8 Essential Tips to Launch A Successful Online Ticket Store
Because of perceived ease and flexibility, online ticketing has received a fair amount of popularity. With the forecasted revenue of $90 billion in 2027, there are endless growth opportunities but selling tickets the right way is of utmost importance.
Selling tickets online is undeniably the most complex part of event organization. Traffic peaks, bad bots, and poor customer experience lead to missed sales as well as declined trust and reputation. So what are the best ways to sell tickets online?
We will take you through some valuable tips for launching a successful online ticket store so you can provide a good first impression and a seamless experience to attendees.
Leverage a Ticketing Solution
As modern customers demand speedy responses, you have to keep pace with their evolving expectations to sell tickets online and expand your reach. Luckily, ticketing solutions are equipped with tools and technologies to create a prompt and stress-free ticket-selling process.
Additionally, you can tailor these ticketing solutions around your business demands. While choosing a solution for your ticket store, consider factors such as ease of use, ticket management features, payment options, customization capabilities, and of course, pricing.
If you want to offer an engaging and user-friendly ticketing platform to your customers at an incredibly affordable fee, TicketsCandy is your advanced one-stop solution. Integrating the innovative and intuitive ticketing widget of TicketsCandy in your website will let you deliver an outclass experience to your prospects.
With an easy 2 step checkout flow, auto-widget syncing, and best-in-performance support and functionality, TicketsCandy is all set to take your event to the next level. More so, its effective marketing efforts will maximize your reach and increase your revenue. You can sell your tickets anywhere and get an insight into each purchase or abandonment.
Utilize SEO and Content Marketing
Visibility is the heart of your online ticket store. If you are not visible to your target audience, how can you visualize a houseful scenario? So utilize the power of SEO to increase your chances of getting found and reaching a wider audience.
For this to happen, understand your target audience, their geographic location, event preferences, interests, and purchasing behavior to tailor your marketing efforts effectively.
Conduct strong keyword research to identify what search terms your audience uses while searching for events in your niche. Then incorporate them into your website content, including event descriptions, blog posts, and landing pages.
Additionally, add relevant information in your content that your prospects might possibly be interested in knowing, including the events, venues, artists, and timing, among others. Do not forget to leverage the power of social media marketing as well. By following a strong online marketing strategy, you can drive people to your site and maximize your sales potential.
Optimize Your Ticket Store for Mobile Devices
More than 86% of the world’s population owns smartphones, this means the essence of a successful event is optimizing your ticket store for mobile devices. By offering mobile shopping, you can increase customer engagement and spark their interest in your event.
Integrate a mobile responsive design in your website and improve loading times. More so, add a ticketing widget right into your web page so it can be perfectly seen on mobile devices and other small screens.
The payment gateway you choose must also align with mobile phone users. It is also wise to test your site’s mobile phone compatibility to ensure your pictures, videos, and content easily adapt to small screens with short loading times.
The intuitive and engaging ticket widget of TicketsCandy can be easily integrated into your ticket store. This will help your visitors make a direct purchase without leaving your sites, ensuring a seamless customer experience.
Configure Payment Processing
Having reliable and accessible payment options at the checkout page makes a big difference in your sales. According to a study, 7 percent of card abandonment comes from a lack of payment options. This means you have to offer a seamless and trustworthy payment system while also catering to multiple payment options, so your prospects can not deny sales due to payment concerns.
Therefore, choosing a solution for your ticket store that offers mobile wallet payments like TicketsCandy is a great way to retain customers. It offers robust Google Pay and Apple Pay wallet payments to encourage people to buy your tickets. Besides, this ticketing solution accepts credit cards, issues quick refunds, and creates discount codes to tempt prospects, and the revenue generated goes straight to your bank account without delay.
With multiple payment options, guest checkout, and prompt order confirmation, you will be capable of delivering a hassle-free customer experience and engaging conversion.
Manage Website Inflow
Getting web visitors more than capacity means your website is soon likely to crash, especially if there is a timed ticket sale in your ticket store. Around 12% of online shoppers abandoned their carts because of website-related errors, which means peak traffic can cost you missed sales.
Source: Zippia
Therefore, you need to know how much web traffic your website can realistically handle.
Load testing is a great way to get this meaningful insight. This performance testing uses simulated traffic to put demands on your app or website and highlight when, why, and where your website starts to crack down.
This meaningful insight will let you know where to focus your site optimization efforts. Likewise, you can send email blasts out in batches, so visitors can’t turn to your website at once. That said, there is no way to limit visitors coming from other sources.
At least knowing about the arrival rate of your website visitors will let you know that your website can run into a problem. If the rate of arrival is likely to exceed the capacity, shutting off those power-intensive features on your website that are indifferent to the customer journey might do the trick.
Offer Personalization and Rewards
Personalization is a great marketing strategy to expand the reach of your online ticket store. You can recommend events based on your customer’s purchasing or browsing history. Tailoring your emails according to the individual preferences of customers will engage your chances to stand out and increase revenue.
Similarly, you can establish loyalty programs to reward repeat customers with exclusive perks, discounts, or early access to tickets. These efforts will foster customer engagement and take your business to new heights.
Set a Reasonable Cart Timeout Period
Setting a cart timeout period can avert the overflow of web traffic to some extent. You just have to set a suitable period within which your customer can comfortably input details without locking the tickets, making them unavailable for others.
For instance, a 3-4 minute timeout will stress out users and kick them out of the checkout flow. On the contrary, a 15-20 minutes cart timeout period will unnecessarily prolong the process, negatively impacting the availability of tickets.
So a time period somewhere between 5-10 minutes is enough to be said to be reasonable. However, the cart timeout period also depends on the complexity of the checkout period. A general admission ticket shouldn’t take longer than a few minutes, but if users have a seating selection option, the process can take longer.
Re-engage Audiences Through Email
Another way to increase customer engagement is to guide customers throughout their ticket-purchasing journey in your ticket store. Once they smoothly go through the checkout flow, make sure to send confirmation emails to all your customers to avoid any confusion and strengthen your relationship with them.
Your confirmation should include venue details, order number, event date and time, Expiry date of tickets, and customer service contact email. Moreover, add a clear CTA button to download their tickets or a QR-code/barcode in the email. The more comfort and ease you deliver, the more those one-time visitors will likely turn into your permanent assets.
If you are using a ticketing solution, make sure it offers an auto-generated confirmation email feature with all the required details of the purchase. Moreover, your tickling solution must send you an insight into the people who’ve abandoned the purchase. Maybe their Wi-fi got crashed, or they got distracted, or have any confusion.
You can win those distracted clients back to the sales funnel by leveraging cart abandonment email campaigns. Furthermore, you can offer discounts or deals to allure shoppers back.
Final Words
A competitive online ticketing industry demands great knowledge and innovative capabilities to make your event a success. Your online ticket store must ensure a seamless customer experience to increase revenue generation. While looking for a ticketing solution, consider its ease of use, customization options, payment gateways, security features, and scalability.
Selling tickets online via a great ticketing platform like TicketsCandy not only increases your sales potential but also develops the valuable trust of people in your business. The service charges of TicketsCandy are lower than many other providers, leading to competitive ticket prices and hence, increasing your conversions.
These tips would help you in selling tickets for your event in your online ticket store and in building a thriving business in the competitive online ticketing industry.
