email marketing | Brown Paper Tickets

What do you do when your event is just days away, but you still haven’t sold enough tickets? Don’t panic. There are plenty of last-minute promotions you can do to help boost sales.

Here’s five great ideas:

1. Email Your List

This is the perfect opportunity to use your incredibly valuable email list. These are people who know and like your events. Many may already be attending, but there’s a good chance a decent portion haven’t bought tickets yet. Send out an email to let your list know the event is happening and ask that they pass it on to friends.

Don’t just send one email and call it good. Re-send the same email to those who didn’t open it the first time. Use words that convince the attendee to buy tickets, such as, “the clock is ticking on your tickets; don’t miss your chance to see So-and-So perform.”

You don’t have to lie. If there are loads of tickets left, use a phrase like “limited quantities available.”

2. Hype It on Social

With the same language you used in your email, use your social media to hype the event. You could even post it with a video. Use Slidely or another service to create a short promo video (very easy) and use it in a paid Facebook campaign for events.

Don’t forget to link to your ticket page.

Pro tip: Ask your close friends and family to help hype your event on their social media. Only do this occasionally, because you don’t want to become THAT person.

3. Post Your Event on Community Boards

It may seem like a waste of time, but posting on community boards can help you sell those last few tickets. People look for things to do in all kinds of places. Post your event to NextDoor, Craigslist, and any other community forums you can find.

4. Contact Influencers and Bloggers

It’s probably too last to get listed in a major printed publications, but bloggers and influencers have the ability to post a few days before. Do your research and make sure that your event is a good match for the audience.

Pro Tip: To incentivize them to write, offer a couple free tickets to give away on their website.

5. Paper the House

If the event you’re putting on is something that you absolutely need to be full for some reason—for instance, to impress sponsors, or for a live recording—don’t hesitate to paper the house. Papering the house is just a fancy way of saying, “give the rest of your tickets away for free.” If the tickets are going to go to waste anyway, why not put some bodies in the seats?

Give stacks of tickets to hotel concierges, baristas and servers. Keep a stack on you at all times and give them away to anyone you feel might be interested. These people could potentially become faithful followers.

Pro Tip: Contact us if you’d like bulk tickets printed ahead of time.

Want one-on-one, completely free, promotion help from experts? Email our promo team.

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Fundraising

We know that promoting a show can be time-consuming and expensive. Don’t fret! You can easily and inexpensively craft an epic email campaign to help fill the house weeks before your event. Check out some of the tips below for adding powerful email tools to your promotion plan.

1. Choose engaging subject lines: When your email pops up in your ticket buyer’s inbox, you have a very small window of opportunity to catch their attention. Oftentimes your subject line will determine whether they delete or save your email. As you craft these phrases, think of specific things that your reader will gain by opening and reading your message.

Example: “3 ways to sell tickets online” is stronger than “Selling tickets online”

2. Maximize your clicks: As you build your email, try to balance the amount of text and graphics on the page. The content of the email should naturally draw readers’ attentions to the links (in this case, your event link or purchase site). Although buttons and graphics make emails more attractive, don’t forget to include plain-text links as well.

Tip: Research shows that most readers respond better to bold and highlighted links.

3. Avoid spam filters: Most email providers have strict spam protection to block unsolicited emails from reaching their customers. To make sure that your message isn’t accidentally marked as spam, try to avoid using these words: save, discount, free, 100%, guarantee. Subject lines with these words have a higher chance of being marked as spam, but try to steer clear of using them in your email body, too.

4. When to schedule: Your email is done and it has awesome graphics, text and links! Now you have to decide when to send it. Think about your audience and when they may be more likely to clear out their inboxes. Studies have shown that the best days to send an email are Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Mondays can be hectic for people recovering from the weekend, while Thursdays and Fridays they may be preparing for the weekend. These may not be the norm for all audiences. Try to plan for the demographic of your event or industry.

Those are the basics! Email campaign management is a tough thing to tackle but well worth the effort in the end. If you’re looking for more information on how to integrate emails into your promotion plan, check out MailChimp’s great resource center. You can also check out this MailChimp integration guide that tells you how to send emails right from your Brown Paper Tickets account.

If you’d like to bounce ideas off someone as you prep for your awesome email campaign, feel free to reach out to our event promotion team atPromo@BrownPaperTickets.com or (800) 838-3006 (Option 5). We’d love to hear from you!

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4 tips to crafting an awesome email campaign

Topics

Low Ticket Sales? 5 Last-Minute Promotions to Pack the House