Speaker 1: Okay, ticket sellers, welcome to this week's run of show. You're going to like this one. We have gotten a lot of inbound asking us to give you numbers around how to sell tickets, how to fill seats, how to put the butts in the seats and make them pay for it, right? It's not easy. I've been there, kind of deciding how you're going to price, how you're going to promote. What we did was we analyzed a ton of information. We ran some regression analyses. We worked with our data scientists. We asked a lot of hard questions and we looked for patterns. We found some pretty interesting stuff and I'm going to get to share it with you today. Today we're going to dive into how to price and how to promote your events when you're selling tickets. What I will say off the bat is this, and this is the bad news. We looked at events that were selling tickets for anywhere as low as a dollar and anywhere as high as $20,000. In each of those types of buckets, we saw sold out events. We saw people who were able to drive ticket sales. It was hard to find patterns that were always very useful, but we were able to find a couple gems that I think you're going to be able to apply to your programs. Let's dive right in with the first one that we call the seven to one rule. The seven to one rule is pretty simple. Let's kind of run a quick scenario. If you think about your next event, let's say you were to sell tickets for $10, right, and then you send out 100 invitations and 10 people bought tickets. That's a 10% conversion rate, right? Now, if you were to increase that ticket value $7 more, so to $17, you're going to see a 9% conversion rate. What I mean to say is you're going to see a 1% drop. For every $7 you increase ticket prices, you're going to see a 1% drop in conversion. That doesn't mean don't charge more for your tickets. As I said, we've seen some very expensive events sell out, but what it does mean is you're going to need to do more promotion if you increase those prices. As you're thinking about kind of where to land on the ticket price, we saw something pretty interesting. We started looking at all of the people who sold out their events, but did they have anything in common? More often than not, we saw what we call the power of nines. They were using $9 ticket increments. As opposed to $30 tickets, they were selling for a very specific number, $29. As you're thinking about where exactly to price your ticket, try $69, try $109. We find that those sell out at a higher consistency. Last on the pricing side, look, we're talking about conversion ratios and that's definitely something you want to watch as you're pricing, but you can also use pricing as a lever and specifically to drive urgency. We call it the early bird effect. What we were able to see was that tickets that were using early bird pricing, so this means discounted pricing if you buy now while tickets last. You should see when they're sending out emails, they're really driving this urgency with countdown clocks and talking about how many tickets they've already sold. They're using these early bird pricing and we're actually seeing a 12.5% increase in total tickets sold when you use early bird pricing. It's a very powerful lever. 12.5% when you're talking about a lot of tickets sold can be a lot of money. Really think about your tickets and how you're pricing them with early bird. It's a very powerful mechanism. Once you've set up your pricing, the next step is to think about your promotion. I want you to sit down for this if you're not already because this is a little bit of a bummer news. You probably already know it. We call this the two months, two weeks rule. For about 90% of the events that we analyze, they began promotion two months out. Despite the fact that they were out the gates with good amount of time for tickets to sell, we saw that 70% of the tickets that were bought were bought in the last two weeks. Even though they were promoted for two months, they sold most of their tickets in two weeks. Just so you can see what that looks like, I just threw a graph up here. You can see that the last two weeks end up being the lion's share of tickets sold, which is a bummer. Here's the good news. As we started diving into the data, we found out one other thing. 50%, half of the people that open that first email you send, half of those people are going to eventually buy. What this says to me is that even though we have to sit back and wait for those procrastinators to eventually buy their tickets, we really want to pay attention to that first email and who actually engages with it. With enough nurture, we can actually get those people to eventually buy. Something that I often will think about is what time to send the invitation. Our data showed that the highest likelihood of purchase, when people purchase the most tickets, is between the hours of 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. What does that say? What that says to me is that when your marketing team is ready to press, and they're like, hey, are we ready to send this invitation now? The only question you need to ask is, is it before noon or is it afternoon? Because if it's afternoon, you've already missed that window, you really might as well wait until the next day. You really want to focus on getting your promotional material out before noon that day so you can take advantage of that high buying window. We know when to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. It really is important to take advantage of Google Analytics and look in your analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from. What we have found is that finally, mobile traffic, when it comes to ticket purchases, has crossed over 50%. Now it's 56% of your attendees are purchasing on mobile. What that says to me is you better be optimizing your mobile experience. Make sure it's seamless. Make sure it's easy to buy. Last but not least, we found that across all of these events that we were analyzing, there was one common denominator for the events that actually sold out. Events that put the attendees on the page and put the speaker pictures on the page, really promoting via social clout, they had a nearly two times higher likelihood of selling out their events than those that did not show the attendees or the speakers that were at the event. Social clout's a really powerful mechanism and I would urge you to take advantage of it. You need to market through your attendees and market through your vendors, market through your speakers, market through your sponsors. It's really the best way to sell out your event. Okay. I hope you find that useful. If you have any questions, any burning questions, please let us know. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running regression analyses. By the way, thank you Mike for all your work on this. I'll see you next time, guys. Thanks for checking in. Craving more event content? If so, subscribe below and you can check out more episodes of Run-Up Show Weekly.