Strategies to Increase Customer Loyalty in Online Ticket Sales

It isn’t easy to earn a customer’s loyalty, but once you do, your event business grows exponentially. A survey reported that 59% of US consumers say that once they are loyal to a company, they are loyal to it for their life and as much as 72% of global consumers feel loyalty to at least one company.

It shows your potential customers are willing to become loyal for life, you need to earn their loyalty before your competitors.

While most event businesses heavily rely on event experience for gaining loyalty, they miss the online ticket sales process. You need to win your customers from the point where their journey begins with your business and they trust your business by converting from a visitor into a customer.

Your customers trust you with their money (by purchasing a ticket) and you need to reciprocate the favor by delivering them the best online ticket sales experience.

This article explores strategies and techniques to convert your customers into loyal customers in online ticket sales right at the point of purchase.

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

6 Strategies to Boost Customer Loyalty with Online Ticket Sales

Here are the best techniques to increase customer loyalty and repeat sales with online ticket sales for your event:

Create a Website for Selling Tickets

Having a dedicated event website makes it easy for your customers to connect with your event and it significantly boosts engagement. You can address customer pain points, list the benefits of attending the event, and address primary fears that potential customers might have.

Research shows that addressing fears on a dedicated landing page increases conversion rate by a whopping 80%.

Collision Conference, for example, has a dedicated website where you find everything about the conference, what it is about, history, speakers, hosts, sponsors, how to buy tickets, schedule, hotels, and even a blog.

You can download Collision 2023 overview by filling out and submitting a form.

This is a perfect approach to building engagement and increasing customer loyalty. The easier you make it for your ideal customers to understand you and buy from you, the more loyal they will be.

Product quality and ease of shopping experience are the primary factors that lead to customer loyalty and you can achieve both with your event website:

Follow these best practices for website creation for selling tickets and improving customer loyalty:

1. Create a dedicated event landing page with all the details about your event
2. Clearly define and highlight your brand value so people can relate to it. As much as 84% of people are likely to be loyal to a brand whose values align with theirs
3. Make it easy for your visitors to find their way on your website
4. Keep it simple and short
5. Improve UX with design and content
6. Focus on benefit-driven copy
7. Collect email addresses with a lead magnet to engage with your potential customers.

Use a Powerful Ticketing Platform

Your event website with a well-designed landing page is the beginning towards creating a loyal customer base, it is not the end. The ticketing app makes a lot of difference as it plays a direct role in user experience which translates into engagement and customer loyalty.

A sophisticated ticketing solution that provides your customers with a seamless experience with added benefits will compel them to stick with your company and buy again. This is a reason why you should stick with TicketsCandy that offers a seamless end-to-end ticketing experience to your ideal customers.

TicketsCandy comes with a user-friendly ticketing widget that allows you to sell anywhere online. Your customers can purchase tickets easily across all devices using their preferred payment options. For example, users can use their mobile wallets to buy tickets with a single tap.

What makes TicketsCandy better than other ticketing solutions is that it doesn’t just focus on making it easy for sellers to set up and integrate it into their website, but it has a super friendly experience for buyers (your customers).

Don’t compromise on your ticketing software if you want loyal customers.

Optimize Checkout Process

A smooth checkout process plays a key role in customer satisfaction and loyalty. A survey reported that two-thirds of consumers rated their checkout experience as extremely influential on whether they will return to a business or not.

Another survey revealed that 74% of consumers are likely to switch due to a difficult purchase process and would never return to such a business.

Improve the checkout process, simplify it, and make it super-easy for your target audience to buy tickets from your website.

One of the biggest reasons why people leave without buying is extra fees along with a long and complicated checkout process. Some 26% of people will leave your website if the checkout process is too long and difficult to understand:

Source: Astra

Follow these best practices for checkout process optimization and sell more online tickets with an increase in customer loyalty:

• Keep the checkout process short. TicketsCandy, offers you a 2-step checkout that significantly improves the experience and increases the conversion rate
• Allow guest checkout where possible
• Minimize the number of forms and steps in the checkout process
• Offer multiple payment options.

Keep Ticket Price Low

This might be surprising but price is the top factor that keeps customers loyal to their brand. As much as 62% of people said that they feel loyal to a brand based on price:

Source: Zendesk

Keeping ticket prices low without hidden charges and unexpected ghost fees is the number one rule to gain customer loyalty. It is easier to avoid hidden charges and keep ticket price transparent, but it gets hard to keep the price low as you have to manage different types of costs.

One way to keep pricing low is by using free ticketing software that doesn’t charge you an insanely high service fee. If your ticketing tool charges you a 15% service fee, reducing ticket price will get extremely tough.

At TicketsCandy, you can pass on their 0.9% fee to ticket buyers, which is extremely low compared to other ticketing platforms. This means you can reduce ticket prices and increase online ticket sales with an increase in customer loyalty.

Remember, every penny counts.

Improve Post Purchase Experience

One area where most businesses lack is that they don’t take post-purchase experience seriously, and that’s where you lose customers. Customers don’t end the transaction at the purchase stage, they evaluate their experience after the purchase and then decide if they should buy again or not:

Source: ReturnGo

A survey reported that 86% of customers consider their post-purchase experience a crucial factor in deciding to buy again and it increases customer advocacy:

Source: Voxco

The importance of customer experience after purchase is more important than online ticket sales than other businesses. This is because customers purchase tickets in advance and well before the event. The way you interact, connect, and engage with your customers after selling them tickets defines how they’d interact with your brand in the future.

There are several ways to improve the post-purchase experience after selling tickets for your event:

• Set up an autoresponder and send weekly emails to keep your customers updated about the event and updates
• Send regular reminders as to how they can make their participation more exciting. This could include advice, tips, and recommendations
• Share your support channels including phone support
• Create a referral program for your customers and encourage them to bring their family and friends to the event. This keeps them hooked and engaged.

Email marketing is the best channel for customer engagement and loyalty. Don’t lose customers once you have their email addresses.

Offer Superior Customer Services

Great customer support improves repeat business and it is essential for business growth, customer experience, and customer loyalty. A major part of the post-purchase experience is your customer service.

A Gartner study reported that the way you approach and resolve customer issues define customer loyalty. The probability that a customer will stay with your business after a value enhancing interaction with customer services is a whopping 82%:

Source: Garther

Here is how value enhancement is achieved, according to Gartner:

1. Anticipate customer needs
2. Help your customers achieve a goal with your product. For example, share a PDF of the previous event via email or send them a freebie (e.g., pen, notepad, etc.) before the event
3. Educate your customers on how they can benefit from your product. As discussed, send tips and recommendations on how they can get the most from the event.

You have to offer customer support through multiple channels including live chat, email, social media, telephone, and messaging. Develop SOPs for your support team and guide them on how to work towards delivering value to the customers.

Follow these customer support best practices to boost customer loyalty after online ticket sales:

• Ensure quick response time. Customers expect to receive a reply from a company in less than 12 hours
• Be available on the leading social media platforms especially Twitter to address customer complains
• Use social listening to find customer issues on forums and places like Reddit
• Train your agents and guide them to focus on value enhancement.

Final Thoughts

Having loyal customers means you end up reducing customer acquisition cost significantly and it gets easier to sell tickets for your upcoming events. Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition, and a single loyal customer won’t just buy tickets but loyal customers act as brand ambassadors.

Nothing beats word of mouth marketing and this is what loyal customers do.

Start working towards improving the online ticket selling experience for your customers. The initial experience with your company starts with the landing page and purchase process. You need to win loyalty at this stage.

Choose your online ticketing tool smartly as it doesn’t just impact sales and payment processing, but it is linked to customer experience and loyalty. A smooth ticket buying process will keep your customers hooked with your brand.