent on registering for your event. If you want people to click and register now or buy tickets now, try pay-per-click advertising.

Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC is a more powerful advertising tool where audiences have more intention to click and register. You can bid on displaying your advertising message at the top of search engines for keywords that are specific to your industry, audience, event, location, or brand. This is a more effective way to advertise to your audience who is more interested in registering.

Remarketing/Retargeting  Ads

If your audience is not converting (buying now) you can re-market to them with display ads. This can be a way to circle back to audiences who were interested once and they just need a little nudge to take action and register. You can offer special messages such as promotions to convert on the people who looked into registering once but did not buy.

Event Mobile App for Attendees

An event mobile app can make your event more accessible to attendees. When you have an event mobile app, you can look more professional and use that app to promote your event. Think of a mobile app as another brand experience tool that you control. Use that space to increase sign ups and revenue.

Press Releases

Press releases seem old-school or outdated, but newspapers and local media use that information. If you publish a press release, promote that announcement to local media and ask for opportunities to share more in the form of news and interviews.

Sponsors

If someone is investing in your audience (by sponsoring your event) they are likely to want to get as much exposure as possible by also helping you promote your event. Your sponsors are likely to have access to a similar audience as you, but a different subset of customers. So, sponsors can introduce your brand to new audiences for you. You likewise can reciprocate by promoting the sponsor to your audiences. Be sure to ask sponsors to help with promoting your event.

Referrals

In a digital world, word of mouth advertising is easier than ever. Incentivizing attendees to refer other attendees to your event can be lucrative for you and the attendee referring more customers. Include messages to attendees with easy-to-use instructions about how they can promote your event and get paid or receive some sort of remuneration.

Testimonials

People are inherently distrustful of companies, but they do trust their peers. Use the best testimonials that you have from the most trusted sources to help attendees trust your brand. If you are not already, create and follow your own process for collecting testimonials.

Affiliates

Referrals are a form of affiliate marketing, but affiliates are usually not attendees. Instead, affiliates are people or companies that specialize in promoting products or services in exchange for remuneration. Setting up an affiliate program for your event can help incentivize people to introduce your brand to their audience, get backlinks for your search engine optimization efforts and lend credibility to your brand.

Cross-promotion

Work with other organizations and events to promote your event in exchange for promoting their event. These events could be complimentary, substitutes, or unrelated entertainment or activities. Reciprocating promotion among brands can introduce your brands to new audiences.

Content Marketing

The reason people want to attend your event is because you’re experienced. You might not be an expert, but you have experience in your field. People trust you to deliver an experience and communicating that expertise can be done by publishing information on your subject matter. You can write articles, infographics, videos, etc. all in an effort to demonstrate your expertise.

Volunteers

Your staff that volunteers is not motivated by money, they are motivated by your mission or the opportunity to serve your community. Another way your volunteers can help is spreading the word about your organization and events. 

User-generated content

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to use content from attendees to promote your event in exchange for a little publicity for them. Everyone likes to be noticed, so exchange exposure to your audience in exchange for sharable content.

Use any or all of these tools to promote and increase the ticket sales for your event. If any or all of these methods are new to you, then pick one tool and try to learn how to do it well and then pick another one the next time you host an event to continue to hone your craft and sell more tickets.

12 Best Pricing Strategies to Sell Event Tickets Online

Pricing strategies are all designed to maximize your mission. If you want to get a lot of people at your event, then perhaps your price needs to be low. If you want a more intimate experience then maybe your price needs to be set at a premium. Whatever your purpose, pricing plays a huge part in selling more tickets online. Use pricing changes as a way to create “artificial” deadlines for attendees to act now rather than later.

Member Pricing

Members of your organization often expect discounts to your events in comparison to non-members. Showcasing a member-only price can encourage people to join your member for the discount. Often the discount is greater than the cost of membership. Once someone is a member it’s more likely that they’ll stay a member too, so member pricing is a way to increase membership revenue.

Student Pricing

Student pricing is more like a gift and incentive to attract new audiences earlier in the student’s life. If a student becomes a customer now, it’s more likely they’ll be a customer in the future. Students are obviously more price sensitive so offering discounts can help them participate when they would not be able to otherwise because of financial restrictions.

Early Bird Pricing

Register early and save is a powerful way to collect money in advance of your event and use that positive cash flow to fund the event before it happens.

Late Bird Pricing

Late bird pricing is really a penalty for people who can’t make up their mind. You can’t lower your price unless it is last-minute, but late-bird pricing can still offer a discount to encourage people to act sooner than later.

Regular Pricing

Regular pricing is used as a comparison against other prices. The regular price needs to be set high enough that you can offer tickets at a discounted price but still be profitable.

VIP Pricing

Those who want an exclusive experience and are willing to pay more can buy a special ticket for a VIP experience. This helps you 1) gauge people’s willingness to pay, and 2) people’s preference for exclusive or higher-level experiences. 

Graduated Pricing

Buy more and save more is often a powerful pricing strategy for larger organizations and larger budgets. This is a form of discounting that is based on volume and increasing discounts with increasing quantities.

Ticket Bundle Pricing

Ticket bundle pricing incentivizes people to buy a group of tickets for a discounted price compared to buying each ticket individually. This can encourage people to get more tickets in exchange for a discount. The higher average order value is good for you because you sell tickets more quickly and they receive a discount. The disadvantage for attendees is that they may not use all their tickets. But attendees exchange this discount for the risk of overbuying. 

Date-bundle Pricing

Date-bundle pricing is allowing attendees to purchase multiple dates for a discounted price rather than a higher quantity of tickets for a certain price. This works well for on-going classes, courses, which have multiple dates.

Pre-configured Experiences
When you offer a variety of experiences and ticket options it can sometimes overwhelm attendees. So, if you can combine ticket bundles into either like experiences or diverse experiences it can help people move forward without decision paralysis. 

Pre-orders

The best time to secure more customers and attendees for the future is to sell them now at their current event. If you can’t sell them now, it will be harder in the future. So, if you offer a ticket option for the next event, or up-sell them after they buy via the event confirmation emails, it’s still a good idea to sell sooner and often than later.

Most Popular 

Sometimes people can’t decide, so just help them by indicating a “recommended” or “most popular” choice. This can help those who can’t decide think they are making a safe choice and move forward.

 

Remember that pricing can be dynamic and serve multiple purposes. Use the right pricing at the right time to encourage people to act. Seeing what ticket someone buys, and the proportion of people who purchase a certain type of ticket can help you learn more about what experience and price to offer in the future.

6 Best Promotional Strategies to Sell Event Tickets Online

It is customer behavior to procrastinate. Sometimes that’s a good strategy too. But as an event marketer you have to fight that customer behavior and move people to act. These strategies can add incentives and impetus to get people to register now or buy tickets now.

Limited Quantity (FOMO)

Using limited quantity tickets is a good way for people to fear missing out on opportunities. If they act now they can guarantee a discount or a special experience. If they wait they may miss out. That doesn’t mean they may not change their mind in the future, but this is one opportunity to encourage them to act now rather than later.

Discount Codes

Discount codes allow you to incentivize specified groups or audiences. You can offer $, %, or quantity discount codes that can direct customer purchasing behavior.

Raffel

If people are really price sensitive, you can invite them to join a raffle list. A limited number of attendees will have the chance to buy a ticket or tickets at a special price or for free. And those who do not win can be encouraged to pay another price.

Gift/Bonus Period(s)

Incentives to get something as a gift or as a bonus can help people act now. You can tell people that they will receive a special bonus if they register now and they would get something less or different if they register later.

Giveaway tickets to 1/100, etc.

You can encourage people to register or buy tickets now if you tell them that a drawing will be held and someone will get their tickets for free and refunded. This lets people know that they have to purchase now but that you’re giving a registration to someone. This is not a giveaway, just a gift.

Local discounts and incentives

Use the opportunity to promote your event to local residents with a special price. This can help attract more people to your event that wouldn’t come otherwise and will help your event look more appealing in the future.

Promotions are an important part of selling and encouraging consumer behavior. This is not manipulation, rather strategy to use normal behavior to your advantage.

4 Best Customer Service Strategies to Sell Event Tickets Online

Customer service is obviously about problem solving, but less obvious is that customer service is also about building and maintaining trust. These strategies will seem familiar and meaningful to you as you reflect on what you consider to be good customer service.

Responsive

You likely can’t be available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. That might be a waste of resources. But when you are available and customers ask for help, be as responsive as possible. The shorter the period between when someone contacts you and the time they get they get a response (and even better when they get their issue resolved) the more trust you build.

Refunds and Guarantees

Offering refunds and guarantees can help you earn confidence and trust from your customers. If someone pays by credit card they will have recourse through their issuing bank in the form of a chargeback so in effect they can get a refund no matter what. You might as well offer refunds and guarantees as a way to establish trust and help people move forward with buying tickets.

Networking Tools (forum, etc.)

Allow attendees to connect with you and other attendees via networking tools such as forums. This helps attendees get value from your organization immediately.

Social Media

Doing customer service via social media is about the principle of meeting customers where they are. If they’re always on social media then perhaps that’s where you should be too. Once someone engages you on social media, it’s okay to direct them to more official channels where you can offer higher levels of service.

You won’t lose out on selling more tickets if you provide great customer service. Great customer service will win customers instead of lose customers. We personally saw this during the COVD-19 pandemic.We offered to let people extend their support licenses by up to 4 months if their business was impacted by covid. As a result, we were able to retain customers that would have otherwise had to cancel their subscription. This is evidence that it is easier to retain customers than to get new ones. With just a few clicks of a button we were able to retain revenue and at the same time we were able to help our customers by solving a problem for them.

5 Best Times to Sell Event Tickets Online

It is critical, very critical, to have multiple deadlines for your event and use those deadlines as a way to incentivize attendees to action. We’ve done research on this with Event Smart and have found when people register. 

During business hours

According to Event Smart, 70% of your event registration and ticket sales will come during business hours. So, staff your resources into when people will need your help.

Within 90 days (5%)

Only a very small portion of attendees are likely to sign up more than 90 days in advance. But this also depends on the incentives and promotions you use to encourage people to register online earlier than later. The earlier you can have ticket sales the better your cashflow you have for financing your event.

Within 30 days (30%)

People start to get serious about reserving their tickets about a month in advance. But this also coincides with the most common period of time in advance that event organizers open registration and ticket sales.

Within 7 days (65%)

The largest portion of ticket sales come within the last week. This is when people finalize their plans and look a week ahead of time for things to do next week.

Last Day (9%)

Yet still, almost 10% of attendees will wait till the last day to make their ticket purchase. So don’t give up on people until the last moment. This is also why it’s worth sending several last-minute reminders.

So, when is the best time to sell tickets online? Every day, up to 90 days in advance, but the closer to the event the more likely attendees are to sign up. Be sure to leverage technology like your event website or social media to facilitate transactions any time of the day all day every day.

20 Best Features of Event Espresso to Sell Event Tickets Online

We’ve pointed out many of the ways you can increase the ticket sales for your event. Here are some of the most important, popular and powerful features of Event Espresso and WordPress your event registration.

WordPress Plugin

Event Espresso is compatible with the most popular content management system on the planet, WordPress. You can use WordPress to create a website for free and Event Espresso to sell tickets, accept registrations and payments. This gives you the power to have your own event registration website under your own brand and own all the data. This is not available with any event platform.

Collect Event Payment (cards and PayPal) into your own bank account

With Event Espresso you can use your own payment gateway account to get paid directly, with no added fees. You get paid each day you accept sales minus any fees from the payment gateway. This is the safest way to manage payments and lets you have a better relationship with attendees and customers.

No Commission Fees

You do not need to pay any commission fees for accepting payments. Some websites like Eventbrite charge 5%+ for using their platform, but with Event Espresso and WordPress you can save 100% of all ticketing commission fees. See this article to find out how much Eventbrite will really cost you.

Custom Event Pages

You can be free to make an event website that looks and feels and functions just how you want it with Event Espresso. You will have access to make style, layout, look and feel changes and if you want to hire a developer to custom code a new feature or functionality you can do that too. Event Espresso is licensed GPL [General Public License] so you will have access to all the code.

Event Registration Forms

Collect all the event and attendee registration information during the ticket sale process. 

Multiple Types of Tickets

Some platforms charge you extra fees to sell multiple different types of tickets to your event. But with Event Espresso you can create any number of tickets for each event. If you want to offer Senior Citizen tickets, student tickets, or VIP tickets you can do that with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Multiple Attendee Registration

You can also collect information for attendees for each ticket you sell, not just for all the tickets you sell. This allows you to customize your event registration process to meet the needs of your business and deliver a great experience for your attendees.

Multiple Event Registration

No other platform allows your attendees to register multiple events at the same time, during the same checkout experience. So, if your audience wants to attend your cooking class one month, and your painting class the next month, they can buy tickets for each event and check out once. That helps you convert more leads into attendees and make more money.

Event Confirmation Emails

The communication that happens when people register for events reinforces to attendees that they made the right decision to attend your event. And the automatic confirmation email system in Event Espresso manages the communication that can happen when you receive payments, and more. This gives your attendees confidence to trust your brand and saves you a lot of time.

Promotion & Discount Codes

With the right promotion you can increase your revenue, and track the success of your marketing campaigns. Event Espresso allows you to create and manage promotion codes for discounts to single events or automatic promotions that are set to start/end at a certain time. This also helps you save time and money administering promotions.

Attendee mover

When attendees need to change their plans, instead of just providing a refund, you can move attendees to another event. This helps you keep more customers and save money.

Printable Tickets

Printable or electronic tickets allows your attendees to present their ticket at the door to be validated by a barcode scanner or an event mobile app. This helps to secure your event and can be used to track attendance too. Tickets can be customized to any shape or size and loaded with special up-sell offers, cross promotion or advertisements. Because you own the ticket real estate you can do whatever you want.

Barcode Scanner and Event Mobile App Scanning

The Event Espresso barcode and QR code scanner features and event mobile app can give your event a professional look and more power in your hand. You can scan and validate tickets at the door, at the session, or check-in attendees at the door. All the scan data is available too so you can track who attended. This can be helpful for issuing certificates, licenses, education credits, or remarketing.

Taxes and Fees

Do you need to add taxes to the price of your tickets? Event Espresso can list that out for your attendees very clearly. The taxes can be added to the price of the ticket and fully transparent to attendees on the ticket price, receipts and invoices.

Attendee Reports, CSV

Event Espresso allows you to download your registration data at any time into a CSV file. You can use this data to improve your ticket sales for the next event.

Event Calendar

The event calendar can be one source of truth for upcoming events. You can color code and categorize your events so it’s easy for attendees to find what they’re looking for and move to register or buy.

Wait Lists

It’s a good thing to need wait lists. With Event Espresso you can continue to accept RSVP registrations for your event so that if an attendee cancels you can easily (or automatically) promote the next attendee on the list to an attendee and request payment. This keeps your events full and maximizes your revenue.

SEO-optimized event pages

Your event website needs to perform well in the search results. Event Espresso is coded to provide the necessary information to show up in the search engine search results. This is free traffic if done correctly.

Upcoming Event Notifications

Reminders and follow-up can be the difference between someone showing up to your event or not. You can automate that process by using the Event Espresso tools.

WP User Integration

Because Event Espresso integrates with WordPress, you can create a system where people must register for your website before they can register for tickets. In addition, you can offer a member-only discount for your WordPress users. You can also give them special discounts if desired.

Conclusion

We’ve just listed over 100 ways that you can increase ticket sales for your event. Over time you can get more familiar with and better at using all these tools and best practices to maximize your revenue and make your event successful.

 

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