How to use data driven marketing to sell more tickets to your next event

Technology can be a powerful way to improve our lives, and for event organisers, it can make it even easier to bring people together to share and celebrate.

One of the most powerful tools for event organisers is understanding digital analytics. Being able to master these tools can take a little bit of time and patience, but has big dividends.

In this blog, we take you through some of the basics and explain some of the cool features we have over at Humanitix, which make it easier than ever to track and manage your event listing. Knowledge is power, and in this case, data will help you know where to spend your money and energy, to level up your event marketing.

What is data analytics?

To make a complicated idea simple: analytics is any process of measuring and evaluating something. And data is any statistic or fact. So data analytics is taking data organising it to derive insights.

Event marketing analytics generally refers to the techniques (and tools) you use to extract data while promoting an event online:

• Event metrics: In the context of organising an event, some metrics might include attendance, revenue cost-to-revenue ratio and average registration value.
• Event marketing metrics: There is other analytics to measure the health of your marketing and social media campaigns, as well as your email campaign.

These are all metrics that help inform decisions you make about events, and how you market them. There are a few major categories you can group them into:

• Conversion: This is about getting a user to complete a predetermined goal. For events, the ‘conversion’ is likely to purchase a ticket. What you might want to track, for example, is how many ‘conversions’ happened after sending a particular marketing email to promote your event - and you can use this information to measure some of your efforts aimed at selling more tickets.
• Engagement: This is for social media and networks, and measures levels of user interaction with your posts and updates. They don’t always lead to conversions but can give a sense of how many people are engaging with your brand (and event).
• CPC: Cost-per-click or how much you paid each time a user clicked on one of your sponsored posts.
• CPM: Cost-per-thousand: how much you paid each time 1000 users were exposed to your content.

The benefits of data analytics for your next event

Using data analytics well can sell more tickets, increase overall revenue from events and ensure that your campaigns get engagement. Plus, if you are tapped into what your guests liked and didn’t like, it can help you run better events in the future.

• Sell more tickets: When you understand the reasons people do (and don’t) buy tickets, you are one step closer to being able to sell more. Maybe the price point is too high, maybe very few people opened your marketing email, maybe you haven’t quite nailed reaching your target market (or maybe your target market is a little different than you thought).
• Make your marketing go further: Having hard data about the effectiveness of your marketing strategies will help you make decisions about where to invest your marketing budget. Is an incredible email campaign best to reach your market? Or are you more likely to find potential punters through instagram ads? This helps you get a clear picture of which avenues actually give you a return on investment.
• Have the stats to back you up: Having cold, hard stats is always going to be useful - especially when trying to convince people that having a jumping castle is guaranteed to make your next event a stand-out success. Your instincts are important, but if you can back them up with data, even better!

The kinds of questions you can answer using data analytics

When deciding how to collect and analyse data, it is important to be clear on the kinds of questions you want to answer - and whether your analytics are the best way to do that.

Which channel is the most effective in reaching my guests?

If you are promoting your event across multiple channels, you will want to know which one delivers the biggest returns. Data can enable you to see how many people engage across channels, and also which channel leads to the most actual ticket purchases (or sales conversions). Humanitix is fully integrated with Facebook Pixel, making it easier to measure the results of your ads and see how many people get driven to your events page, and actually end up purchasing a ticket.

Which copywriting or campaign is the most effective for reaching out to potential (and previous) guests?

Different audiences will respond to different campaigns and copy - and analytics, such as A/B testing campaigns - can help pinpoint the kind of language, images or “vibe” that your target guests respond to. You can test everything from email copy to the text you use on a button, to the overall look and feel of a campaign.

When you list an event with Humanitix, you can use Google Analytics to measure how your event page does in achieving conversions. This can influence the copy you write on your event page or the design tools you use. This helps you make the most effective page for every event.

What point in the purchase drives most people away

The sad truth of online commerce is that most people abandon their carts. Something that can be really helpful in understanding why is tracking the point in the transaction when this happens. For event organisers, it is usually either when people get to the ticket sale page and see a fee they weren’t expecting, or when they have to type in a ton of personal information to complete the purchase.

With Google Tag Manager, you can track and analyse a huge range of user behaviours. This includes whether they got to the end of filling out a form or what items they removed from their cart. Humanitix is fully integrated with Google Tag Manager, so you can incorporate even more powerful analytics. We also have a 1-click ticket manager, which means you can let guests check out by entering the minimal amount of information, then ask them to fill in the missing pieces later. This helps remove a major barrier to completing the purchase - which is great news for your sales.

Feeling driven to create your first event? Let's sell some tickets!

List your event with Humanitix and make the most of data analytics tools. Our integrations make it easy to track how effective your event marketing is, and help you improve your event listing and marketing. Plus, every ticket sold means another fee gets donated to education projects around the world.