Selling tickets for festivals is more than just putting them online and hoping for the best. To truly maximise your sales and build a loyal community, it’s important to have a clear and effective ticketing strategy. In this article, we’ll walk you through the most successful approaches, explain how to keep your audience engaged, and provide tips on timing, pricing, and communication. Let’s dive in.
Summary
Building a strong foundation for your festival ticketing strategy
1. Harness data and pre-registration effectively
The first step to a successful ticketing strategy is gathering data. Before your festival even goes on sale, encourage potential attendees to pre-register. This gives you valuable insights into your audience and helps you build anticipation. Consider offering perks, like early access to tickets (at a discount) or exclusive content, to encourage sign-ups.
Collecting data during pre-registration is also key to understanding your audience and running more effective marketing campaigns later on. In the case of festivals, if pre-registration data shows a high number of attendees from a specific region or country, organisers can target localised advertising in those areas through social media, radio, or outdoor ads. Additionally, if data indicates a popular interest in certain music genres or activities, marketing materials can emphasise these features to attract even more attendees from those segments.
Understanding ticket sales patterns
In general, there are three common ticket sales patterns leading up to an event. Knowing the ticket sales patterns of your event can help you determine the optimal timing for launching your ticket sales. Here are the three patterns:
Blast: Most of your tickets sell out the moment sales go live. After that, things settle into a slower, steadier pace. This is the pattern you get when you have a highly engaged audience that has pre-registered, and you have a good launch to your ticket sales.
Bowl: Expect two clear spikes in sales: one when tickets go on sale or your lineup drops, and another closer to the event. This curve is common for many events and festivals. However, the sales in the last weeks are a drawback and could disappoint when the weather turns bad.
Exponential: A slow start, but momentum builds steadily. Sales stay low until shortly before the event, when the majority of tickets are sold. This is a pattern you want to avoid because it is risky. Until shortly before the event, you will not yet have clarity on the success of your campaign, and therefore, no time to adjust costs. And when the weather turns bad, your sales disappoint.
By far the most common pattern for festivals is the bowl pattern, where there is a large peak of sales shortly after ticket sales go live and a second peak that begins to rise closer to the festival. Please keep this in mind when reading the strategy outlined in this article.
Optimise your festival’s ticket sales
Determine the most effective ticketing approach
1. Build and nurture your community
For festivals, we recommend combining the ‘open/close’ and ‘phased’ ticketing strategies. The combination of these strategies helps create urgency while allowing you to build momentum over time. Here’s how to approach it:
1. Early access (part of open/close)
You can start offering early access tickets to your dedicated community long before your ticket sales go public. This can help build momentum for your festival. By providing exclusive access to past attendees, members, or partners, you create a sense of privilege and urgency.
You can even start selling for next year’s edition during this year’s festival. Implementing QR codes on promotional materials, such as flyers or screens at your current event, can direct interested individuals to your ticket shop seamlessly. This not only simplifies the purchasing process but also capitalises on the excitement of the moment. Consider selling these early access tickets at a very competitive price.
An early access campaign is only available for a limited time. Nevertheless, your ticket sales campaign has officially not started. So close the early access campaign again within 1-2 weeks. Thereafter, ticket sales are closed.
2. Post-event engagement
You can start offering early access tickets to your dedicated community long before your ticket sales go public. This can help build momentum for your festival. By providing exclusive access to past attendees, members, or partners, you create a sense of privilege and urgency.
After your early access campaign, ticket sales will be closed again. Ensure that you have a pre-registration form available on the website or in our ticket shop. You should aim to have all website traffic convert to a sign-up for the general ticket sales, which will begin at a future date.
Why register? To be able to buy a ticket (build hype!) and to be able to access the limited number of early bird tickets.
Even though you don’t sell tickets, this period following your festival is crucial for sustaining engagement organically. Sharing highlights, gathering feedback, and trying to get pre-registrations for the general ticket releases.
💡 Tip: use an event-focused CRM like Gigz. Connected to Weezticket, it automatically pulls in all your ticketing data, allowing you to segment your messages with precision. You can also automate your campaigns using key triggers (purchase, registration, birthday, etc.), ensuring consistent, personalised communication without manual work. By using visit and purchase data, Gigz also helps you target highly qualified lookalike audiences.
3. Early, Regular, and Late Tickets
A couple of months before the event (approximately 6-7 months), you’ll start preparing the launch of your ticket sales campaign. If well executed at this point, you’ll have ticket sales from the early access campaign, and you’ll have new pre-registrations for the ticket sale release. Now the general campaign is about to start!
Implementing a tiered ticketing strategy addresses the varying purchasing behaviours of your audience. Early bird tickets, offered at a discounted rate, incentivise prompt purchases and provide early revenue. As the event approaches, transitioning to regular and then last-minute pricing can create a sense of urgency, encouraging hesitant buyers to act.
Before you launch, ensure you are ready. The initial launch of the campaign should be hyped up. Email your existing customers and pre-registrations to inform them that the launch is approaching. Run remarketing campaigns on your pre-registrations and existing customers to build hype for the release. You want to launch with a bang. If you have a small customer base or pre-registration list, consider adding paid ads early on to gain sufficient initial traction.
We advise investing more marketing budget early in your ticket sale campaign than at the end of the campaign. Because early ticket buyers will act as mini-ambassadors and will help push your ticket sales later on in the campaign. If you sell 30-40% of your tickets early in the sales campaign, your entire campaign will be much easier.
Choose the optimal time to launch your ticket sales
Launching ticket sales at the right time can make a big difference. Mondays and Wednesdays are proven to be the most effective days, while late mornings (10:00 – 12:00) and early evenings (17:00 – 19:00) are the best times to go live.
Remember to plan your sales launch carefully. A Friday launch, for example, might require extra attention over the weekend to keep the buzz going.
Maintain continuous engagement
Keep your festival top-of-mind with teasers, line-up reveals, and social media posts. Consider using newsletters to re-engage past attendees and run retargeting campaigns throughout the sales period. Always focus on the experience you’re offering rather than just discounts or percentages of tickets sold per phase.
Refine your strategy year after year
After your festival, keep the momentum going by launching ticket sales for next year’s event straight away. Share highlights, gather feedback, and offer early bird options. This helps to build a community of returning visitors.
Use your data to refine your strategies year after year. Look at which areas your attendees come from and adjust your marketing to target those locations. Use a mixture of digital and offline marketing to target your audience in those areas.
💡 Tip: Allow pre-registrations to build anticipation and exclusivity, boosting your chances of selling out when tickets go live. They also give you insights into audience demand, helping you plan and target marketing efforts for maximum impact.
Review emerging patterns
There are a couple of important patterns worth considering:
- The average age of festival attendees has risen from 27 to 31 since 2021.
- Younger audiences are no longer waiting to buy late, but instead are moving toward earlier. lower-cost options.
- For festivals, the average ticket purchase window increased from 105 to 134 days before the event.
- Events with ~20% early bird have a higher likelihood of selling out.
In summary
The sales cycle begins with First Sales, which involves launching early access promotions to generate initial excitement and secure early adopters through limited-time offers and exclusive access. Crucially, before the main launch, you must establish clear objectives and configure sales systems efficiently to ensure readiness, seamless transactions, and an optimised user experience. As sales fully open, the focus shifts to conversion, using personalised communication, reminders, and targeted messaging to boost conversion rates during this peak period. Finally, the post-event phase is key for generating new revenue by capitalising on your audience through merchandise, memberships, or pre-registration for future events, offering exclusive content and loyalty rewards to maintain long-term engagement.
Effective management of ticket sales throughout an event cycle is crucial for maximising revenue, engagement, and long-term attendee relationships. By understanding and strategically addressing each phase, from initial interest to post-event opportunities, organisers can optimise marketing efforts, streamline processes, and boost sales performance.
Selling festival tickets successfully is all about having the right strategy, understanding your audience, and maintaining engagement from start to finish. By combining open/close and phased ticketing strategies, utilising data effectively, and maintaining open communication, you’ll set your festival up for success year after year.
