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