You have come up with this wonderful idea for an event or business but need to find a way to sell tickets for it. Sure, you could sell tickets in person at the event, but it is always better to have an online presence.
According to IBISWorld, in the U.S. alone, online event ticket sales by the end of 2021 are projected to be $14.3 billion and will likely continue to grow at 8.7%. Being a part of this growing market is imperative if you want your event/business to thrive in the coming years. So, how do you sell tickets online?
Table of contents
- Using Ticketing Platform to Sell Tickets Online
- You Need a Merchant Account to Sell Tickets Online
- Building a Website to Sell Tickets Online
- Promote Your Event Through Social Media
- Use Other Marketing Techniques to Increase Ticket Sales
- How to Sell Tickets Online Successfully
1. Use Ticketing Platforms to Sell Tickets Online
A ticketing platform gives you the necessary tools to sell and manage tickets for your event. They help to create the tickets and ensure each ticket has a scannable QR code to prevent fraud. The best ticketing platform on the market for you to use is TicketsCandy.
TicketsCandy is a fast and easy ticketing solution for your event. With a customizable approach, your ticketing account is designed to work specifically for you and your event so that you stand out from your competition.
Use TicketsCandy to Sell Tickets Online
In order to provide you with services, ticketing solutions have to charge you fees. Usually, these fees are charged on a per-ticket sale basis.
What makes TicketsCandy stand out from its competitors is its affordable prices. Let’s say you sell 200 tickets a month for about $25 a ticket. If you were to use a different ticketing solution, it could cost you anywhere between $250 – $493 in fees.
However, with TicketsCandy, you are charged just a 0.9% flat fee. Therefore, you are only looking at about $45 in fees for your 200 ticket sales at $25. Coupled with its plethora of features and ability to customize everything to your exact needs, TicketsCandy is the clear choice for your ticketing needs.
How to Start Selling Tickets with TicketsCandy
To start selling tickets, you first need to create an account with TicketsCandy. As a relatively simple process, signing up involves giving them basic information about your event such as:
- Events details
- Ticket types and prices
- Time slots and capacities
Once you have done this, they will assign you a dedicated project manager who will set up your box office for you. That way you don’t have to waste your time trying to figure it all out. If you need to update or change anything after it’s created, don’t worry. You can always go back in and add more information later on.
Once you are all set up, you will be able to begin selling tickets for your event!
TicketsCandy Features for Successful Tickets Sales
With TicketsCandy, you can create unique ticket types and admission schedules to guarantee everything is best suited for your business. With their wide range of features, you will never be left wishing you had more tools for your business!
Their long list of features and tools to help you successfully sell tickets online includes:
- Custom ticket types
- Unlimited number of tickets
- Custom event calendars for selecting time and date
- Information on attendees including tickets and visit details
- Real-time sales data
- Ability to create discount coupons
- Ticket scanner through their mobile app
- Dedicated support
- No contracts
Not sure how to use the tools? No problem. Their dedicated support team can walk you through every step of the process to guarantee you the best ticketing experience possible. Not to mention the fact that they don’t try to lock you in with long-term contracts because they know they don’t have to since their fees are the smallest in the industry.
Once you are up and running, you receive all ticket revenue directly to your bank account after each purchase. That way, you know your money is safe in your own hands, not theirs.
2. You Need a Merchant Account to Sell Tickets Online
To process credit card information when buyers purchase your tickets, you need a merchant account. Essentially, it is a type of bank account that allows you to accept your client’s purchase through various ways, such as debit or credit cards.
TicketsCandy allows you to choose from one of the major merchant services in the United States such as Square, Stripe, Paypal.
All merchants charge their own separate fees apart from the ticketing platform fees. Using our example from before, most merchant accounts will charge you about a $175 processing fee for 200 tickets sold at $25. That is about $0.88 worth of fees for one $25 ticket.
TicketsCandy’s Partnership with Square
The largest merchant service, Square, has partnered up with TicketsCandy to provide their customers with a number of benefits and to make the setup of their merchant account much easier. As one of the best, most trusted merchant account services in the U.S. according to various sources, Square is an easy choice for any TicketsCandy customer.
If you decide to go with Square, you will receive customized merchant processing coupled with 24/7 Square priority support. Any question or issues you have with your Square account will be quickly and efficiently taken care of no matter what time of the day it is.
Due to this wonderful partnership, you will have an account created for you easily through TicketsCandy with personalized onboarding with Square. The best part? You will receive a $1,000 processing credit directly applied to your Square account. Essentially what this means is that Square will not take out any fees on the first $1,000 worth of ticket purchases.
Merchant Payment Processing Fees
Square’s processing fee is not a part of TicketsCandy’s pricing plan. They charge 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction. However, TicketsCandy allows you to choose whether you want to pass those fees onto the customer or keep them for yourself. Thus, giving you complete control over your finances.
3. Build a Website to Promote Your Tickets
Once you have your tickets made and have set up your merchant account, you need a website to sell them. You can either create your own site, or have Atavion custom build one for you.
If you decide to use your website, you can place your box office widget within it by using HTML code or a plugin.
Using Atavion To Create a Website For Your Event
You have this amazing idea for an event or business and now you have the venue, the tickets, and even a merchant account. However, all of that is no good if you don’t have a trustworthy website to sell tickets on.
Through our partnership with TicketsCandy, you will receive a 35% discount on our already affordable website development plans to showcase your event and sell more tickets. The website we create for you will be specifically built for your event in order to promote your branding efforts.
Our all-in-one solution allows you to sit back while we do all the work for you. Simply tell us some general information about your event and any requirements you may have. Then we immediately go to work to bring your website to life.
It is our goal to help your event thrive. That is why every website we create is perfectly optimized for sales. With professional copywriting and unlimited maintenance, you never have to worry about your site not performing at its best. After all, a well-performing website leads to a high level of ticket sales for your event!
4. Promote Your Event Through Social Media
A great way to spread the word about your event is through social media marketing. You can use your existing social media accounts or even create new ones for the specific event to promote the sale of tickets.
The top 3 social media platforms to use for your promotional efforts are:
- TikTok
Creating an Instagram and using the correct hashtags can grab a lot of people’s attention. Similarly, creating a Facebook page specifically for your event and sharing it everywhere can draw in a lot of people too.
When using Tiktok, creating engaging videos with excellent sound and video quality coupled with great hashtags can help you reach millions of people. Hop on different trends and interact with influencers to get more views on your videos.
On any platform you choose, always make sure you post regularly and at the time of day when you will have the highest number of viewers. Use nice, creative visuals that grab people’s attention and research which hashtags will work best for you. Don’t forget that you can collaborate with other people and businesses to help spread more awareness of your social media account as well.
Another important tip to remember is that with whatever social media platform you choose to use, there is a link to the website where you are selling the tickets so that people can easily buy them. If your potential customers have to try to work to find where your tickets are sold, more than likely, they will not take the time to find and buy them. Always make it super easy for them by putting the link in your bio or directly in the post if possible.
Choosing a Platform Based on Your Audience
Different people use different platforms. Depending on the demographics of your target audience, you may also be successful on other platforms besides the top 3, such as LinkedIn.
For example, a selfie museum such as Selfie World offers an exciting, immersive experience for people to take pictures and create content. Therefore, a fun and exciting TikTok created within the museum would hit their younger target market and potentially lead to the sale of tickets.
However, an event focused more on the business aspect of things, such as a speaker looking to teach people their secret to a thriving business, would be more successfully promoted on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn has a more serious audience that would be interested in that type of thing, it makes sense to promote the event on that platform.
Essentially, the success of your social media marketing depends on what platform you choose and whether or not you will be able to reach your target audience when using that platform. If you have an older intended audience, Facebook will probably work great. However, a younger audience may perform better on Instagram. It is all about who your target demographics are.
Try Social Media Ads to Sell More Tickets
Are you not reaching enough of your audience with your posts? Boost them.
When you boost a post on any social media account, you are paying to have it seen by more people on that platform. You can tailor your post to only be sent to your target audience to ensure the highest effectiveness of using it.
With more people seeing your post comes a higher level of ticket sales to your event. Although you need to consider if the cost of boosting the post is worth the number of customers you could potentially gain or not. If not, maybe just stick to regular, no fee organic promotion efforts.
5. Use Other Marketing Techniques to Increase Ticket Sales
Besides social media marketing, there are a bunch of other ways you can market your event to sell more tickets online. A few of these include:
- Email marketing
- Google Ads
- Influencers
- Partnerships
- Podcast
Using Email Marketing to Sell Tickets Online
If you are a business that already has consumers and therefore a growing list of emails, you can use email marketing to promote your event. All you have to do is send emails that tell your consumers about new events, promotions, and other important updates about your business.
If your business is new, you can integrate a newsletter solution like MailChimp into your website with an email form so that you can collect your website visitors’ emails and send your updates and promotions.
Once you have your list of customer’s email addresses, craft an enticing email that consumers will want to click. Make sure to have a big call-to-action button that gets them to buy your tickets!
Google Ads Is The Fastest Way to Start Selling Tickets Online
Paid advertisements on Google are a great way to reach lots of people. You specify what keywords you want your ad to appear under, as well as the general location in which you want searchers located. You can also select certain demographic aspects such as age and gender. Google will take that information and deliver only the people in your target audience your ad.
By showing your ads to the right audience, you will be able to start selling tickets fast. You also won’t be wasting your money on serving ads to people who aren’t interested in your business.
You can also put a cap on how much you want to spend on your ads so that you don’t end up spending more than you make. Just make sure you are tracking your sales so that you are aware of how much you can spend.
Utilizing Influencers to Sell Tickets Online
Influencers are individuals who have the power to affect a group of people’s purchasing decisions because they are viewed as trustworthy. Getting an influencer to promote your event by either paying or asking them, can have a huge impact on the number of tickets you sell. This is because they have a large amount of traffic and followers that they will share with you when they promote your business.
Just make sure the influencer’s following is made up of people who are in your target audience.
Partner With Other Businesses
Partnering up with another business can help to spread awareness about your event and lead to more ticket sales. A partnership usually benefits both businesses, like TicketsCandy’s partnership with Square!
Both companies benefit from the added exposure from each other’s audiences as well as the boost in sales from the special offers they offer each other. For example, Square benefits from having more customers sign up for their service through TicketsCandy and TicketsCandy benefits by having more people choose them for their ticketing services since they have a deal with Square to provide discounts to their customers.
Using Podcasts to Promote Your Event
According to Statista, there were 88 million podcast listeners in the U.S. in 2019. Since then, the number of listeners has continued to grow by about 20 million new listeners each year. Having your event advertised on a podcast by either doing one yourself or paying for an ad, can lead to you possibly reaching thousands of people. With the correct call to action, that could result in a bunch of online tickets being sold for your event/business.
How to Sell Tickets Online Successfully
If you are looking for a special formula on how to sell tickets online successfully, we have it for you. It starts with finding a top and easy-to-use ticketing platform like TicketsCandy. Then it involves finding the perfect merchant account like Square to process the ticket sales.
From there, you need a premium website, like the ones Atavion builds, to sell the tickets on. You will also need different ways to let people know about your event, such as through social media and other marketing techniques.
Put all of these together and you will be successfully selling tickets online in no time!
