10 SMART WAYSTo Improve Ticket Sales and Audience Engagement

ebook

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. COLLECT DATA ABOUT VISITORS 04

2. LAUNCH AN ONLINE TICKET SHOP 05

3. DON’T RELY EXCLUSIVELY ON DISTRIBUTORS FOR TICKET SALES 06

4. CATER TO CUSTOMERS’ PURCHASING HABITS 07

5. PERSONALISED COMMUNICATION AND OFFERS 08

6. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ONLINE TECHNOLOGIES 09

7. FACILITATE ORGANISATIONAL ALIGNMENT 10

8. RESPOND QUICKLY TO LAST-MINUTE CHANGES IN TICKET DEMAND 11

9. TRACK IMPACT OF MARKETING CAMPAIGNS 12

10 . USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO STRENGTHEN BRAND 13

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INTRODUCTION

Driving ticket sales for your venue

– whether sports, culture or live

entertainment – requires ongoing,

coordinated effort.

Beyond your venue’s content and

programming, which are clearly the

prime drivers of audience, there are

tactical activities like discounts and

promotions, which can yield short-

term sales. Yet, to achieve strategic,

long-term growth, all this must

be supplemented by consistent

great service, ongoing audience

engagement, and personalised

offers. Technology is a key enabler

to such strategic growth.

This ebook includes 10 smart

methods and best practices,

assembled from ticketing projects

at large sports clubs, museums,

and theaters.

By reading this guide, you’ll learn

how to:

• Setup a t icketing technolog y

infrastructure to support sales

growth and audience engagement,

• Use data insights to personalise

offers and communications with

your target audiences,

• Leverage digital channels to

strengthen your brand and enhance

the customer journey.

“ We wanted to move from a transactional logic to a relational logic in our approach to ticketing. Ticketing must be aimed at developing and animating our audiences, which goes far beyond the simple sale of tickets.

The SecuTix 360° solution allows us to fulfil this vision and offer maximum flexibility to our spectators through innovative services that simplify the whole purchasing process”Company Secretary at La Maison de la Danse

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Every customer interaction is an opportunity to learn about the preferences, demographics and habits of each customer, and consequently, be able to provide more relevant offers, cross sell and upsell. Nevertheless, most companies fail to collect this valuable information and view the sales interaction as complete once a ticket is sold.

Instead, you should be able to conveniently collect and store data about customers in a single, centralised contact database - whether the ticket sale takes place online, on the phone, or at the ticket box office.

Each customer record should store user demographics, purchasing history across all channels (online, call centre, mobile, box office etc.), and possibly personal data such as birthday, membership level and type of events attended.

1. COLLECT DATA ABOUT VISITORS

“ The centralisation of all customer transactions in a single database allows visitor history to be tracked across ten cultural institutions.

The shared CRM system is the starting point for fine grained statistical analysis of customer profiles, such as where they come from, how old they are, and how they spend their money on cultural events taking place in Reims.Each institution can use this common database for market segmentation and targeted customer communications.”Head of the cultural portal at the City of Reims

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Regardless of your business - sporting events, museum, entertainment, live shows or other – an online ticket sales portal is a first step to increasing the visibility of your offering and brand to a wider audience anywhere in the world.

Don’t settle for limited functionality that enables selling single tickets. Instead, build an online ticket shop that lets you expose the full breadth of your offering with products like season tickets, group visits, personalised offers, guide tours, private events and merchandise.

You don’t have to implement all online shop functionality at once, as you can gradually add products. But make sure you have the right infrastructure to expand your offering.

2. LAUNCH AN ONLINE TICKET SHOP

“ We currently sell over 75% of our tickets through our own website and that figure is growing each year.”Head of Ticketing at Paléo Festival Nyon

“ We can quickly launch new offers and sales campaigns in the ticket shop. One such offer is ‘Family Day,’ for which almost 3,000 family tickets were sold online, prompting a sales boost for the entire venue. Since introducing SecuTix, our online sales rates haven’t stopped climbing.”Sales coordinator at the Swiss museum of Transport

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Distributing tickets via partners is great since it allows you to extend your reach. However, distributors cannot account 100% of your sales. To differentiate yourself in a crowded market, you must build your own brand and communicate directly with your audience on an ongoing basis.

As a museum, sports club, theatre or any other venue, you must get to know and establish a relationship with your audience, which begins by direct sales.

Of course you should still use partners and third parties to reach specific audience segments, but you must also ensure that not all your sales are dependent on external entities.

3. DON’T RELY EXCLUSIVELY ON DISTRIBUTORS FOR TICKET SALES

“ We wanted to take back control of our own ticketing, data and ultimately that all-important relationship with our fans. Our vision is to deliver industry-leading fan engagement both in physical and digital stadia.

SecuTix is much more than a ticketing solution. They get how important fan data is to a sports business and their platform is a modern technology building block to supercharge this vision and take us to the next level of fan experience management.”Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer at Saracens

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The need to offer consumers more flexibility when purchasing tickets has never been more important. Consider, for example, a visitor that looks at an event page on her smartphone in the morning, makes the purchase on her laptop at work, and then downloads the ticket to her smartphone.

Such multi-device journey is not just a practice of millennials or younger fans but is shared by a wide audience. With this in mind, make sure you offer a seamless ticket purchase journey - regardless of the channel or device.

4. CATER TO CUSTOMERS’ PURCHASING HABITS

“ We realised our fans’ purchase journey isn’t linear and involves several devices. Although most visits to the ticketing site are from smartphones, people actually use their desktop to make the purchase. We’re dealing with a multi-device customer journey where fans view emails on their smartphone and then finalise the purchase on their computer.

The SecuTix platform is multi-channel, so we took advantage of that to strengthen the links between sales channels and provide a better buying experience.”Sales and Marketing Director at Lausanne Hockey Club (LHC)

Build support for an interconnected pool of communication methods and sales channels, making the user experience as smooth as possible – easy transition between corporate web site and online ticketing sales, simple navigation with few clicks, responsive design, and consistent experience across all platforms.

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While some companies still send bulk e-mail with offers to their entire contact database, it is really a practice of the past proven to yield limited results. Best-in-class companies practice ‘one-to-one’ marketing by customising offers and products to individual customers based on what they have learned about each individual.

Start with segmenting your audience – by demographics, purchase history and preferences. This will allow you to build personalised marketing campaigns and sales promotions that better address the needs and preferences of customers. Using individual behavior data, such as the type of event one attended or the media channel used, you can further personalise offers, by creating dynamic audience segments. You can also create individual promos, sending out unique single-use codes that are directly targeted to individuals.

5. PERSONALISED COMMUNICATION AND OFFERS

“ Considering the diversity of what we offer, the challenge is to segment our client base very carefully so that the right message can be targeted at the right person.

SecuTix allows us to define the segments using many different criteria and then target each sub-segment with offers and benefits that we think will interest them. This fine-tuning in terms of targeting means we can improve in both relevance and speed. For example, we can easily identify clients who have been to a match during the current season and suggest that they might attend a second one.”Head of Ticketing at Le Havre Athletic Club (HAC).

The more relevant and personalised your campaigns, the higher the engagement and click through rates. Segmented campaigns can provide 50-100% higher click through rates (CTR) compared to non-segmented, bulk campaigns.

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As a ticketing professional you should continuously implement new and advanced solutions that add value to your fans, visitors and spectators.

Once you launch and practice digital marketing and sales, you’ll discover the rich offering of technologies and products that can further enhance and optimise the customer experience.

Here are a few examples:• Offer seat selection through a realistic 3D maps of your venue• Allow users to place an option on a seat before confirming the purchase• Facilitate the donation of a few Euros to a charity while paying for tickets• Allow fans to accrue loyalty points when they buy online

6. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ONLINE TECHNOLOGIES

“ Thanks to the ease of integration between SecuTix and Optionizr we were able to go to market quickly with an innovative option service that simplifies our customers’ lives. By alleviating the anxiety associated with a purchase, we hope to offer our audience members a better experience when they visit our ticketing website and also to give them more freedom.”Company Secretary at Théâtre du Chatelet

Such technologies will not only enrich your audience experience, but will help build your brand and make you stand out compared to your competition.

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Too often in the ticketing world, groups operate in silos with little integration between their activities. For example, ticketing, audience development, and hospitality groups are often disengaged, each using a separate system with little coordination between activities.

Yet, integration, data sharing and synchronisation between all groups is vital for overall business success and building a long-term engagement with audiences.

A Ticketing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system used by all teams enables sharing data and dramatically increasing the effectiveness. For example, a marketing campaign can be setup to boost the sales of season tickets, which are not performing well. Or a mail campaign can be sent to promote hospitality suites.

7. FACILITATE ORGANISATIONAL ALIGNMENT

“ With all the data and CRM for both ticketing and hospitality in one place, we now have a holistic view of fans and those insights play a fundamental role in our fan engagement strategy for future tournaments.”Head of Revenue Operations at UEFA

Make sure that the alignment between groups isn’t only carried out at the technology level, but also takes place in daily operations between teams.

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The way users learn about events has changed dramatically in recent years. Discover of events is not only through billboards and newspaper ads, but through endless digital channels – website banners, email, Facebook ads, tweets made by friends – to name just a few.

The richness of media channels influences the rapid changes in ticket demand.

Make sure you are able to respond to demand changes in real-time and rapidly adjust data in your box office, mobile app, online ticket shop, distributors etc. For example, two hours before the show you should be able to move seat quotas reserved to B2B customers and make them available on the mobile app, as well as on all other channels.

8. RESPOND QUICKLY TO LAST-MINUTE CHANGES IN TICKET DEMAND

“ We have a consolidated view of our sales across our web shop, our box office, our two points of sales outside the theater and also our mobile application.

Not only does this cross-channel visibility simplifies our processes, but it also allows us to trace the entire purchasing history of our customers across any channel and any device. All this information is available at a glance in a single place.”Head of Ticketing at Theater Basel

In short, establish a common, unified data view to all sales parties – physical and digital, to enable making quick decisions and moving tickets around.

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Marketing analytics offers profound insights into customer preferences and trends, as well as into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Rather than spend money and resources on marketing campaigns without any knowledge to their effect, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: “How much impact did the email campaign I sent last month have on ticket sales? Is the money we’re spending on digital advertising returning the investment ?”

It’s only through measurement that you can optimise your marketing spend and continuously improve the impact on sales.

9. TRACK IMPACT OF MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

“ We are now able to measure the impact of our campaigns on ticketing revenue, allowing us to adjust our strategy continuously and ensure better operational management.

This tool has opened up a whole new range of possibilities.”Head of audience development at Centre Pompidou

Implement work processes where you track, measure and evaluate mail and web metrics like open rates, click-through rates (CTR), affiliate links performance, and total campaign ROI (cost vs. revenue).

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As of June 2017, Facebook had more than 2 billion monthly active users. Can you afford to ignore social media in your marketing and sales efforts ?

But don’t settle for putting up a Facebook page and tweeting a few times a week. Instead, understand the quirks of each network, and implement a well thought-out strategy.

For example, you can promote ticket sales via Facebook CTA (Call to Action), make it easy for fans to share their ticket purchase, reach out to past attendees, run contests, reach new (but related) audience, involve partners and sponsors, incentivise social sharing through promos, and many more.

10 . USE SOCIAL MEDIA TO STRENGTHEN BRAND

Do not consider your social media strategy in isolation. Your company’s social media page is an integral part of your other digital channels, like the online ticket shop, company web site, mobile application and even search engines etc. Make sure that all platforms are well integrated to offer a seamless experience.

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GET A FREE DEMO

SecuTix provides everything you need to expand tickets sales on the internet, manage ticket distribution, and create effective marketing campaigns.

You’ll be able to:

• Open a smart online ticket shop

• Sell season tickets online

• Optimise ticket sales across all channels

• Run targeted email campaigns

• Reduce the workflow of ticket operators

GET A FREE DEMO

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