Blog
Nov 10, 2021
In 2020, basically every industry was disrupted by the COVID-19 outbreak, which kept us inside for the vast majority of the year. The events industry possibly took the hardest hit. Countless exhibitions, conferences, and concerts were canceled because of health concerns.
As Forbes reports, more than 83 million event-goers had their plans canceled. This resulted in billions of dollars lost for event organizers. Fortunately, things are slowly going back to normal. Venues, zoos, museums, and galleries started reopening and expanding their capacity limits in early 2021.
If you’re a venue, museum, or gallery manager, one of the biggest questions on your mind is: how to sell tickets to your potential customers more efficiently? Selling tickets in-person has become much harder since people are still opting to stay inside.
Thanks to the recent increase in Internet usage, the most effective tactic is to sell tickets online. Doing this will allow you to:
- Sell tickets more quickly and efficiently
- Market your event to a lot more people
- Reach a much more diverse audience
But you’re wondering how to sell tickets online? It’s rather simple and with the right tools, you can start selling in just a few hours.
You can sell tickets online for an event in just four steps:
- Select an online ticketing system to monitor and track ticket sales
- Create a merchant account for easy payment processing
- Build a dedicated website to showcase your event
- Leverage social media, influencers, and advertisers to market the event
Of course, if you’ve never done it before, you need to know more. Luckily, we’re here to help you. Read on to find a complete guide on how to sell tickets online.
Start By Selecting a Ticketing System
To sell tickets for your event online, you need all of the basic tools to manage the sales process. A ticketing platform allows you just that.
With an effective ticketing system, you can ensure that every ticket sold comes with a unique, scannable QR code. QR codes are pretty common nowadays, which is why many people forget about their benefits, including:
- Making ticket checking much easier
- Speeding up event check-ins for guests
- Effectively preventing ticket fraud
If you’re looking for an effective ticketing platform at a low price, TicketsCandy is your best option.
How to Sell Tickets Online for an Event with TicketsCandy
When selecting an online ticketing system, there are two things you need to pay attention to; their service and fees. Luckily for you, TicketsCandy has you covered on both fronts. Not only does the platform offer top-notch ticket selling and monitoring tools, but it does so for free.
You see, to provide a business with services, a ticketing solution needs to charge a fee. More often than not, the fee is charged on a per-ticket basis. Most online ticketing solutions out there will charge you between 5% and 10%. TicketsCandy is far more cost-effective than that.
TicketsCandy’s online ticketing platform is completely free for event organizers. It charges a 0.9% flat fee to your customers as they check out. The fee is added to the ticket price and is so low most customers will barely notice it.
If you want to absorb the fee rather than pass it on, you can do that as well. So, if you sell $10,000 worth of tickets, you only need to pay a $90 fee that is automatically deducted when you start making your first ticket sales.
The best thing about this ticketing software: there are no hidden or additional charges. The platform is free for you to use at all times (unless you decide to absorb fees) without having to sign any contracts.
How to Set Up an Account on TicketsCandy
You’ve taken our advice and chosen TicketsCandy to sell tickets online for an event. What’s the next move? You need to sign up for an account of course. To do this, you need to visit their website, click on “Get Started” and enter your personal information (full name, email, and organization information).
After that, you can create your first event! They have a multitude of articles and videos on their support page to help you set up your tickets and a dedicated support team that is always happy to help.
Of course, different events require different approaches, so it makes sense that TicketsCandy has people experienced in:
- Museums and galleries
- Popups and exhibitions
- Zoos
- Festivals
- Concerts and stage events
Event organizers around the globe have sold millions of tickets using TicketsCandy. The platform managers have made the process a stress-free experience.
How to Use TicketsCandy for Event Ticketing
TicketsCandy allows its users to create unique schedules and ticket types for ticket purchasers. For example, many museums offer tickets at different prices. You can sell tickets for children, adults, and seniors at three different price points.
You can also offer free tickets using the platform, as well. Some of the stand out features TicketsCandy offers include:
- Unlimited Tickets: You can sell as many event tickets as the venue allows.
- Event Calendars: Notifies your attendees about the time and place of the event.
- Attendee Data: You can collect basic information about your guests.
- Ticket Scanner: Send tickets via email and scan them at the door.
- Revenue Control: Receive the revenue of ticket sales directly.
- Dedicated Support: Personalized support to help you sell tickets online.
Again, if you’re not sure how to make use of these features, you can always contact their support team to walk you through the process. As soon as you set up your first event, you can start making online ticket sales and receive all the revenue directly to your bank account.
Create a Merchant Account
There are over 15 billion payment cards on the planet. To process card information, you need to get yourself a merchant account. What’s that, you might be asking?
It’s a type of bank account that allows businesses to accept the client’s payment in several ways, including debit and credit cards.
TicketsCandy’s Official Partner Square
If you’re using TicketsCandy, you will make use of their partnership with Square and all of the perks that come with it.
If you don’t already know, Square is a mobile payment company located in San Francisco. It was founded by Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey. Over the years, Square has become one of the largest merchant services on the market, with annual net revenue of $4,7 billion.
In the last couple of years, Square has managed to become the most trusted merchant platform in the United States. That’s why Square is such an easy choice for all TicketsCandy users.
How Square Helps Your Event Ticket Sales
What are some of the perks that come with using Square as your merchant? First off, you’ll receive a fully customized merchant processing system with 24/7 support. If you have any problems with your account, a customer support agent will take care of it in minutes.
When you register for a Square account through TicketsCandy, you receive personalized onboarding, and professional assistance to set up your account hassle-free.
Consider Merchant Payment Processing Fees
If you’re organizing a serious event, you’re probably making a detailed plan. When creating a budget, you need to consider that Square’s fee isn’t a part of the TicketsCandy pricing plan. But don’t worry, this fee is pretty low too.
Square charges a flat rate of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. TicketsCandy also allows you to pass these fees on to the event attendees. This will slightly increase the price of tickets, however if you want to keep the original price, you can keep the processing fees for yourself.
Build a Website to Showcase Your Event
Once you create a merchant account, you’re ready to start selling tickets online. Now you just need a website to showcase your event and sell the tickets from. If you already have a website, you can just use the TicketsCandy widget to add the tickets to your page.
However, if you don’t, you can create a custom website, or hire a professional builder to do the job for you. The best options out there are Atavion, Wix, and Squarespace.
Sell Tickets Online for an Event with Atavion
Looking to create a multi-functional, easy-to-use website to increase ticket sales? You should check out Atavion. This is the largest custom website development company in the US that offers affordable plans, advanced features, and promotional tools that allow you to market your events easily.
While Wix and Squarespace allow you to build a website using their tools, you have to do it yourself and they don’t offer a lot of customization options. If you don’t have any web design experience, you won’t be able to create a website that will stick out. With Atavion, you solve that problem.
You just contact the Atavion team, give them some general information, and sit back while they do the work. In addition, if you’re a TicketCandy user, there are also additional perks. Through their partnership with the online ticketing platform, you will receive a 25% discount on any website development plan you choose.
Sell Tickets Online with Wix
Wix is a popular drag-and-drop website builder. It has more than 120 million users and makes around $760 million in revenue a year. The platform is popular because it allows regular people to build websites using their premade templates. With a little help from the TicketsCandy widget, you can turn your newly-built website into a ticket selling machine.
But we have to mention that Wix does have its limitations. For instance, the free plan forces Wix branding on you, the templates aren’t interchangeable, and analytics requires a paid plan. Of course, there’s an alternative to Wix…
Sell Tickets Online with Squarespace
If you know anything about eCommerce – you’ve definitely heard about Squarespace. With nearly 4 million active users, it’s one of the most popular eCommerce platforms. While it’s mainly built for selling actual products, you can still use it to sell tickets online for your event.
Again, you can use the TicketsCandy widget to enable your customers to buy event tickets easily. It will display the ticket prices, collect users’ information, and show available for booking time slots.
While promoting your event with a Squarespace website is possible, it’s not really ideal. For instance,building and customizing your website can be highly unintuitive. Also the website builder lacks proper marketing tools and doesn’t support a lot of 3rd-party apps that could do you good.
Market Your Ticket Selling Website
Whether you work for a museum or a concert venue, you know that selling tickets to events isn’t easy. For most salespeople, making a sale is the hardest part of the job. In fact, for 40% of people, attracting buyers is the most difficult part of their job.
To market your business event properly and attract the right kind of people, you need to use specific ticket sales strategies.
Market Ticket Sales On Social Media
“Make sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter!”
How many times you’ve heard something like that? Probably a lot! Nowadays, this simply isn’t going to cut it. To cross-promote your event on social media, you need a clearly defined strategy.
How to sell tickets online using social media? First, you need to pick a social network. How do you do that? Well, you need to know your target audience. In what age range they are, what are they interested in, and things of that nature.
The top 3 platforms to promote your tickets are:
Let’s start with the most popular social platform out there. In 2021, Facebook has almost 3 billion active users. Family-friendly places like zoos and museums are easily promoted on Facebook.
Unlike the first platform on our list, Instagram is popular among users of all ages. Nearly 12% of active Internet users use it daily. Instagram is the perfect place for promoting music events and visually-driven events like exhibitions.
TikTok
TikTok is the most popular social media app among the younger generation. Last year, TikTok generated nearly $2 billion in profit. If you’re organizing a concert and you want a lot of teens to attend, TikTok is the place for you.
Use Influencers to Sell More Event Tickets
Influencer marketing is a strategy in which brand partners up with a person who has a strong social media presence. This includes celebrities, vloggers, and people of note in a particular industry. Last year, according to official statistics, brands spent over $14 billion on influencers.
How do you find the right influencers? Just see who your target audience follows on social media, get in touch with them before the event, and get them to promote it. If one of your speakers has a healthy social media following, they can promote their session on social media.
Keep in mind that every niche has its influencers:
- Pet/Animal influencers: Perfect for attracting both young and old visitors to a zoo.
- Museum influencers: They can attract some of the 108 million yearly museum visitors.
- Art world influencers: Great for attracting people to local exhibitions and promoting artists.
Paid Advertising for Selling Tickets
As we already mentioned, social media is an effective tool, but it’s not effective as it once was. For instance, a Facebook page with 500,000 likes, according to research from Ogilvy & Mather, reaches only around 2% of its audience.
Paid ads are a great way to reach people. You just need to specify what keywords you want the ad to appear under, and the location of the searchers. There are other demographic aspects, like gender and age, you can target as well.
Google, Facebook, or Instagram will take all of that information and target the perfect audience. Just make sure to put a cap on how much you want to spend on your ads. By failing to cap your ad budget, you can end up spending more than you make.
Partner Up with Groupon
Since you don’t need to drive to a venue anymore to buy a ticket, most people are actively seeking events online. To make your event more visible, you can use a service like Groupon, which combines convenience with discounts.
By using their service, you can sell out in just a few days. Groupon has more than 30 million active users who may be looking for discounted tickets and places to visit. A small investment like this could end up exposing your business event to demographics you didn’t think of targeting.
How to Sell Tickets Online for an Event Successfully
There you go. To successfully sell event tickets online, you need to follow the steps we outlined above. Just to recap, when someone asks you how to sell tickets online for an event, tell them to:
- Select an online ticketing system like TicketsCandy
- Create a merchant account on a platform like Square
- Use a service like Atavion to create a website to showcase your event
- Make use of various advertising platforms to spread the word about the event
By following these steps, you’ll be able to sell more tickets than you ever imagined, make your event a huge success, and make up for the lack of visitors in 2020.
