How to make the most of Black Friday to sell more tickets?

Tick­et­ing experts gen­er­al­ly advise event plan­ners to pay atten­tion to their tick­et sales curve. Often, atten­dees pur­chase their tick­ets either at the moment the tick­ets go on sale or right before the event. To pre­vent the pres­sure ris­ing just before an event, when it is dif­fi­cult to guess whether last minute sales will actu­al­ly hap­pen, there are mar­ket­ing cam­paigns you can run to boost sales. Black Fri­day is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty. Here is how to make the most of this major mar­ket­ing event.

Con­tents

1. Make your flash sales count
2. Use your best chan­nels to com­mu­ni­cate
3. Sell your tick­ets online
4. Set quo­tas and an end-date for your sales
5. Beware of peaks in traf­fic

1. Make your flash sales count

Offer­ing dis­count­ed tick­ets is not enough to sell dur­ing Black Fri­day. Your offer needs to be suf­fi­cient­ly attrac­tive for a poten­tial attendee to decide to pur­chase a tick­et for your event when hun­dreds of oth­er prod­ucts and ser­vices are also offered at heav­i­ly dis­count­ed prices. A 24hr flash-sale with a dis­count of 40 to 60% can con­vince your audi­ence to make a deci­sion. Whether it is a dis­count, a free gift offered with the tick­et, 2‑for‑1 tick­ets, etc. the buy­er needs to make a deci­sion with­in a few sec­onds and in a few clicks.

For the 2018 Foire de Paris, the event organ­is­ers used Weezevent to set-up a 24h flash sale allow­ing them to sell 1,000 tick­ets at a 30% dis­count­ed price. This amount of dai­ly tick­et sales has only been topped dur­ing the 13 days of the event itself — and for a spe­cial Valentine’s Day offer. Yet, Black Fri­day occured 6 months before the event. It is, there­fore, proof that this kind of mar­ket­ing cam­paign works. As a reminder, here is how to cre­ate and struc­ture tick­et types for your event.

2. Use your best channels to communicate

For large-scale mar­ket­ing events such as Black Fri­day, con­sumers are gen­er­al­ly sat­u­rat­ed with mes­sages on every pos­si­ble com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel. If you want your cam­paign to be effec­tive, you will need to think about how to reach the peo­ple most like­ly to pur­chase your tick­ets at dis­count­ed prices, rather than aim­ing at max­i­mum expo­sure. This should be reflect­ed in your choice of com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels.

You should favour your most cost-effec­tive chan­nels, rather than the ones promis­ing “mir­a­cle” results. Here are three exam­ples — up to you to assess whether they would work for your event:

• Ultra-tar­get­ed newslet­ter: Weezevent helps you analyse your event and list the peo­ple who have attend­ed your events most fre­quent­ly. That way, you can refine your mes­sage. For instance you could write: “You are among our most loy­al cus­tomers, and we think Black Fri­day is the per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to say thank you with an exclu­sive offer”. This will pre­vent you from send­ing a gener­ic email that may go unno­ticed among the 30–50 oth­er Black Fri­day offers that your con­tacts will receive.
• Insta­gram: Using the Close friends list, you can post a Sto­ry shar­ing an announce­ment or a pro­mo code to a cho­sen list of con­tacts. You can edit your close friends list by click­ing on your pro­file pic­ture at the bot­tom right of the app, then on the 3 hor­i­zon­tal bars and final­ly on “close friends”.
• Google Ads: Using the search engine ads, you can tar­get the peo­ple who are already look­ing for tick­ets for a con­cert or event sim­i­lar to yours. An attrac­tive mes­sage and pre­cise tar­get­ing will ensure that you don’t throw away your mon­ey. Clear­ly dis­play “-50% on [artist] con­cert tick­ets in [town]”.

3. Sell your tickets online

As indi­cat­ed in the name, Black Fri­day hap­pens on a Fri­day and most peo­ple won’t take a day off to enjoy the many deals avail­able in the shops. This is why Black Fri­day has become such an impor­tant Inter­net oper­a­tion and you should sell your tick­ets online. Oth­er­wise, you may miss sales oppor­tu­ni­ties because most of your poten­tial atten­dees will want to make the most of Black Fri­day in the morn­ing before work, or dur­ing their lunch break. You should offer a lim­it­ed num­ber of tick­ets or at least announce it in order to reward the quick­est buy­ers and prof­it from your oper­a­tion.

4. Set quotas and an end-date for your sales

If you feel that a high num­ber of peo­ple will want to ben­e­fit from your offer, you should make a lim­it­ed amount of tick­ets avail­able so as not to find your­self in a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion if your event can­not wel­come every­one. You should also set an end-date for your offer. Black Fri­day can be extend­ed to the fol­low­ing Mon­day (Cyber Mon­day). You should base your deci­sion on the time you think your poten­tial buy­ers will have and remem­ber that the more lim­it­ed your offer is — in time and quan­ti­ty — the faster the pur­chase deci­sion will be.

All quo­ta and date options are detailed in our help sec­tion here: Cre­at­ing and struc­tur­ing tick­et types for my event.

5. Beware of peaks in traffic

Among the events that gen­er­ate the most traf­fic on e‑commerce web­sites, Black Fri­day is at the top. On Weezevent, your min­isites and tick­et­ing wid­gets are pro­tect­ed because our sys­tem auto­mat­i­cal­ly adjusts to peaks in traf­fic. How­ev­er, if you have added your Weezevent wid­get to one of your web­site pages, you should ensure that your page can with­stand the poten­tial surge in vis­its.

Now that you know every­thing about Black Fri­day, it is time to start prepar­ing your offers for this once-a-year oppor­tu­ni­ty. Click on the but­ton below to dis­cov­er how our ser­vices can help you:

Sell­ing tick­ets online