Every year, organizations get an influx of customers purchasing single tickets for the upcoming season. This grouping of customers will be a combination of brand new customers who have never purchased from you before or customers that have been dormant due to your annual sales cycle. When that happens, it’s time to take that subscriber or season ticket holder hat off and focus on building a compelling experience for prospects to be sold on coming to your events. This is an altogether different process than renewing subscribers or selling new season tickets. But what does that mean and how should it change your approach?
Before you define an approach, it’s fundamental to follow one simple rule – these are NOT prospects to become season ticket holders…yet. How many of us proposed after a first date? For the time being, you need to treat this set of customers as a separate grouping in your CRM strategy. That doesn’t mean they won’t become subscribers one day. But a lot needs to happen before they are warmed up and engaged enough to be asked to commit to an entire season.
But just because your ultimate goal won’t be to convert subscribers doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plan to optimize your revenue generation from these customers. It simply means that you need to think about what, when and how you might offer to them during this stage of being a single ticket customer.
We’ve compiled a list of effective ways to generate more revenue from this key customer group, along with methods of introducing these during the customer engagement lifecycle. These have been proven to work across various AudienceView customers and might just increase overall revenue and give you a stronger indication on who might be ready to take that next step towards being a subscriber!
1. Vouchers for drinks, food or parking.
As happens with most consumers, you need to consider the behavior of the purchase. How many times do you throw that one last thing into your cart? We all do it. If you offer food, drinks or parking at your events and you rely on that revenue, then you need to start offering these during the single ticket purchase flow – across all of your customer channels. People are more likely to throw that in when they are excited about buying tickets for the event than they will after they are stuffed from that pre-event meal or just don’t like the idea of pulling their wallet out. By selling these items in advance, you are collecting more revenue and you are building up a stronger customer profile as you get to know this customer group better.
2. Sell commemorative tickets – before, during AND after the event.
These days, the tickets we hold – physical or virtual – just don’t have that same nostalgia that they used to have for people. But the mechanism of printing and mailing tickets is something that you have perfected. So just change it up! Why not design and offer commemorative tickets that people can add on during the checkout process. Or, if something amazing happens at that event, capitalize by offering a commemorative ticket during and after. With the tools available in our portfolio of solutions to design and print almost anything, you can keep that nostalgia alive while engaging your customers with your brand and generating significant revenue.
3. S&*% happens. You should offer refund protection to your single customers.
This is an easy one and it happens to all of us. Booking Protect is our trusted partner in offering a seamless way for your customers to protect their ticket purchase in case anything unforeseen should happen (death, illness, weather, etc.) that keeps them from attending the event. Loads of AudienceView clients offer this as an opt-in during the checkout process and have made piles of new (and free!) revenue. Book a consultation today to learn more about this simple and effective partnership.
4. Hotel and restaurant partnerships.
Remember, your event is the peak of a memory that your customers are creating. However, it’s not the only thing they plan that day. Many people plan events around the events, including meals and overnight stays. It’s time to take that next step with your partnerships and start selling these as packaged deals when people are buying single tickets. Your ability to bring mass to these hotel and restaurant partners will be very attractive to them. So much that they will cut you in on any deal you create. So in the end, you have a new offering that expands your value to your customer AND you make more money. Plus, now you know how people like to shape their experiences outside of your event. You can’t put a price tag on that.
5. Experiences – they’re cheap to execute and people love them.
This is an area that represents a huge opportunity for growth and engagement for any organization. No matter what size or type of organization you are, you have a chance to create experiences that range from simple (tours) to extravagant (become a mascot for an hour). Your only limitation in creating experiences for your organization is your time, creativity and people. Enough AudienceView clients have proven that offering compelling experiences to single event customers simply drives more revenue and engagement. Not doing this right now? That’s okay. Start small and grow the program. Try something and see if it works. Tinker with these and we promise you’ll hit on something sooner or later.
We hope you take some of these ideas and implement them for your organization. You will definitely generate more revenue and start to create a more intelligent mechanism to start moving single customers into a new category. Then one day, you’ll be on one knee proposing and we all know what the answer will be!