Holding events? Own your customer data and revenue with white label ticketing platform, TicketSocket
By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur.
Ashley Cline is the Executive Vice President of Client Strategy of TicketSocket. They’ve worked with big events like Spartan Race and the National Basketball Association. In the recent episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, she talked about how entrepreneurs can build an event where they own the attendees instead of giving them all away to other ticket platforms.
Image from LinkedIn
Choosing Your Ticketing Platform Matters
When choosing a ticketing platform, one of the most important things that any company or event organiser should consider is data, more importantly, customer data. Who owns that? Who has the right to use it?
Customer data is important to have and understand, especially with the things that went through during COVID — wherein no matter where you are; there’s a good chance that your event has been cancelled or shut down.
It was a really tough time for the industry and every one. Companies that put on events struggled because if they were not using a ticketing platform that allowed them to own their brand, money, and data, they were at the mercy of the ticketing company selling their tickets.
One of the things that made this problematic is money. Many of these other ticketing companies hold onto your money and pay you out. Sometimes they pay you out throughout the sales cycle after a couple of weeks. A lot of times, they hold onto the revenue until the event is over.
If this is the case for you (i.e., your ticketing company was holding all of your funds) and your event was cancelled, it leaves you with no room to figure out how to pivot your company and get through this period of turmoil.
Taking it one step further, not having control of your customer data meant that as someone who’s in full control of communication with your customers, you won’t be able to do the proper customer service and public relations needed to make it through this rough period.
Image from Pexels
White Label Ticketing
A lot of TicketSocket’s clients that come to them understand — or are starting to understand — the importance of their brand equity.
They at TicketSocket don’t consider themselves a ticketing company. Rather, they’re a software company and a powerful platform you can use to sell tickets. If you choose their platform, there are many pieces in the journey that you’ll be able to control and customise, starting with the simplest: your domain name.
Instead of selling tickets on a third-party ticketing site, your tickets can be sold on a website with your own domain name. Your domain name stays in that picture. Your logo and colour scheme appear all throughout. What you want to communicate to a customer throughout that checkout flow is all controlled by you. The branding of TicketSocket completely disappears.
Marketing Your Event Right
A third-party ticketing site like Eventbrite has a built-in audience. The downfall is that the built-in audience is getting marketed by several other events. These events compete with you, even if it's not the same event as yours. You’re all competing for someone's time.
Ashley’s role at TicketSocket is to strategise with clients on how they can grow their own data of customers and prospects — people who are interested in attending an event but have not yet attended one.
She has helped clients shift away from spending 100% of their marketing dollars acquiring a customer. And acquiring a customer through a Facebook ad, email, or Short Message Service (SMS) can get costly. You’ll get stuck in that cycle of spending more money to meet a sales goal and get the people you want to get to your event.
Image from Pexels
What she does is help them build a list of people who are interested in their event but haven't bought tickets yet. If you flip that script where you're spending your marketing dollars buying leads — which can be pennies compared to acquiring a customer — then you can nurture those leads into making a purchase.
You can nurture them through emails, SMS, and retargeting, utilising that list to create what they call “look-alike audiences” on Facebook and Google. This is a much more cost-effective way to market your event and grow your customer base.
Easy Integration
TicketSocket is a plug-and-play type of system. They have an open Application Programming Interface (API) so people can utilise it to create custom integrations. They also have a marketplace on the back end of their software where you can choose different tools to plug in and connect to.
These tools include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, HubSpot, and even Mailchimp. TicketSocket can connect your accounts on these tools to your TicketSocket account and leverage those to increase your sales and conversion. They can do trigger automated abandoned cart sequences — something that’s more elaborate and branded than what you could do with a standard ticketing system.
When someone purchases a ticket, they also send all that customer data back to your CRM so you can upsell them on the things they didn't buy yet or cross-sell them on another event that you have coming up.
In sum, they leverage those integrations to ensure you are getting as many sales as possible without increasing your media-spending dollars.
On Payment Processing
What sets TicketSocket apart is that you will have a platform, and they will connect it to your payment processor of choice (e.g., Stripe, Square). If you don't have one, they will match you with the one that would give you the best rates.
Image from Pexels
What happens is that when a customer buys a ticket, instead of TicketSocket processing the money, holding onto it, and paying you out when they see fit, the money immediately goes into your bank account.
On the back end, they split off their fee, and that goes into their bank account whilst your money goes into your bank account. That way, they will never be holding funds, invoicing you, or anything of the such.
A lot of their clients are international brands, and they do events not just in the US, UK, or Canada. TicketSocket can process over 200 currencies. No matter what country you're in, they have a payment processing partner — i.e., the most reputable brand within your country — that they can connect your site to so that you're processing that country's revenue.
Online and Offline Capabilities
When it comes to entry and registration, a lot of it depends on your event and what you choose to do.
TicketSocket has a component that processes online sales. They also have a box office component because many of their clients do both — they have a box office and online sales. Their software can integrate with whatever system you choose to use.
Some of their clients prefer Square; some prefer Clover. Some prefer Zebra scanners; some use TicketSocket’s mobile app (They have an app you can download onto any phone or iPad that will scan the tickets).
The tickets can be done however you want it. For instance, they can do mobile tickets that can get emailed to you. They can also use a printing mechanism called Boca so you can have those long rectangular tickets that have sentimental value (A lot of their circus and time ticketing museum clients still use those).
The choice is really up to you and what will streamline your business. They also provide consulting services to help you determine how you will make this point of entry and traffic control as seamless as possible.
Your Event, Your Money
At TicketSocket, they will give you standard pricing based on your ticket value. Typically, they’d charge 3 to 3.5% of your ticket price. And the cool thing about it is that you own the back end and how those fees are set up.
If you also need to charge a city venue fee or an insurance fee, or you want to raise the 3.5% to 5% and charge your client that additional ticketing fee, you can do so. That way, you can make an additional revenue stream from the fees. They will give you the lowest base price that they can; passing it on to your customers is up to you.
Image from Freepik
A number of big ticketing websites take quite a high percentage of your ticket sales. And that can hinder conversions at checkout. You'll see a lot of people add things to their cart just to get high fees at the very end and bail.
The folks at TicketSocket have seen clients come to them and see dramatically increased conversions at checkout and make more money on their bottom line revenue. This happened essentially because people feel more comfortable purchasing tickets when the fees are not extremely high.
How to Build Event Attendees
Ashley is responsible for marketing and helping clients build attendance at their events.
To help business owners get more registrations, the first thing that she does is sit down and strategise how many tickets they need to sell. Then, she’ll build a strategic digital marketing plan for them. And that usually includes components like Facebook ads, Google ads, search engine optimisation, email, SMS, and social media content.
She’ll find out what her clients are planning to spend on Facebook ads, for example. Suppose it’s $10,000. They will run Facebook ads to acquire a sale, driving people to check out and buy tickets. As it can be a costly method of acquiring a customer, she doesn’t consider it the best way to spend that $10,000. And if that's all you have, guaranteed you will not reach your sales goals.
What Ashley does is a learning curve for clients, especially if they’re newer to events and don't have a database yet of past customers.
Out of that $10,000, she’ll recommend using 50 to 70%, for example. Before you go on sale, she’ll help you run ads to generate leads. Meaning, you must get someone's name, phone number, and email. After that, what she’ll basically do is grow the database. Doing this will only cost pennies compared to acquiring a customer because you’re only asking for their name, phone number, and email.
Once you have that information, she’ll assist you with creating a sequence of emails, text messages, and retargeting ads that communicate to them the day you go on sale and why they don’t want to miss it. What you want is to create a big deal out of the opening night; create what is called FOMO or fear of missing out where customers won’t want to miss the day and time because that first hour is crucial.
You’ll do the lead generation campaign for three to four weeks before tickets for your event are on sale. It can be scary for many customers who've never shifted their dollars this way. However, she found that within that first hour of going on sale, their clients experienced such a strong opening night. It allows everyone to relax a little during that stressful sales cycle because they’ve already secured enough money to make sure their venue fees — or any other big costs that will occur before the event happens — are paid.
It's a great way to generate a lot of buzz and an audience very quickly. You can also use the rest of that money to acquire customers whilst nurturing that email and text number list to drive more sales.
Image from Freepik
For Ashley, she wouldn’t want to execute a marketing strategy without integrating text or SMS messaging. It's something that she’s started implementing with her clients in the last 18 months or so, and it made such a dramatic outcome. Many of her clients leveraging text messaging marketing in the right way are seeing that 70 to 80% of their sales are coming from that channel.
This doesn't mean Facebook ads and email aren’t important because they are necessary. If all three of those work together properly, it will help one channel convert more. Facebook, email, and Google ads are assisting whilst SMS is executing the sale. Her preferred partner for text messaging is attentive, and it's usually about two cents or less per text message you send.
To learn more about how you, as an entrepreneur, can use a white label ticketing platform to own your clients, events, and revenues, visit www.ticketsocket.com.
This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.
Cover image by Drazen Zigic on Freepik
