As an event planner or concert promoter, we know exactly the two words you absolutely love to hear — ‘Sold Out!’.

But have you ever had to face the problem of ticket sales flatlining as event day approaches?... Maximizing ticket sales for your event or conference can often be a challenging task. Selling tickets is not just about marketing your event, but also requires savvy sales tactics, advertising strategies and an understanding of your target audience. To help event professionals struggling to increase their ticket sales, we’ve put together an actionable guide based on event marketing best practices.

In this guide, we will cover proven strategies to increase ticket sales:

- Creating a competition
- Implementing different ticket types and discounts
- Leveraging the network of your speakers and artists
- The right way to promote early bird registration
- Optimizing your ticketing page
And much more!

Get ready to see those ticket sales climb up rapidly!

1. Create Different Ticket Types And Discounts

When considering an event ticketing platform, be sure to choose one that offers the option of creating different ticket types. For example, you can offer a premium ticket option, an early-bird option, as well as meet and greet with the artist option. Make sure you list multiple ticket types reflecting the price increase as the event is approaching to stimulate early buyers. Multiple ticket types allow you to accommodate a larger audience, and therefore increase event ticket sales.

Offering discounted tickets to groups is also a great tip for selling more tickets. A great way to sell to groups is to contact the sponsors for your event and, ask your sponsor to bring their company to your event. 

2. Create Facebook Event

Creating a facebook event can really help to score more ticket sales. Facebook events allows for collaborative group discussion, which is an effective way to organically generate conversation surrounding your event. Make sure to make the public event so that you it will be seen to your network and the network of your friends who will be attending the event.

Not only would you be integrating your event throughout social media but you would also be exposing your event to many qualified people in your friends network. Be sure to include a direct link to your event ticketing platform within your Facebook Event.

An additional benefit of Facebook Events that can help you increase event ticket sales is that event attendees automatically receive updates about event discussion activity via email. That means that you’ll be engaging members not only on social media, but also via email.

3. Create A Contest

Creating a contest is a great way to promote your event and boost ticket sales. Just make sure to keep it appealing, and offer an award to the attendee who can generate the most ticket sales through referrals.

To create a contest like this, you can use your event ticketing platform to create a custom tracking link for those who opt into the competition. Whoever opts in can share that link with their network and because the link is trackable, you’ll be able to see how much revenue that participant has generated. The person who generates the most ticket sales can be awarded an award like free tickets, meet and greet with the artist, or discounts for future events.

4. Create A Facebook CTA (Call To Action)

Facebook CTA, or “Call To Action” is a tool that helps an event organizer to achieve its goal: increase event ticket sales. By inserting a CTA on your Facebook page, you can easily direct already engaged fans and followers directly to your event ticketing page.

To implement Facebook’s CTA, first, create a Facebook page for your event. Then, while viewing your Facebook page as an administrator, click the button that’s labeled “Create A Call-To-Action Button.” Facebook will bring you to a pop-up screen where you can modify the CTA text, and insert a link to your ticketing page.

5. Use Your Talent Networks To Increase Event Ticket Sales

Using your talent (speakers, artists) online networks can really help to increase ticket sales to your event or conference. Asking your speakers to use their social media accounts as a platform to promote the event is an absolute must for event's success.

Your booked talent should naturally want to promote your event on their social media accounts, if more people attend your event, the more people they will be exposed to, creating mutually beneficial relationships. Artists and speakers naturally want as many people to attend their sessions as possible. It reflects well on them and provides them a better opportunity to promote their personal brand.

In addition to encouraging talent to share information about your event on their social media profiles, you can also ask them to write a guest post for your event website blog. They can write about their area of expertise, which can really help to get potential attendees interested in your event, and thus can help you to increase event ticket sales. Additionally, you can then promote that blog post on your social media channels and via email marketing.

6. Reach Out To Past Attendees

It is always a great idea to reach out to past attendees. They already familiar with your brand, they've attended your previous events, they know what to expect, and therefore they're much more qualified leads than someone who's never heard of your events. Through your event ticketing platform you can reach out by sending a tailored email reminding them of your past event and potentially offering a discount to your upcoming one.

This personalized approach creates a sense of exclusivity, which can help turn a past attendees into a loyal fans. Sharing media and images from the previous event can also get them excited about your next event.

7. Promote Your Next Event Right When The Current One Ends

What better way to secure ticket sales than directly after an event that just concluded? After an event you have a whole group of potential attendees who have just had a great experience at your event. Offering an early buyers discount to those who choose to purchase tickets for your next event is a great incentive that converts into increased event ticket sales. Exclusivity and a sense of urgency are great motivational factors to buy tickets.

8. Embed The Ticketing Process Onto Your Website or Blog.

Smooth and intuitive event registration process is crucial to securing ticket sales. The best way to ensure this, is to make sure your potential ticket buyers don’t have to leave your event website to purchase a ticket. This benefits user experience since they won't be exposed to another brand throughout the process. By keeping the user within the event website, you're keeping the entire experience aligned with your event brand and increase the likelihood of them registering for the event.

9. Launch An Affiliate Campaign

These days consumers are being flooded with different advertisements and promotional messages, but there is something refreshing and impactful about word-of-mouth marketing. Apply this same principle to your event strategy by incentivizing attendees to share their custom tracking links to their social networks. Build in an incentive so that for each new registrant who signed up with a referral link, the attendee who shared that referral link will receive a commission or discount for future events.

10. Measure, Sleep, Optimize, Repeat

The key to sell more event tickets is to not only implement these best practices but most importantly, to reiterate them as you go along. During the months that your event tickets are on sale, make sure to constantly measure the performance of the different channels in order to see which ones are most effective and to optimize accordingly. 

Your event ticketing software should have the analytics dashboard to help you keep track of ticket revenue month over month, as well as to measure your marketing campaigns through tracking links and engagement analytics. What gets measured - gets improved.

Why It’s Easy to Sell Event Tickets With EventCartel?

- EventCartel is built by Event Professionals for Event Professionals.

- Over 10 years event industry experience working with nationwide concert tours and small local events

- Self service event management tools

- Award winning customer support for event organizers and their customers

- Huge affiliate network

- Custom build websites for your organization

- Wide variety of promo tools

- Instant Payouts

Summary

There a plenty of ways to increase your event ticket sales but the trick is to find the right event ticketing software and combination of strategies that work best for your event brand and target audience.