Ditch Discount Codes — Sell Out Without Being a Sell-out
Tags: Event Marketing, Discount, Ticketing System, Ticketing, Tickets

When the credit crunch hit in 2008, casual dining was in danger of crisis. With everyone counting the pennies, it was getting harder to justify eating out and restaurants needed to come up with something to keep the punters coming in.

Pizza Express were early pioneers of the voucher code; a seemingly great way of encouraging diners in by offering them a great deal. While this undoubtedly helped in these testing times, it also had a profoundly different effect. Due to the ubiquity of the vouchers, from this point onwards, some customers no longer expected to pay full price. Not only was their product devalued, it could be argued that over time, people’s estimations of the restaurant as a whole were lowered.

Tim was bemused by the topping to dough ratio on his Romana pizza base

Offering discount codes for your ‘content’ — whether that’s a pizza, a product, a play, a gig or any other type of event — may give you a temporary uptick in revenue but it is having long-term repercussions on the perception of your venue and the entertainment that you host there.

Over the past few years, we’ve observed how some ticket vendors have employed strategies to avoid falling into the perilous trap of discount codes but have managed to sell consistently well.

Before we identify these examples, we need to take a step back as to understand how to avoid discount codes, we need to understand when tickets are sold.

The Ticket Sales Cycle

Put simply, the ticket sales cycle shows your ticket sales activity over time; from when tickets go on sale to the start of your event.

Typically, the sales cycle will look like some variation of this:

Phase 1: The Launch spike

When tickets first go on sale there tends to be a sharp spike as the launch event marketing kicks into gear. This drives initial interest and early ticket sales.

What happens next will largely depend on the type of event. Unless you’re hosting Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran or you’re one of the organisers of Fyre Festival, chances are there will be a sharp decline in sales as initial coverage and exposure wears off.

Phase 2: The hard yards.

Much like running a marathon, as you come down from the high of starting the race, the finish line can feel a million miles away and the next stretch feels especially gruelling. Most ticket sales cycle follows the same trend.

During this phase, ticket sales will trickle in, but as the launch exposure fades and customers lack the urgency to book, sales will be slow and steady. It is during this crucial time that many will be nervously keeping an eye on sales, and putting stakes in the ground about when to start panicking.

Phase 3: Sprint finish

Sales will start to increase, curving upwards gradually at first before the graph gets steeper and steeper in the final days before an event.

Not all events are created equal so some may not follow this cycle exactly. Numerous factors will come into play such as type of event, price, how long the show runs and how ‘hot’ the tickets are— but the cycle above is what we see very often across our customer base.

Further reading on the ticket sales cycle — ‘When do people buy tickets?’

Setting Targets

As part of your event marketing plan, it can be useful to try and forecast your tickets sales and set targets accordingly.

This doesn’t need to be especially complex. Start with picking a performance date and then, on a calendar, mark your on-sale date. Then set some pre-performance date milestones — e.g. one day before, two days before, one week before, three weeks before, and so on. Use sales data from historical, similar events to help you spot patterns and plot rough percentage-sold indicators against your date milestones.

Once you have this, you can use it to create a graph. This graph will probably reflect your ticket sales cycle graph in that it will have an upwards trajectory initially, followed by a period of a relatively flat line before rising steeply towards the end.

So you’re worried about sales?

We’ve all been there. The performance date is looming and sales aren’t hitting their targets.

Time to panic right? Time to get one of the team to fire up Mailchimp, send an email out to the database with a hastily composed message about wanting to offer your “best customers” a discount code to see the show.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

The key area of focus when identifying ways you can sell more tickets, is Phase 2. Taking action and implementing an event marketing strategy aimed at driving up ticket sales during this period, can have a real impact on final sales.

You should therefore be looking at ways to change the graph line during this period from being relatively flat, to one that includes a series of miniature spikes. Doing so requires actioning a number of activities which enable you to reach as wide an audience as possible and drive them to buy there and then.

Each activity will be designed to deliver a sales boost, so your ticket sales cycle graph ends up looking something like this:

Your activity during this period will largely fall in to two camps:

Marketing-based Sales Mechanisms (or MBSMs as we like to call them) Urgency Triggers

The best examples will be a combination of the two.

Marketing-based Sales Mechanisms (MBSMs)

There are ways of selling discounted tickets without offering a discount code. The best examples of this are powerful as they don’t send the wrong message to your patrons about the event in question and they often require the buyer to do something in return.

Case Study 1: The Ticket Lottery

Increasingly common in the West End, a ticket lottery (or similar) can be a great way of shifting tickets and capturing marketing data.

Customers enter a lottery to win the chance to buy discounted tickets. Shortly before the performance date, a number of winners will be selected who have a limited time period to purchase, usually 24 hours.

There are numerous benefits to running this kind of promotion:

Data capture —The kind of questions you can ask at entry are different to the ones you might ask for as part of a ticket purchase; so it’s a good way to discover more about your patrons. We’ve also found that people will be more inclined to agree to hear from you again if they’re entering a competition.

The lottery creates a flexible mechanism for selling tickets where inventory can be adjusted as you need depending on the existing sales for an individual performance.

You can keep the purchase flow simple — lotteries usually limit the number of tickets that can be bought and buyers aren’t able to select seats. This means the purchase can be quick, simple and converts really well. It can even be handled as a manual allocation, outside of your box office software if this is not something it supports.

Other examples of MBSMs:

‘Rush tickets’ — again, makes the buyer work for their ticket as they either need to share something on social media or fill in a questionnaire to get to the point where they can purchase.

Basket Based — try to sell tickets for event B, as they buy their ticket for event A. Offer them a basket-based incentive to do so — this doesn’t have to be something major but enough to get them thinking that this is their only opportunity to take advantage of this offer; it’s now or never. This could be a basket-based discount but it might not even be something monetary; it could be status-based, e.g. they become a VIP or get some sort of perk.

Urgency Triggers

You need to generate urgency. You want people to feel like they need to buy there and then when they come across your event , not think about it for a while then potentially never come back.

It’s important to do this in a way that is ethically and morally-sound though. Panic-inducing, factually-incorrect ‘only one ticket left’ or ‘10 other people looking at this date’ warnings are not what you should be aiming for. In fact, regulators are getting hotter about taking action against companies who are deliberately misleading customers in this way.

There are ways of achieving urgency without lying to customers.

Case Study 2 — Advanced early bird pricing

We’ve learnt a lot about pricing strategy and making the most of urgency triggers from one of our customers. This goes far beyond the usual early-bird pricing model.

What this customer wanted was to split their ticket inventory into chunks of tickets. Each of those groups was given its own price band, each rising slightly in price. Then there was a full-priced ‘general admission’ ticket as an anchor.

The idea was that they’d only ever have two of those tickets present on their website at one time — the current early bird and the general admission. The current early bird would have a genuine countdown of how many tickets there were left at the time and buyers would be told that the prices were always rising as tickets were sold. As that early bird price sells out, the next early bird price bracket would automatically take its place. This means that as a buyer, whenever I arrive at the website, I always get a similar experience and the same feeling of urgency.

Advanced early bird pricing

Other ways of injecting urgency:

Purchase windows — as part of your marketing mechanisms insist on deadlines or purchase windows. These will help you control where the peaks in your ticket sales cycle appear and will encourage the required urgency for buyers.

Availability indicators , but done right. The issue with the traffic light systems is that it can be putting off buyers. Many won’t look at the red or even orange dates for fear that the best tickets have already gone. This means that you’re actually harming sales for these dates rather than encouraging people to book quickly.

What can work better is a visual indication of availability, without scaring people with colours associated with warnings. For example, The Great Gatsby uses availability indicator bars which fill up as tickets are sold.

The Great Gatsby’s availability indicators

Give some people a head start, but with a deadline — those who practice good customer database management can offer early access to tickets in the form of an invite before tickets go on general sale. The key thing here though is incentivising these folks to book before a certain deadline.

Finally, if they do leave, go and get them back…

Even with the strategies above, there will still be customers who leave without booking, but that doesn’t mean they are lost forever. We’ve seen customers use social media retargeting to their advantage to remind buyers of their event on Facebook, Instagram and other social media channels and encourage people back to buy. What’s more, if you have a ticketing system that enables you to embed a Facebook tracking pixel into the purchase flow, you will get be able to get a direct sense of your ROI for these campaigns.

Delight and Excite

Remember, this is all part of delighting and exciting your audience.

Your customers want to feel excited about what they’re booking for. In today’s world, people are desperate to have something to look forward to. Offering them a discount code isn’t going to do that.

Discount codes may be a means to an end but they’re slowly killing your brand, code by code.