Increasing ticket sales: Guide for event organizers

I believe all event organizers often ponder over these questions:

1. How to boost ticket sales for their events?

2. How to increase revenue?

3. How to expedite receiving payments for sold tickets?

Regarding points 2 and 3, it’s straightforward:

How to expedite receiving payments for sold tickets?

The answer to question 3 is simple— all clients of the ArenaSoldOut.com platform receive payments for sold tickets directly into their accounts (acquirers). ArenaSoldOut.com doesn’t handle payments for sold tickets. Organizers receive all proceeds from each sold ticket directly into their acquirers and settle with ArenaSoldOut.com for the services provided by the platform.

How can event organizers increase their revenue?

We have previously addressed this topic in another article, where several unconventional methods for increasing revenue for organizers of any event—be it a concert, concert tour, festival, or any other event—are succinctly described. You can read the article later here, but for now, let’s focus on the first question.

Connect partners and promoters to ticket sales

You can connect any number of partners to sell your tickets and provide each with individual terms.

On the ArenaSoldOut.com platform, all necessary functions and desktop applications for your partners are available.

You can connect:

1. Trusted agents, allowing them to collect payment for tickets sold, with payments made to you according to your contracts and agreements.

2. Basic agents. In this case, money for tickets sold by agents will be deposited into your account, and you will settle with these agents according to your contracts and agreements.

3. Agents who will sell tickets for cash and settle with you according to your contracts and agreements (Online Cash Register).

All sales and sources of sales will be visible to you and your agents on the ArenaSoldOut.com platform.

Here are a few examples:

– A concert agency operating in different countries connects posters and media in each location, which not only advertise the event but also sell tickets for it on their websites and social media.

– A flamenco theater on one of the coasts of Spain has connected local travel agencies, kiosks selling books, magazines, and excursions, as well as hotels that sell tickets to the daily Flamenco Show.

– An organizer of ballet festivals and gala concerts featuring ballet stars has connected expensive hotels in their city, ballet and dance studios, yacht rental companies, and travel agencies to ticket sales.

– An organizer of a Latin American dance festival actively sold tickets by connecting with cosmetic and hairdressing salons in their city.

– A tourism festival connected equipment stores, tourist clothing stores, walking and orienteering clubs, fitness centers, and bookstores to ticket sales.

In this direction, creativity is almost endless; it’s important that agents know your target audience and engage with them.

Another important aspect to mention is that connecting agents reduces your advertising costs because agents become interested in sales themselves, and you gain contacts with representatives of the target audience without advertising expenses.

Leveraging your buyers data base – a powerful marketing tool

The functionality of ArenaSoldOut.com allows every organizer to accumulate databases of buyers across all locations. Despite the era of apps and social media, event marketing via email remains incredibly effective.

Here are 4 tips to help you stand out and drive traffic from your emails to your event list:

1. Retargeting visitors from past events

If someone attended one of your previous events, reach out to them when planning a new one! Collect email addresses of people attending your events and use them to build a base of loyal fans who enjoy your events.

2. Keep emails short and sweet

Utilize vibrant text and engaging images, don’t forget to include a clear call to action. Use a single-column design, convenient for larger fingers, to attract mobile users. Research shows that emails of less than 150 words have a higher click-through rate.

3. Ensure mobile-friendliness

As nearly 80% of emails are opened on mobile devices, you need to ensure your emails are optimized for mobile. Ensuring email compatibility with mobile devices means preserving layout, design, and formatting for all screen sizes, preventing any loss of important information due to poor readability.

4. Don’t rely solely on images

Create a message that is legible, with or without images; the text should be engaging and readable even without images. Keep in mind that spam filters often block emails without text, so avoid embedding flyers in the body of the email, and don’t create emails that contain only images and no text. Remember, images may load slower than text, especially if users have limited internet connections, and many users prefer to read text and not load images. Additionally, due to spam filters and cluttered inboxes, sending an email does not guarantee registration or even a click.

By incorporating these strategies into your email marketing efforts, you can enhance your reach, engage your audience effectively, and drive ticket sales for your events.

Early-Bird ticket sales

Today, the events market worldwide is highly saturated. How can you win in this competitive arena and attract maximum buyers and attendees? Many industry professionals agree that timing is crucial for most events – it’s the temporal window preceding the event that allows the organizer to effectively advertise to the target audience and garner maximum attention.

Start selling as early as possible and utilize all opportunities to maximize early sales periods. On the ticketing platform ArenaSoldOut.com, you can adjust ticket prices at any moment with just a few clicks, so plan your sales periods accordingly.

You can offer your buyers various options. Most organizers conduct early sales with discounts to quickly boost their revenue. Additionally, we observe that some organizers do not offer discounts for early purchases but provide buyers of this sales period with other perks, such as access to VIP tickets, branded souvenirs, complimentary drinks, or the opportunity to participate in an artist’s autograph session.

Sell tickets quickly by creating scarcity. Offer a limited number of tickets at certain prices to encourage visitors to purchase tickets before they run out.

The functionality of the ArenaSoldOut.com platform allows you to open/close sales at any time for any quantity and any ticket category. Use this feature to create scarcity and excitement.

Price Adjustments

You can change prices throughout the entire sales cycle. Plan a pricing strategy, inform your audience about the dates when prices will increase to create a sense of urgency with each pricing offer, thus accelerating ticket sales.

All of this is easy when you use a ticketing platform that offers a powerful set of features for event organizers. Fortunately, you can create various types of tickets and discounts, and adjust prices directly on the ArenaSoldOut.com platform.

Track your advertising and marketing efforts

If you’re planning to invest in promotion, you need to know what works and what doesn’t. The most effective way to increase your sales is to identify which channels bring the highest revenue, ensuring the reasonable utilization of your advertising budget.

The good news is that with the ArenaSoldOut.com Reporter app, you can not only see all your sales in real-time but also the sources from which you acquired these buyers.

You’ll see which partners and bloggers brought you sales, which advertising campaigns were effective, and which weren’t. This is possible thanks to the platform’s architecture, where each organizer can create any number of sales sources, referred to in the platform as “Front-ends.”

This is a significant difference from Google Analytics, as you see not just the number of clicks or visits but actual sales correlated with the source, allowing you to optimize your marketing efforts and advertising campaigns using this data.

Moreover, if you additionally use traditional analytics systems, you’ll be able to analyze data on the number of visits and build actual end-to-end analytics to enhance the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing campaigns.

Attract sales from influential bloggers, affiliates, partners and media

Thanks to the functionality of ArenaSoldOut.com, you can create and distribute widgets (unique links) for each sales partner (Agent). Your sales partners can include bloggers, opinion leaders, event posters, news websites, Telegram channels, messenger groups, social media pages, radio stations, local media, and more – those who have connections with your target audience.

In the desktop application of the ArenaSoldOut.com platform, you’ll precisely see how many sales and the total amount each partner or blogger has brought you. These are accurate data points that will serve as the basis for your calculations with your sales partners. Additionally, you can set up individual service fees for each agent. You’ll be able to connect each agent to the reports, allowing your agents to see only their sales. This ensures that your relationships with partners are as transparent as possible.

Pre-Sale of goods and services

Alongside ticket sales, you can conduct pre-sales of goods and services, thereby increasing your revenue and providing additional convenience for buyers.

Simultaneously with ticket sales, you can, for example, sell:

Parking spaces

Food and beverages

Branded merch, souvenirs

In many cases, we see that organizers earn as much from these sales as they do from ticket sales.

Pre-selling merchandise allows organizers to bypass the rules of certain concert venues that do not permit organizers to sell anything during events. In this scenario, organizers sell in advance, receive the funds, and attendees receive their purchased items at the event by an additional ticket for the merchandise they bought. This eliminates queues and sales during the event itself.

You can read more about this here

Service Fees

Service fees have long been a customary part of ticket purchases. You can employ various strategies:

– Implement a zero service fee and promote this, boosting ticket sales and fostering loyalty among your audience.

– Alternatively, set any service fee when selling tickets through your social networks and website, earning additional revenue.

In the admin zone of the platform, you can also set a service fee of your choosing for all your sales partners. This flexibility allows you to adapt your fee structure to align with your business objectives and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

Adjust these fees through the platform provides organizers with a powerful tool in event management toolkit.

Shortening the path from advertisement to purchase

Ensuring the shortest possible path for your customers from advertisement or information to purchase is crucial. With each transition, a significant percentage of potential buyers may be lost—they get distracted by incoming calls, other inquiries, and you lose them.

The functionality of the ArenaSoldOut.com platform is designed so that every buyer can seamlessly transition from your website, advertisements, or the widgets distributed to partners directly to the purchasing process. There’s no need for customers to navigate between multiple different sites, saving valuable time and reducing the likelihood of abandonment during the buying journey.

By streamlining the purchasing process and minimizing friction points, you enhance the user experience and increase the likelihood of conversion. This seamless integration from marketing channels to the point of sale ensures that your promotional efforts translate efficiently into ticket sales, maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Your website as a sales tool

Our platform enables all ticket sales through your websites. Additionally, we support direct purchases from social media channels without the need to navigate to a website. This gives you the opportunity to promote your websites and social media channels while selling tickets directly from your web platform. No longer do you need to advertise ticket systems from other companies at your expense. Promote your site!

In fact, the ArenaSoldOut.com platform functions as a White Label solution. Your customers will see that all ticket sales occur directly on your website, thereby increasing trust in your point of sale. Moreover, by promoting your website, you elevate its visibility in Google search results and become a more recognized brand for your customers and audience.

Visitors coming to your site are less likely to divert to other events, significantly increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

To ensure maximum convenience for your customers, we recommend:

– Optimize your website for mobile users: With over 80% of today’s traffic coming from mobile users, optimizing your site for mobile devices not only retains loyal users but also widens your reach.

– Utilize advertising tools to optimize your budget: One of the best ways to achieve success without compromising your budget is to increase Facebook’s relevance score. When you launch an ad, Facebook quickly analyzes how well your audience is responding to it by measuring clicks, likes, shares, and comments. Facebook then uses this data as an indicator of how relevant your ad is to your audience, assigning it a score from one to 10, where 10 is the highest. Higher scores make your ad cheaper.

Within one advertising campaign, you can run multiple variations of ads and evaluate the effectiveness of each, selecting those that generate the most sales. Additionally, you can use advertising targeting tools and A/B testing in Google to choose the most effective ads for sales.

By implementing these strategies, you not only streamline the ticket purchasing process but also enhance your marketing efforts, ensuring that your promotions translate into tangible ticket sales and increased brand recognition.

Create events and sell tickets online

If you’re wondering how to sell tickets to your event, consider ArenaSoldOut.com as your ticketing partner. Our technological platform for event organizers allows you to create events and sell tickets online using reliable and convenient ticketing software.

By collaborating with ArenaSoldOut.com, you gain access to a plethora of features essential for organizers of any scale. You can leverage numerous marketing tools, including offering promo codes, creating group discounts on tickets, and ultimately, increasing ticket sales velocity. You become the owner of your tickets, empowered to implement various creative and marketing concepts using ArenaSoldOut.com features.

Learn more about your possibilities with ArenaSoldOut.com. In the Articles and Markets sections, we regularly publish updates for you, enabling you to create unique events, be flexible, and achieve success!