How much should you charge for a ticket? What's the most effective ticket strategy? When should you start promotions? How should you promote?
In this Run of Show Weekly video, Splash's CEO Ben Hindman answers all these questions and reveals the data that will change the way you price and promote your events.
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Ticket sellers, welcome to this week's Run of Show. You're gonna like this one.
We’ve gotten a lot of inbound asking us to give you numbers around how to put butts in the seats and make them pay for them.
It's not easy, I've been there — deciding how you're gonna price, how you're gonna promote. So we analyzed a ton of information, ran some regression analyses, worked with our data scientists, asked a lot of hard questions and looked for patterns. We found some pretty interesting stuff, and I'm gonna share it with you today.
Today we're gonna dive into how to price and promote your events when you're selling tickets. What I will say off-the-bat is this, and this is the bad news, we looked at events that were selling tickets for anywhere as low as a dollar and anywhere as high as $20,000, and in each of those types of buckets, we saw sold-out events. We saw people who were able to drive ticket sales.
It was hard to find patterns that were always very useful.
But we were able to find a couple gems that 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 7:1 rule. The 7:1 rule is pretty simple.
Let's run a quick scenario: let's say you were to sell tickets for $10. Then you send out 100 invitations and 10 people bought tickets. That's a 10% conversion rate. Now, if you were to increase that ticket value $7 more — so to $17 — you're going to see a 9% conversion rate. What I mean to say is you're gonna see a 1% drop.
For every $7 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 sell out.
What it does mean is you're gonna need to do more promotion if you increase those prices. Every seven dollars, 1% drop in conversion.
As you're thinking about where to land on the ticket price, we saw something pretty interesting. We started looking at all of the people who sold out their events. But did they have anything in common? More often than not, we saw what we call the power of nines.
They were using nine-dollar ticket increments, so as opposed to $30 tickets, they were selling for a very specific number, $29. As you're thinking about where exactly to purchase your ticket, try $69, try $109. We find that those sell out at a higher consistency.
Last on the pricing side, we're talking about conversion ratios and that's definitely something you want to watch as your pricing. You can also use pricing as a lever, 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, this means discounted pricing if you buy now, while tickets last. You should see, when they're sending out e-mails, they're really driving this urgency with countdown clocks and talking about how many tickets they've already sold.
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.
Once you've set up your pricing, the next step is to think about your promotion. 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 analyzed, they began promotion two months out. Despite the fact that they were out the gates with a 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 e-mail you send, half of those people are going to eventually buy. 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 wanna pay attention to that first e-mail and who actually engages with it because with enough nurture we can actually get those people to eventually buy.
Something that I often will think about is what time to send the invitation. What our data showed was that the highest likelihood of purchase, when people purchase the most tickets is between the hours of 12PM and 1PM. So what does that say? What that says to me is that when your marketing team is 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 might as well wait 'til 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.
We know when to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. You know, it really is important to take advantage of Google Analytics and look in your analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from.
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 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.
Last but not least, we found across all of these events that we're 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, 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 at the event.
Social clout is a really powerful mechanism, and I would urge you to take advantage of it. You need a 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.
I hope you find that useful. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running regression analyses.
Want to bring in more revenue and drive more pipeline? Get the comp ticket strategy for your event.
Ben Hindman is co-founder and CEO of Splash, the country's fastest-growing event marketing platform that helps businesses and brands more effectively market through their events. An event planner turned tech entrepreneur, events are in Ben’s DNA. Prior to starting Splash, Ben was the Director of Events at Thrillist, where he produced large-scale events from concerts to mystery fly-aways.