The perfect on sale

You’ve booked your artists, managed to find the perfect venue and gathered together all other ingredients for the perfect event – the only thing left to do is let your customers know the tickets are on sale and decide when to release the information to the baying hordes of people who’ll be attending.

Part of this is the on sale process. Listing an event and adding tickets for sale straight away is a perfectly legitimate way of doing things, but sometimes it’s a good idea to follow a set of rules which mean customers get the chance to become more excited about it all.

Let us know in advance

On sales vary in demand, but if you are anticipating a lot of people wanting to come to your event it makes sense to let us know about it with plenty of time to spare. We can prepare articles and festival pages in advance so the minute an announcement kicks in we have news ready for it, plus it also helps us position promotion for you better.

Newsletters and Eflyers for example are booked months in advance, and if you’re selecting an on sale date close to payday then there will be a lot of demand from other promoters – so you don’t want to miss out. Black Friday in late November is one of the busiest retail days of the year and this bleeds into ticket buying as well, so make sure you communicate with us as much as possible to make sure whatever plan you follow, we can support as much as possible.

It’s also worth noting that the sooner your event is listed, the sooner it will rank on Google – people searching for your event or the headline artist for instance would find it higher up in the search results, and are far more likely to click onto the event listing.

Prewarn Your Customers

Photo: Parklife

It’s always a good idea to ramp up excitement for an event by announcing a time for ticket sales or a line up announcement in advance. Looking to sell on a Thursday at 10am? Then releasing the details earlier in the week with reminders in the build up makes it easier for people to know when something is going live and makes tickets sell quicker as well. Parklife did this most recently, teasing line up announcements and giving plenty of notice before the tickets were finally released.  The event was well advertised with a strong social media presence, catching the imagination of customers, and ticket sales have already reflected that.

Going to an event often involves ringing round your mates to see who else is going and, for higher priced showcases, making sure the money is right too. Giving customers a few days to get these important components together makes them buying tickets all the more likely.

Don’t over egg it

On sales are brilliant ways to harness excitement for your events, but at the same time they only work when the event is definitely something that will experience big demand. Hyping up an event too much can cause your audience to switch off; if you need any advice on what plan to follow you can speak to our account manager team.

How it’s done well

Recently we sold out our allocation for the final ever Godskitchen party in minutes, and it was done at only 25% of our server capacity and by following the steps above (this news article was written two days in advance as part of the process). By contrast Ticketweb experienced key issues with customers being unable to access the tickets, so we’re a retailer capable of dealing with this level of demand.

Another tool Godskitchen utilised was the pre-registration option, where customers can register to get priority access to tickets. This benefits the promoter by collecting customer data leading up the on sale, and is a great tool for building hype. Social media posts can be written letting people know that pre-sales have sold out, but to hang on for tickets coming on general sale. It can also be made compulsory to share the fact the customer has pre-registered by generating a tweet or Facebook post letting people know, again giving your event more exposure. If you believe your event will have high enough demand for this feature please contact an account manager who will walk you through the process.