How to Price & Promote Ticketed Events | Event Marketing Ideas — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:04Okay ticket sellers, welcome to this week's Run of Show, you're gonna like
2. 0:08this one. We have gotten a lot of inbound asking us to give you numbers around how
3. 0:15to sell tickets, how to fill seats, how to put the butts in the seats and make them
4. 0:18pay for it, right? And it's not easy I've been there kind of deciding how you're
5. 0:23gonna price, how you're gonna promote. So, what we did was we analyzed a ton of
6. 0:28information, we ran some regression analyses, we worked with our data
7. 0:32scientists, we asked a lot of hard questions and we looked for patterns. And
8. 0:36we found some pretty interesting stuff and I'm gonna get to share with you
9. 0:40today. Today, we're gonna dive into how to price and how to promote your events
10. 0:45when you're selling tickets. And what I will say off the bat is this and this is
11. 0:48the bad news. We looked at events that we're selling tickets for anywhere as
12. 0:53low as a dollar and anywhere as high as twenty thousand dollars and in each of
13. 0:57those types of buckets, we saw sold out events. We saw people who were able to
14. 1:00drive ticket sales so, it was hard to find patterns that were always very
15. 1:04useful. But we were able to find a couple gems I think you're gonna be able to
16. 1:09apply to your programs. So, let's dive right in with the first one that we call,
17. 1:13the seven to one rule. So, the seven to one rule is pretty simple.
18. 1:19Let's kind of run a quick scenario. If you think about your next event let's
19. 1:23say you were to sell tickets for ten dollars, right? And then you send out
20. 1:26a hundred invitations and ten people bought tickets, that's a 10%
21. 1:31conversion rate, right? Now, if you were to increase that ticket value seven dollars
22. 1:37more so, to seventeen dollars, you're gonna see a 9% conversion rate.
23. 1:42What I mean to say is, you're gonna see a 1% drop. So, for every seven
24. 1:47dollars you increase ticket prices you're gonna see a 1% drop in
25. 1:51conversion. Now, that doesn't mean don't charge more for your tickets. As I said,
26. 1:56we've seen some very expensive events sellout, but what it does mean is you're
27. 2:00gonna need to do more promotion if you increase those prices. And as you're
28. 2:04thinking about kind of where to land on the ticket price, we saw something pretty
29. 2:07interesting. We started looking at all the people who sold out their events, but
30. 2:11do they have anything in common? And more often than not we saw we call
31. 2:15the power of nines. They were using nine dollar ticket increments so, as opposed
32. 2:20to thirty dollar tickets, they were selling for a very specific number,
33. 2:24twenty nine dollars. So, as you're thinking about where exactly to price
34. 2:27your ticket, try sixty nine dollars, try one hundred and nine dollars, we find that those sell out at a
35. 2:33higher consistency. And last on the pricing side, look you know we're talking
36. 2:37about conversion ratios and that's definitely something you want to watch
37. 2:40as you're pricing, but you can also use pricing as a lever and specifically to
38. 2:44drive urgency. We call it the early bird effect. What we were able to see was that
39. 2:48tickets that were using early bird pricing so, this means discounted pricing
40. 2:52if you buy now, you know while tickets last. And you should see when they're
41. 2:57sending out emails they're really driving this urgency with countdown
42. 3:00clocks and talking about how many tickets they've already sold. And they're
43. 3:04using these early bird pricing and we're actually seeing a 12.5% increase
44. 3:10in total tickets sold when you use early bird pricing. It's a very powerful lever.
45. 3:1612.5% when you're talking about a lot of tickets sold can be a lot of money so,
46. 3:21really think about your tickets and how you're pricing them with early bird, it's
47. 3:24a very powerful mechanism. Okay, once you've set up your pricing the next step
48. 3:30is to think about your promotion. Okay, I want you to sit down for this if you're
49. 3:35not already, because this is a little bit of a bummer news, you probably already
50. 3:39know it. We call this the two months two weeks rule. For about 90% of the
51. 3:45events that we analyze they began promotion two months out. And despite the
52. 3:51fact that they were, you know out the gates with good amount of time for
53. 3:54tickets to sell, we saw that 70% of the tickets that were bought,
54. 3:59were bought in the last two weeks. Even though they're promoted for two months,
55. 4:03they sold most of their tickets in two weeks. Just so you can see what that
56. 4:06looks like I just threw a graph up here. You can see that the last two weeks end
57. 4:11up being the lion's share of tickets sold. Which is a bummer, but here's the
58. 4:16good news, as we started diving into the data we
59. 4:18found out one other thing. 50%, half of the people that open that first email
60. 4:25you send, half of those people are going to
61. 4:28eventually buy. And so, what this says to me is that even though we kind of have
62. 4:33to sit back and wait for those procrastinators to eventually buy their
63. 4:36tickets, we really want to pay attention to that first email and who actually
64. 4:41engages with it. Because with enough nurture, we can actually get those people
65. 4:44to eventually buy. So, something that I often will think about is what time to
66. 4:48send the invitation. And what our data showed was that the highest likelihood
67. 4:53of purchase, when people purchase the most tickets is between the hours of
68. 4:5712:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. So, what does that say? What that says to me is that,
69. 5:02you know when your marketing team is kind of ready to press and they're like,
70. 5:06"Hey are we ready to send this invitation now?" The only question you need to ask is,
71. 5:10"Is it before noon or is it after noon? Because if it's after noon, you've
72. 5:13already missed that window, you really might as well wait till the next day. You
73. 5:17really want to focus on getting your promotional material out before noon
74. 5:20that day so you can take advantage of that high buying window. But, we know when
75. 5:25to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. It really is
76. 5:30important to take advantage of Google analytics and look in your
77. 5:33analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from. And what we have
78. 5:36found is that finally mobile traffic, when it comes to ticket purchases, has
79. 5:41crossed over 50%. Now, it's 56% of your attendees are purchasing
80. 5:45on mobile, what that says to me is, you better be optimizing your mobile
81. 5:48experience. Make sure it's seamless, make sure it's easy to buy, right? Last
82. 5:53but not least, we found that there was across all of these events that we were
83. 5:57analyzing, there was one common denominator for the events that actually
84. 6:01sold out. The events that put the attendees on the page and put the
85. 6:07speaker pictures on the page, really promoting via social clout, they had a
86. 6:13nearly two times higher likelihood of selling out their events than those that
87. 6:18did not show the attendees or the speakers that were gonna be at the event.
88. 6:22Social clout's a really powerful mechanism and I would urge you to take
89. 6:26advantage of it. You need to market through your attendees and market
90. 6:30through your vendors, market through your speakers market through your sponsors.
91. 6:33It's really the best way to sell out your event. Okay, I hope you find that
92. 6:37useful. If you have any questions, any burning questions,
93. 6:40please let us know. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running
94. 6:44regression analyses. By the way, thank you Mike for all your work on this. I'll see
95. 6:48you next time guys, thanks for checking in.
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