Selling early bird – or pre-sales – tickets is generally considered a good idea when you organise events well in advance. By offering a 20 to 50% discount compared with the final sale price, you can really promote your event to future attendees and thus increase the number of tickets sold. With the help of an online ticketing solution, setting up early bird tickets is a piece of cake. One of our articles details how to set-up your early bird tickets, but let’s first examine why early bird tickets are so important and what strategy you should adopt to sell more tickets.
Contents
- Why should you sell early bird tickets for your event?
- Prepare a sales strategy for your early bird tickets
- When should you sell early bird tickets?
- Set-up your early bird ticket price
- Use tips that work for early bird ticket sales
1. Why should you sell early bird tickets for your event?
First of all, early bird tickets are a rather easy way to please your most loyal customers, the ones who are willing to book their tickets weeks – or even months – in advance
Offer them a 20 to 50% discount on the ticket price and let them know about the benefits of buying their ticket earlier than most people:
- Why wait when you can save money now?
- You are guaranteed to have a ticket for the event.
- You can prepare your trip in advance.
- You get benefits — meals, gifts, etc.
As the event planner, you are ensuring that a substantial part of your tickets are being sold and can be more relaxed about what’s coming. This will allow you to focus on other event-planning related tasks. Waiting queues will also be shorter at the event. The more you sell your tickets online in advance, the shorter the queue, the lower the stress and frustration of attendees ad staff on the day.
2. Prepare a sales strategy for your early bird tickets
Choose the right price
Before you do anything else, set a realistic price for each ticket type. Use the following formula to keep things simple:
Minimum price of ticket = total cost of the event / number of expected attendees
Use tiered pricing
Offer a range of prices for each ticket type based on attendees’ willingness to pay. The benefits of each ticket type must be clearly explained so as not to disappoint attendees during the event.
Look for peak periods of sale
The goal here is to create and maintain a momentum so that your event is top of mind of your target audience. Key moments will help you achieve this:
- Exclusive pre-sales — discounts are offered only to people who attended a previous event or who subscribe to your newsletter.
- Early bird tickets — discounted tickets for people looking to buy over a limited time, from the moment your event is announced.
- Bargains — special promotional campaigns spread out over your sales period.
3. When should you sell early bird tickets?
As early as possible! The date you start selling your tickets full-price does not matter. You should just make sure that your event does happen. Otherwise, you may find yourself in a complicated situation. If possible, open the first batch of early bird tickets to your most loyal followers. You can then open the sale to the general public, or offer another discount. Exclusivity is a good way to retain your audience.
Be sure to communicate well and specify the window of opportunity for early bird tickets in your terms and conditions and communication material. Your early bird ticket sale must have an end-date or a limited number of tickets available. Up to you. You can also plan several tiers, starting with super early birds, and so on!
4. Set-up your early bird ticket price
Using an online ticketing solution, selling tickets at various prices and over different periods is easy. You can read our dedicated article to this topic to set-up your tickets in a few clicks.
5. Use tips that work for early bird ticket sales
Create a sense of urgency
Communicate about the exclusivity and limited time of the sale to show the urgency of the situation. To create this psychological effect, use marketing tips, a precise schedule and good online registration tools. Your attendees will make faster decisions and will be happy to purchase your tickets.
Use an online ticketing platform
Online ticketing and registration software will be very helpful. Professional tools make your process faster and help you obtain better results in terms of ticket sales.
Send targeted emails
They may be less trendy than social media but emails are still a very efficient way to sell early bird tickets. In particular, if this is not your first event, you should have a good database of email addresses already.
Use social media
All social media surf on the following viral principle: the more a post is liked, the more it will be exposed to a large number of users. In this context, posts with an attractive image and a promise of a discount on early bird ticket purchase will work very well. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., choose the platform where your potential attendees are the most active.
Sell tickets for your next event
Lors d’un événement, mettez en vente les billets de votre prochain événement auprès des participants présents. S’ils apprécient le moment qu’ils sont en train de passer, ils auront envie de revenir à la prochaine édition. Autant assurer leur venue dès que possible. Récompensez-les avec des places prioritaires, des accès VIP, des cadeaux, des repas, etc.
At an event, you should put up for sale tickets for your next event. If the attendees are having a good time at this event, they will want to come back for the next one. You may as well secure their presence as early as possible. Reward them with preferential seats, VIP access, gifts, meals, etc.
It is clear that early bird tickets are a must in event planning because they ensure that you make regular ticket sales easily.
In order to best prepare your ticket prices and be free in your choice, use a professional solution like Weezevent. Discover all our features in terms of ticket types, forms, and our custom options by clicking below:
