Posted on February 16, 2024

Maximizing Ticket Sales: Advanced Event Marketing Techniques

Knowing how to effectively host and run an event, whether it’s virtual or in-person, is crucial to maximizing ticket sales. 

Every event requires meticulous planning to ensure that it meets its objectives, engages participants, and leaves a lasting impression.

This involves thinking about things like technology, how to communicate, and making sure attendees have a good experience. It’s also important to be ready for unexpected issues. 

In this article, we’re going to look at some advanced event marketing techniques to help you increase ticket sales for your event. 

Let’s get started!

How to Maximize Ticket Sales

1. Utilize Email Drip Campaigns

Email remains a strong go-to when it comes to how to increase ticket sales, thanks to its direct approach and the fact you will be communicating with people who have already shown an interest in your offerings. You can ping them personalized messages, exclusive offers, and important updates leading up to the event – and afterward for upcoming events.

However, email drip campaigns for events are where things start to get interesting. Drip campaigns work by, well, drip-feeding a series of automated emails to your contact list. Long-term, this works well as they’re consistently reminded about your event, but not to the extent where it becomes invasive.

With the right marketing tools, email drip campaigns become a breeze. Through InEvent, rather than sending emails manually, you can use our built-in content and message delivery tools. From here, you can create lists that perform essential activities, such as follow-ups for not opening emails or guests who didn’t confirm their presence.

Plus, you can drip-send emails from your domain using integration with your DNS and InEvent servers. For those that don’t respond, you can send automatic follow-ups to nudge them.

Statistics for each email can be seen after the email was sent, getting actual results of openings, clicks, and bounces. Take a look for yourself!

2. Tap into Influencers to Promote Your Event

If influencer marketing had a stock price, it’d be pretty high at this point. Influencers act as your event’s brand ambassadors, and depending on their reach, they could help your event get seen by thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of new customers. TikTok alone has a potential ad reach of 1.218 billion users aged 18 and above, which is 23% of the global internet users.

If your event is targeted at younger audiences, leveraging influencers is a great way to connect with them, considering most of them are consuming content from TikTok and Instagram. Be sure to partner with influencers who are relevant to your industry and event – otherwise, you may miss the mark with your target audience. 

For event marketing, specifically how to increase ticket sales for your networking event, you could partner up with a business thought leader, a career coach, or a networking expert with a strong presence on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter. After the event has finished, there’s no reason why you can’t continue your partnership with them to build anticipation for your future events.

Having an influencer create authentic content personalized to your event is a brilliant way to generate buzz and create a sense of exclusivity. 

3. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Considering pretty much everyone carries a smartphone around today, ensuring they’re able to access and purchase your event tickets swiftly and easily is essential.

In addition to having a UX-friendly website, your mobile site needs to follow suit. This means customers should easily be able to find your ticket page, register for the event and buy a ticket on their phone. 

Incorporating features like ApplePay, Google Pay, or other mobile payment options provides customers with a convenient and secure way to buy tickets from their smartphones. 

We’d also encourage you to download our event mobile app to create accessible in-person, hybrid or virtual event experiences. Plus, you’ll be able to communicate with your audience sessions, speakers and devices in multiple segmentation targets and channels.

Think of it this way, if your mobile site was poorly optimized and users kept getting lost or didn’t trust the payment portals, they’re more likely to leave. We’d recommend speaking to a trusted managed hosting provider if your website isn’t up to scratch.

4. Create the Perfect Ticket Landing Page

Do you know what makes maximizing ticket sales way easier? Building a landing page specifically designed to sell tickets.

Through InEvent, you can create drag-and-drop ticket landing pages without the need for complex coding. You can also integrate content such as text, images, videos, galleries, contact forms and social media integrations.  

Through InEvent, you can also:

• Customize powerful forms and manage invites effortlessly with a smart chatbot AI.
• Sell tickets securely on a cloud-synced website, providing a range of options for attendees.
• Personalize event flows with different landing pages and access controls for various stakeholders.
• Benefit from built-in integrations with leading platforms, ensuring data synchronization.

Plus, our Website Builder can be integrated with your current page through dynamic plugins, which will load only the information needed for a certain section, such as event map, calendar, speakers, sponsors, etc.

5. Discounted Group Tickets Work Wonders

Most people who are attending events are going with work colleagues or friends, so creating group ticket options is a great option to target this audience segment. 

You could also offer discounted rates for group tickets, whether it’s doubling up with a friend, work groups or even families. Discounted group tickets offer a cost-effective and convenient way for attendees to enjoy the event together. 

Group tickets also, naturally, appeal to bigger audiences. You’re not selling to an individual, you’re selling to a group that’s collectively interested in the same or at least similar experiences.

Plus, group tickets subtly motivate guests to attend events. At some point, you’ve likely been offered to jump into a group ticket because your friends are going or there’s a great discount to take advantage of. 

In essence, more group tickets purchased = more sales for your event!

6. Play on the Scarcity Angle

A great marketing technique for how to increase ticket sales is creating scarcity. Why? Scarcity creates urgency, and urgency encourages action. 

For example, a popular scarcity tactic is to place an alert above a call-to-action (CTA) that compels readers to action. This could be ‘only X amount of tickets left!’, or ‘Get Early Bird prices before they go’ or something similar. Timed sales events also work well, as having something like a countdown timer puts pressure on the user to purchase a ticket before the offer expires. 

The key is to be truthful about your claims and use this tactic sparingly. Claiming there are a few tickets left all the time will get you caught out eventually and is generally a pretty shady approach.

7. Stay in Touch All year round

When your event ends, it doesn’t mean you should cease communication with your audience. It’s essential you keep in contact with them throughout the year. Whether that’s drip-feeding them updates on upcoming events, offering early bird price incentives or sharing content related to their interests.

You want to make the most of the positive impact your event had on the attendees, so, keeping that energy alive and kicking until the next event is crucial to keep engagement levels and ticket sales high.

Yes, there will likely be a drop-off in engagement during the period between your last and next event. However, consistently posting content relating to your business offering and/or upcoming events is a great way to maintain momentum during quieter lead-up periods.

This could be anything from sharing behind-the-scenes glimpses, interviews with experts or relevant industry insights. This ongoing dialogue not only sustains interest but positions your brand as a reliable source of valuable content until your next event pops up.

Conclusion

When it comes to how to increase ticket sales, there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing technique. The key is to employ a combination of approaches tailored to your specific event and audience. 

Understanding your target demographic, leveraging social media, incorporating advanced event marketing techniques, and exploring innovative ticketing options (like group rates) are all important elements. 

Remember, beyond the event’s conclusion, maintaining communication, providing exclusive content, and sustaining the excitement in the lead-up to the next is also essential. 
And of course, having a trusted event platform to simplify and integrate your end-to-end flow will make all of this much easier!