7 Ways to Use Your Website to Sell More Tickets

Written By: Carl Diesing

Events are a big deal and so is your brand. Find out the 7 ways our team has discovered how to sell more tickets using your website. Whether your company hosts a few casual professional meetups, an annual fundraising gala, or even multi-day MICE events, we’re talking a substantial investment of money, time, resources and effort from your event team. And for every event you organize, you want to see some form of ROI – sales, donations, new leads or contacts, conversions down the sales funnel, customer loyalty, or even just creating awareness in or making a positive impression on your market or community.

But maximizing the impact of your event is not something to be left up to the last minute, or a single task to be scheduled right in between ordering brochures or sorting seating arrangement. To get the best out of your event, you need to plan early, and the key, really, is to start milking your resources for every ounce of audience engagement you can get. One amazing resource that you own entirely and which you fully control – is your website. All you need to learn is how to harness the power of your online tools to create maximum impact on your potential attendees. Keep reading for 7 ways to use your website to sell more tickets!

1. Integrate, integrate, integrate

In today’s markets, information is king, and being able to work with your data will always translate into more opportunities and more potential. Ever heard the saying “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing”? Yup, that’s not a situation you want for your company to be in.

Integration across platforms, therefore, has become a growing need when it comes to a company’s back-end systems. In planning any event, you’re looking at utilizing a whole host of tools such as a registration and ticketing platform, marketing tools, CRM platform, website management tools, social media tools, database and contact tools, event planning and management tools, logistics tools… Imagine the chaos if all these separate tools and entities didn’t speak the same language! Your data needs to flow seamlessly across platforms so that at one glance you know all you need about Mr. John Smith, for example, in order to market directly to him.

When you’re planning your event, you shouldn’t have to worry about things like identifying repeat customers, identifying which marketing tools are working best for you, or how to export your attendees into your CRM system. Sparxo allows you to automatically track engagement data and gain real-time insights into the effectiveness of your event marketing and promotion efforts. Sparxo allows you to directly integrate it’s event registration and ticketing platform directly into as many webpages as you’d like so that you can track exactly where your attendees find you. Sparxo also allows you to aggregate your data across other platforms by importing your sales lists into Sparxo. Sparxo will combine that imported information and pinpoint who is a loyal fan and who is a firsttime attendee. This also lets you use one check-in system for everything.

2. Simplify.

How many clicks does it take for an interested person to sign up for your event? It’s a little bit like playing golf – the less, the better! When you’ve sparked a little bit of interest in someone – even if it’s just the tiniest instance of a spark – you certainly do not want to lose them thanks to some clunky user interface or weird domain redirection. No! You want to make it as easy as possible for them to sign up for your event. Thankfully it’s pretty easy to achieve this. You want your event hosted on your own website, you want it embedded into your social media pages, and you want to make registration a breeze. With Sparxo, all this is possible.

3. Content marketing

SEO is a buzzword you’ll see everywhere, but it stands for search engine optimization, which is boosting your visibility online. And you can certainly boost your event’s reach and impact by marketing relevant content to your target audience. This is the value add you offer as a company. This is how you engage your audience and win them over. Here are some things you can do:

* Write and publish a few blog posts about your event. You can cover a different topic every week, from conducting interviews with the people involved, to offering behind-the-scenes looks into your planning process. Get people excited about your event taking shape. Hook them with teasers while capturing their curiosities.

* Make use of cross-platform marketing. Reach out to relevant other online publications in your industry or locale. Ask them to post about your event and link it back to your website. Get your event’s corporate sponsors in on the online promotions. Get the word out as much as possible amongst the community.

* Startup engaging conversations with your registered attendees on social media. Generating these types of organic interactions will boost your event’s visibility as well as create hype and excitement for the event.

Everybody is curious, so use it to your best interests. Create valuable, interesting content that revolves around your event to not only grow your potential audience but keep your registered audience captivated and looking forward to your event. Sparxo uniquely allows you to do this. Enabling you to engage directly with your audience is a core foundation of Sparxo’s philosophy. The longer you retain your audience on your webpage, the better your organic SEO. 

4. Reach out to industry influencers

Just like the point before this, social media influencers can be extremely effective partners for promoting your events. They are well-connected, have a good following, and are usually credibly regarded when sharing their personal and/or professional insights, depending on their background. Find out who the worthy influencers are for your sector or locale and reach out to them. Finding a mutually beneficial way of working together can work well to boost the reach of your event by a digital mile.

5. Research your registered attendees

Now that you know who is signing up for your event, what can you do with that information? With Sparxo, you get full data breakdowns including their background and history of engagement with your organization. This helps you identify certain individuals for networking purposes, for example. Knowing your attendees means being able to identify your opportunities better and solidify strong strategies that work for these individuals.

6. Offer a pre-sale option

Why give up a chance to make a sale before you even get your customers in a room to give them the official sales pitch? When registering for your event, you can give customers the option to purchase certain “add-ons” that are relevant to your event. For example, you might have a casual lunch-time networking event in between conferences. You might also offer merchandise or premium packages for your products and/or services for pre-purchase, or the possibility to purchase the books of one of the speakers at your event. Not only does all this generate extra revenue, but it continues to interact with your attendees and keeps the event fresh and exciting for them.

7. Make the early birds feel special

It’s up to you to give them the worm! Early bird promotions can drive ticket sales in the lead-up to your event. You could offer coupon codes which people can share with their friends, create tiered packages or early bird packages with extra perks or at lower price points, or offer free merchandise or useful bonuses to a certain amount of first-in online registrants. Whatever it is, making your early registrants feel special isn’t that difficult or too expensive, and it can certainly go a long way in converting your attendees into loyal customers down the funnel!

With a combination of all these tips, you can develop an amazingly effective event marketing and audience engagement strategy that works for your unique event and your company’s needs. Here at Sparxo, we understand the importance of your brand and brand experience. That’s why we developed a white label, no brand event ticketing and registration platform focused on giving you tools to build your brand, directly connect with your audience, and analyze the right data. And, you keep 100% of your ticket price with us! Sign up for a free, no-obligation account today! Happy eventing! We hope you enjoyed this article on how to sell more tickets using your website!

 

About the Author:

Carl Diesing, Managing Director – Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with on-going web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.