by jonc | Apr 24, 2019 | Promote
91% of consumers check their email every day. But if you’re looking to convert potential attendees from just opening your email to buying a ticket to your event, you’ll need to stand out and highlight exactly why they should buy a ticket from you.
To start making email your most influential advertising tool is to understand how you rank against your competition in several key metrics.
To make your event email marketing more effective, there are 3 key metrics you’ll need to pay attention to. The open rate, click-through rate, and the unsubscribe rate. The average stats for event emails are:
- 26% of recipients open their event emails
- 4.95% of recipients click links in their event emails
- 0.8% of recipients unsubscribe to their event emails
There are several ways you can use these metrics to optimize your event email marketing campaign.
Open rate
The open rate of your emails is the percentage of recipients that opened your email. With an average of 26%, it means out of the number of emails you send marketing your event, only 26% will actually open that email. The common range of opens can be between 21-30 %. Music events tend to have a higher rate of opening at around 29%, and professional events such as conferences have an open rate of just 23%.
If your current email open rate is below these averages, there are several things you can look at to increase the rate of people opening your email.
A good place to look is the subject line of your email. You need to be specific in your message with a sense of urgency. You should use 50 characters or less in your event email subject line. If you’re sharing promotional codes or a save the date email with a time limit set to it, make sure that’s included in the subject line. For example, “25% off ticket price for 24 hours with this code!” If you have the opportunity to include the recipient’s name or city in the subject line, this kind of personalization can see an extra 20% in open rates!
It may also be worth looking into the name of the sender of your emails. It might be worth testing sending emails from your company name, from your own name, or maybe even the name of a popular speaker at your event (if applicable and with permission), as well as looking into what time you send your email.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
A normal average click-through rate (CTR, the percentage of people who click a link in your email) for an event email is 4.95% — so just under 5% of people who receive event emails will click on a link in that email. Music events tend to have the best results, with an average CTR of 5.43%, while classes and workshops have just an average of 4.08% CTR.
One of the most effective ways you might be able to increase your click-through rate is to add more links in your event emails and ensure your links are as close to the top of the email as possible. For example, if you have a “Buy Tickets” link at the bottom of your email, add it to the top, or include an alternative link to find out more details on the event.
The best way to develop your CTR is to be more specific with your targeting — with your email list or your content. A good example is segmenting your email list by geography to reach a more local audience or send a discount to previous event attendees. (If you’re like many Helm Tickets event organizers and use MailChimp for your email marketing campaigns, you can sync your account with Helm to automatically transfer attendee email addresses and other data between systems. Find out more here.
If you don’t want to narrow down your email lists, it’s worth testing your content to see if one kind is more responsive than another. You can create two versions of your email (version “A” and version “B”). Send version A to one set of subscribers and version B to another more restricted set. Then you can send the better-performing email to the remainder of your email list.
Unsubscribe Rates
The average event email has a rough unsubscribe rate of around 0.8% — so just under 1% of people who receive your event email would unsubscribe from your database. If your rate is above the 1% average, the top of the median range for event emails, it’s worth looking to become more targeted in who you’re sending your emails out to, as well as asking for feedback in a prompt on your unsubscribe page. It’s essential also to be sure to include another communication option on your unsubscribe page. Just because someone doesn’t want to receive your emails doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear from you on Facebook or another channel.
Having great email marketing is just one of the many ways to increase your ticket sales to your next event. Helm Tickets’ promotional tools and integrations are all there to make the process that little bit easier!
by jonc | Apr 18, 2019 | Promote
Your event’s website – specifically the landing page/homepage – is the most critical tool for converting event awareness into converted event attendees. Your pages’ design should help achieve this goal with a clear identity and message, and organized information hierarchy and stunning visual imagery. The following tips can help you maximize your event page’s effectiveness using the Helm Tickets event widget.
Brand Identity
Your events landing page (homepage) should embody your brand by showing your brand’s unique identity. The most effective event ticket pages express this identity with both visual and verbal aspects. By pairing typefaces with simple and clear layouts that help close a sale with a natural registration process, you create a hierarchy. A design hierarchy is a design that guides a user along a specific path towards a single goal.
Having a good visual hierarchy arranges content into whatever you want the viewer to see first, second, third, etc. You can do this with powerful imagery, contrasting colors, or even each element’s relative size on a page. Verbal hierarchies work similarly in that you can funnel your information available towards the desired outcome. For example, you could present your essential information first, such as event name, date/time/location, and cost, then follow on with further engaging event details such as any speakers, activities or logistics.
Ensuring a good usability level is essential when putting together all of these elements on your event ticket page. Be flexible with your layouts and make sure your site loads quickly and is easy to use, especially mobile. Whilst design is important; it shouldn’t lose any usability.
Brand Message
An events ticketing page messaging works alongside its information hierarchy. Attendees are increasingly searching for greater levels of interactivity, entertainment, and engagement. By creating an effective event page messaging, you should support a user-defined experience based on trust, which is a key factor in building return and new attendees.
Your page’s design is essential when you look to develop trust levels between your attendees and the whole event experience. Defining what that experience is with a combination of visual cues and descriptive text can help define what your brand message is.
Keeping your brand message consistent throughout the experience, from buying a ticket to the event itself, is immensely important. It will help fuel future purchases with a clear message when being referred by word of mouth or social media, as well as then hopefully leading to a more significant conversion rate.
Consistent messaging creates a level of interest by focusing on the event’s brand promise (an incredible experience), which can feed word-of-mouth advertising (social proof, recommendations) and increase conversions (registration, ticket purchases). Delivering on that promise converts attendees into advocates for your brand, developing future engagement and reinforcing the brand, particularly for recurring events.
Brand Colors
Event ticket pages seek to spark meaningful, tangible, and comprehensive event experiences. They should depend on a palette of three to five emotionally associated colors. Shades of crimson, navy blue, bright gold, deep orange, vivid magenta, or (more frequently) royal or ultraviolet purple are still commanding palettes both in print and on-screen.
Vibrant colors provoke an intense experience, but colors associated with specific emotions (cool for precision or tradition, warm for innovation, neon for excitement) can also emphasize that experience. Contrasting colors for body copy, like black text on a white background, make it easy for potential attendees to skim, read and get a quick feel for your event without having to struggle to find information.
Brand Type/Fonts
Most educational event ticket pages use copy that’s understandable regardless of its surrounding (literal or figurative) noise. Simple typography and iconography allow convenient navigation, and consistently applied type supports the brand’s visual signals in any environment. On-screen that means it needs to be highly functional – mostly sans-serif font sets for subheads, body copy, and buttons – followed by heavier display typefaces or even hand-lettered type for headlines.
As for copy in general, using fewer words (but correct words) is still the practice. Properly layered typography (progressively darkening color shades or descending weights for headers, subheads, body copy, etc.) will contrast well for more important content like detailed programme descriptions or guest speaker information.
Brand Images
Captivating brand imagery will strengthen any event tickets page’s brand, message, and call to action. Professional photography fairly dominates a significant amount of large conferences, concerts, and festival pages—but many events of varying sizes may also use interchangeable imagery. These illustrations or icons may arise throughout the site, either as a latent wallpaper or overtly associated with particular event features or actions.
Several brands are dialling back their aesthetic imagery for banners or other hero-level imagery in favor of more dynamic and engaging content (social media walls or video reels). Visually, that means simpler logos with fewer colors (if not completely all-one color) and subtler placement are becoming key. This is the most common occurrence of white logos (or text or icons) overlaying wildly colorful imagery or video.
Whether your event ticket page uses photography or illustration, it’s always best to hire a professional. This will help you stand out from thousands of amateur Facebook banners or badly lit photographs of surprised or unprepared people. Creative professionals can always make the most of less-than-ideal conditions, so your next events imagery can be more engaging and shareable!
Keeping track of the latest and most valuable event ticket page trends and designs isn’t always at the forefront of many event professionals’ minds when they’re busy with the event’s logistics. Your event ticket page may not even be the first point of contact for any potential attendees. Still, it should 100% be the most informative and have a clear narrative leading to your desired outcome regardless of where they came from (a social or email link).
Perceptive event professionals know the best events where attendees participate in an engaging experience before attending the event. Successful event professionals understand how critically important their event ticket page is as a component to reach those conversion goals.
by jonc | Apr 12, 2019 | Promote
Having great event photography can take your event promotion to the next level.
Whilst the added time and effort may not initially seem like the wisest investment, having amazing quality images will make advertising and promoting your next event a thousand times easier in the long run.
Despite camera phones upping their game over the last few years, to really capture the feel of your event and to have professional-level advertising content, it’s still essential to hire an experienced professional if you want to have clear, compelling images.
Here are a few of our top tips to ensure your next event has the best images possible.
Booking a photographer
Hiring an experienced event photographer is incredibly important. If you Google event photographers in your area, you’re sure to find hundreds of photographers, so it may be worth reaching out to people you know and seeing if they have any recommendations. If you’re using a venue, they also may be able to supply you with several suppliers they’ve used in the past. Give yourself plenty of time to find the right photographer for your event.
Take a deeper look into their work through their website: for example, galleries, testimonials, experience, if they have any specialities, and their pricing. If they’ve frequently worked on events similar to yours or previously worked at the venue, they’d be able to provide you with the most effective images.
Try and find a photographer whose style would suit your event’s promotional needs as well as your budget. Always ensure you agree on a fee upfront and what exactly that fee will cover in terms of time, scope, editing and supply of the images.
Once you’ve found a photographer you’re happy with, you’ll need to ensure they’re fully briefed on exactly what you need from them. Ensure there’s a safe place for them to leave their equipment, such as a lockable cupboard or office space, and make sure they have appropriate access to the part of your venue you need photographing.
Also, make sure they’re easily identifiable as the official event photographer(s). This makes sure you know what you’re paying for and ensures they don’t get too hijacked by guests looking for photos!
Writing an appropriate brief
Writing a brief can seem a daunting and time-consuming task. However, the long term payoff of having a clearly written brief ensures your photographer will be able to do the best job they can for you. Make sure you take the time to discuss what you want from them before the event and arrival – this way, you can deal with any last-minute opportunities or concerns.
The images from your event should have a clear narrative and tell the story of your event. Include pre-event shots to show your event’s set up and build hype for it, followed by plenty of images of attendees arriving and people interacting with your event. Depending on your event, you may want to include images of people watching a demonstration or presentation, your attendees sampling something, or talking to others at the event. The key sentiments you want to convey are your attendees enjoying themselves, celebrating, learning, and interacting. This will grow the levels of trust and engagement for possible future attendees.
Have a good mixture of close-up and broader shots and a mix of candid and posed shots. This is necessary to ensure you have a good variety of material to work with in the future. Some of these shots will be more appropriate for social media use, and some may be more appropriate for use on marketing and promotional materials. Having images that convey emotion can sometimes be more effective than getting action shots, aiming to get a good level of reaction shots to your event. Put together a list of essential shots and some that are more abstract and allow your photographer to be creative on the day too!
The brief itself should include:
- Audience and purpose: it’s essential to get images of your audience interacting with your event, but it’s also a good idea to think about who you’ll be putting that image in front of and what they’d want to see to encourage them to buy a ticket to your next event. Are the images for social media? Are they for a press release? Are they for stakeholders? Or maybe for your next brochure or advert? There can sometimes be several audiences you want to target, so it’s important to remember this when writing out your image list.
- Branding: if you have a set of brand guidelines, it may be worth supplying those to your photographer, so they get a good feel and understanding of your brand and are better able to create images that accurately reflect it.
- Know the event: the more information your event you can supply your photographer, the better. If you have an event programme or guide, it may be worth sending this to them in advance so that they can plan out their time to make sure they’re able to get all the shots you need in the allotted time. Once arriving at the event, it may be worth showing them around to know where they’re going and can be more effective in how they spend their time at your event. If there are any VIPs or specific people you need plenty of photos of, make sure you introduce them in advance, so there’s no confusion, and it makes it easier for both the photographer and the person of interest.
- Key moments: let your photographer know the key moments of your event that you want to capture in advance. Creating a timetable of these moments may be really useful in timings for your photographer and make it easier to create a shortlist.
- Timings: before your event, it’s important to agree on both how and when they will supply you with the images. It’d be useful if, at some point during the event, you receive a few images to be used across all communications whilst the event is still live, and enough to use immediately after the event for ‘round up’ emails and press releases. The remaining images can then be scheduled to be delivered depending on when you need them.
Permissions
Generally, you don’t need to get permission to photograph large groups of people at public events, provided the images won’t be used out of context or aren’t likely to cause distress or harm. However, if minors are present, you’ll need to get parental consent for the child to be photographed.
Despite the fact you generally need permission, it’s advised that you highlight that there will be a photographer present at your event and have a procedure in place for those who are unhappy having their photo taken. Many events include opting into having the attendees’ photo taken as a condition of admission into the event, depending on the type of event and audience.
At Helm Tickets, we want to make sure you make the most out of your event and set yourself up to have even greater success at your next event. Finding a great event photographer and using the images to promote and share your event is incredibly important, and we hope these tips will make the process that little bit easier!
by jonc | Mar 22, 2019 | Plan & Create
New event pages are going up daily on Helm Tickets, and there are always even more people looking for events to go to. So what makes certain event listings and pages more successful than others?
There are a few factors that make a great event listing. So whether you’re going to embed your listing on your own site or link directly to ours, discover how to make the most of your event listing here!
The Event Name
The most successful events have short, engaging titles that describe exactly what your event is and why it’s different from the rest. The most effective titles make an instant impression, are simple to remember and look great on any promotional materials.
Your title doesn’t need to explain everything about your event, just enough to catch potential attendees’ attention so they’ll want to learn more about your event. If you have a person of interest attending the event or the organiser, are the person of interest, make sure any notable names are included in the event title.
The Event Location
When people are looking for events, they often search by location. They may be looking for something close to home or something further away during a trip. Your short and engaging event title will appear where the potential attendees are searching by providing the exact location.
Having this exact event location means anyone who’s already attending your event is also more likely to share with people around them to help spread the word.
Event SEO
Making your event listing SEO friendly means it’s easier for search engines like Google to find your event, which is incredibly important. A good chunk of SEO is based on having relevant keywords in your event title and on your event page. When creating your event title, it’s important to think about making it short and sweet and including a keyword or two in the title that could be used to search for your event.
Then it’s time to look at creating your event description. Take a quick looking into the types of people you want to attend your event. Build up some keywords and phrases that you think they’d search for to find your event. These will be the keywords and phrases that you’ll want to include in your description. SEO can be as simple as that!
The Event Details
Writing out all the small event details may not be the most interesting part of creating your event, but your audience will appreciate it. Make sure that your event description tells any potential attendees everything they need to know about your event.
This could include:
- FAQs
- What’s allowed/not allowed
- Line up
- Recaps from a previous event
- Transportation options
- Any other information you might think will help convince your audience to buy a ticket.
Make sure your pricing and tickets types are clear, and it’s easy to understand what’s included with each ticket. For example, if you have a VIP package that includes free food and drink, make sure you let the potential attendee know that’s what’s included.
All this has many benefits: as well as helping your SEO, it’ll also help to answer any questions people have before they buy their tickets. Picture yourself as the attendee: if you couldn’t find the information you needed before buying a ticket, how likely would you buy that ticket?
Be Organised
No one likes having to read through lots of text to try and find the information they’re looking for. Use headers to help organise your event information and break up large text bodies with sections of broken down information. This makes it super easy for your audience to find exactly what they’re looking for. If you have a schedule for the day or a line up playing at different times, break it down using bullet points. Simple changes like this make it much easier for potential attendees to find what they need.
The quicker they find the information they’re looking for, the quicker they’ll start buying tickets to your event.
The All-Important Images
Your event images are arguably one of the most important features of your event page. It’s the best way to attract people to your page. It’ll be used when sharing your page and listing on social media and is one of your most important tools to help you sell more tickets.
Upload the logo of your event, business or organisation. Choose other images that are unique to your event (such as images from previous events) and images that reflect your event’s feel. By uploading lots of great images, you’re giving your audience an insight into your event before attending. Make sure you keep these images as professional as possible. This can help you sell more tickets and encourages people to share your event on their own social media profiles.
Combining Text, Images and Video For Success
The most successful event listings and pages include engaging text, compelling images and sometimes even video content embedded into the event description. Choose images and videos that add meaning and depth to your event, so your audience can learn more about your event through your visual content. If you’ve held this event or a similar event in the past, including images and videos that provide show how it went. If you have people of interest attending, performing or speaking at your event, consider including images of them (as long as you have their consent). Having visual media like this in your event listing is far more engaging for your audience and will help convert them to attendees.
by jonc | Mar 15, 2019 | Product
As part of our ongoing mission to make Helm Tickets more accessible to the thousands of organisers that use our software around the globe, we’ve introduced new localisation features for events, assets and organiser profiles. These changes will help your current and future events to run even more smoothly, no matter where you are in the world.
While individually these may not seem like huge changes, individually they’ll go a long way to supporting both organisers and ticket buyers outside of the UK going forward.
Localised times for events and users
With Helm Tickets expanding further around the world, it’s important that dates and times are displayed correctly and clearly to all users – both organisers and ticket buyers.
This feature includes a new time zone setting for your events. This setting allows you to set the time zone the event takes place in, and applies to any other times and dates set within your event, for example, ticket on sale from and to dates and times.
For example:
If you’re hosting a conference at 9 am in New York (EST, GMT-6) but the attendee is visiting from Los Angeles (PST, GMT-8), what time should be displayed – the time local to the event, or the time local to the current user?
Previously, this was ambiguous and there was no clear way of knowing, but now it’s much clearer, with the ability to manually set a time zone.
User’s timezone
The user’s timezone can be set from their profile page. If the person currently viewing the website doesn’t have an account (or is registering), our platform guesses what their time zone is, based on either their browser settings or IP address.
This time zone will be used to display any dates on the website that don’t directly relate to an event’s time slot. For example, see when an order was made or refund was processed, when an invoice is due, or when a member of the reserve list was last notified.
Event time zone
When creating or editing an event, you can set an explicit time zone against it. By default, it will select your time zone (if you’re the event organiser), but you can change this.
The time zone you choose (or your time zone if you leave it as the default) is the time zone that all event slots will be displayed in. Everywhere an event’s time slots are displayed will be in this timezone, usually with a clarification added to it. This helps all times be consistent and make it easy for your attendees to understand what time the event will take place at, in the time zone local to the event itself.
Updated Language Settings
We’ve also introduced a language setting that allows you to choose between English (United Kingdom) and English (United States), and we’re planning to add in further languages at a later date.
Until now, our website has been entirely in British English. This has caused some issues for American users in a couple of ways:
- American users are used to a different date format: they use MM/DD/YYYY whereas in the UK we use DD/MM/YYYY. This causes confusion when dates are shown, as when we display a date like 01/02/2019 it’s unclear whether this is 1st February or 2nd January
- It can appear like we have spelling mistakes to Americans, as we spell words like “organizer” (organiser) and “color” (colour) differently because of our use of the British spellings
This update allows users to select a language from their profile page, currently either between British English and American English. The default language selected is based on the user’s browser settings or IP when they register. The platform also assumes a language based on browser settings or IP if users don’t have an account.
Whichever language you select determines the language you’ll see, and this changes for each user. This means the date pickers show months and days differently, and any words that have different spellings between British and American English will be shown according to the language you choose.
Updated Date Pickers
The date pickers on our platform have proven to be tricky for a while – they weren’t user-friendly and can often be cumbersome and confusing to use.
We’ve replaced these date pickers with new ones. The new date pickers have an intuitive interface that’s easy to use on both desktop and mobile devices, with a clear way to select the time and a range of dates, and none of the hassles the old date pickers brought!
To make sure your event(s) and profile has the correct settings, we’ve made the following changes:
- We’ve updated all existing event time zones using the event(s) address and updated all other dates and times in the event(s) to match this
- We’ve updated your profile time zone, using data you may have already provided to us, such as your address
As we’ve made these changes under the assumptions above, you should check the time zone set against your event(s), and the time zone set against your profile to make sure they’re all correct. This way, we can ensure your event and future events run as smoothly as possible.
We hope you enjoy this update and hope it benefits your event. If you have any questions, please let us know by emailing support@helmtickets.com.
