5 reasons to digitalise the management of your events

The sales of your tickets online and the automation of your processes will simultaneously allow you to increase your revenue and reduce your workload.  Discover in this blog the five main reasons to digitalise the management of your events.

How can you boost the ticket sales for your events thanks to digitalisation?

1. Use a single and synchronised ticketing platform for online sales and point-of-sales.
2. Take advantage of analysis and sales forecasts in real time in order to take informed decisions based on actual data.
3. Opt for dynamic pricing in order to increase your revenues.
4. Set up a mobile, secure and fast access control system for a smooth reception.
5. Simplify your marketing and evaluate the success of your ads campaign to reach a wider audience.

1. Single and synchronised ticketing solution

For a lot of events, online ticket sales and on-site sales are not synchronised. It means that at specific times, it is complicated to know the exact level of sales.  If an event has limited capacity, care must be taken not to sell more seats than are available. 

The optimal situation would be to directly link the physical point-of-sales of the event to the online sales systems.  As a result, the quantity of tickets available is synchronised in real time, online and offline sales run in parallel, and online sales no longer have to be stopped once on-site sales have started.

What are the benefits of online sales ?

• Sales 24/7,
• Access to a larger audience,
• Early ticket sales,
• All payments methods are accepted,
• Automation of email confirmations,
• And much more...

Read this article for more information on the benefits of online sale.

2. Analytics and sales forecasts 

During your events, you often rely on your experience and make decisions based on your instincts, am I right? What if you started to make decisions based on statistics instead of predictions.

By digitalising your events, you can collect valuable data about your sales, customers and marketing. With a wide range of live analyses, you can quickly identify the strategies that work and make data-driven decisions to better allocate your staff, resources and budgets.

Analysis of sales channels

Through the use of tagged links, it is possible to find out where sales come from and which channels convert the most. Is it from your website? a Facebook post? a newsletter? an Instagram advertisement? a marketplace? This data allows you to focus on the most profitable channels. 

To find out more about tagged links, please read this article.

Real time sales monitoring

Online sales synchronisation allows you to check your offers at any time and get a quick overview of available and sold tickets. This makes it easy to see at a glance which products are performing best and to follow the evolution of your revenues. 

With this data, your marketing strategies can also be adapted in real time. For example, for an evening with low sales, it is possible to propose a promotional code to generate an increase in the level of sales. If promo codes are used during a period, it is possible to know the exact impact of these strategies on sales. 

To learn more about promo codes, please read this article.

Analysis of the participation rate 

There is often an unknown gap between the tickets sold and the actual participation rate. With a digitalise reception desk, it is possible to see in real time how many buyers have scanned their tickets and what the busiest times are. This overview is useful to better manage staff between low and high traffic periods.

3. Smart pricing

Smart pricing, or dynamic pricing, allows you to optimise your revenues by automatically adjusting your prices according to demand, weather or other factors specific to your business. The pricing model is based on past transactions to predict sales and thus propose optimal pricing for each event.

Dynamic pricing allows you to optimally capture increases in demand and mitigate decreases in demand by offering attractive prices during these periods.

Why predict your sales ? 

• Financial planning: anticipate your organisation's income and profits.
• Marketing execution: launch promotions in time, in case of insufficient sales forecasts.
• Price optimisation: capture the demand curve at its maximum by adjusting your prices.
  

4. Mobile access control

Welcoming and checking-in your participants at the entrance can be a complicated  task. Simplify this step with a fully digitalised process. 

When booking online, confirmation emails will be sent automatically to your participants with a unique QR code and a ticket attached in PDF format. There is no need to print out the tickets, as the QR codes can be scanned at the entrance directly through the mobile phone.

The scanner is also a simple mobile phone. So if there is a large influx of people, any authorised team member can take out their phone and start scanning tickets. In addition, a QR code has the advantage that it can be scanned in all directions, unlike a traditional bar code which can only be scanned in the right direction.

Finally, if a participant has forgotten his ticket or can't find his email, you can search for his name in the attendee manager and check if he has a valid ticket. With a unique and highly secure QR code, there is no risk of fraud from the participants, by trying to get several people through with a single ticket. You are the only one who can decide when and where the ticket can be scanned and how many times.

In this way, any entry is done professionally, quickly and securely.

5. Marketing and success of advertising campaigns

At Smeetz, we are convinced that well-targeted marketing can have a great impact on your sales. Our team offers advice to the organisers, so that they can effectively deploy the tools built into our system.

We advise our customers to integrate with HubSpot, a software that allows you to manage your contacts and target your marketing more efficiently. Thanks to booking data, you have an automatically updated database of your participants and can, for example, send personalised newsletters to your different types of customers.

On the other hand, our clients use the Facebook Pixel to optimise the success of their Facebook and Instagram ads and reach a wider audience. This tool, which links the interactions on our website and your website with Facebook users, allows to target ads to the users most likely to act on the message. 

To learn more about our integration with the Facebook Pixel, have a look at this article. 

Digital marketing is not your strong point? We offer individual marketing advice to our clients. Contact us for more information: sales@smeetz.com

Let’s get digital with Smeetz for Business

By centralising all your sales channels on Smeetz for Business, you will be able to see in real time how many tickets are available for your event and keep control of the tickets sold. In short, you will have a single stock from which you can sell through the channels of your choice.

The sale of your tickets, admissions or reservations can therefore be done on a minimum of 3 channels simultaneously:

1. Online on your own website with the Smeetz booking widget,
2. Online on different marketplaces,
3. On-site with the Smeetz point-of-sales

Smeetz will enable you to collect valuable information about your customers and sales, whether you are organising free or paid events. During ticket sales, your data is automatically transformed into ready-to-use statistics to simplify your decision making.

Free invitations are managed by the same system as paid tickets. This way, the exact participation rate as well as the number of tickets sold and guests attending each event are known.

One of the main utilities of the data we collect is our smart pricing model. It is used by several of our clients and here are some of the results:

• more than 10% additional revenue compared to a fixed pricing,
• increase in the conversion rate of online sales,
• and acceleration of early bookings.