Ace Your Event Ticketing & Payments.

Getting paid and making a profit for your event is one of your top considerations. If you can’t get paid fast and turn a profit what are you doing this for? As always cash flow is king, generate early pre-event sales revenue to contribute towards the overall event expenses.

So you have booked your artists, the schedule is agreed and the venue logistics are under control. It’s time to start marketing your event and generating ticket sales. Assuming there is some time before the event and your marketing is generating interest how are you going to convert sales into money? You can split this between pre-event sales, usually online, plus a ticket allocation for on-the-day venue sales as customers rock up at the last minute (on the door sales).

For pre-event online sales aim to use a payment method that allows customers to purchase tickets in as many convenient ways as possible, Credit/Debit Card, PayPal, Bank Transfer or even Bitcoin. You can use a standard merchant account from your high street bank but the handling charges may be high. Consider using one of many Payment Gateway companies out there, for example Stripe, Sagepay, Google Wallet and PayPal that all offer multiple payment methods and where the handling charges tend to be lower. These are also relatively easy to obtain and set up on your website.

With online ticket sales it’s easy to monitor daily activity so you can forecast ticket sales and revenue enabling you to take remedial action if sales are low. Ongoing monitoring of ticket sales is key to planning your logistics and understanding how many tickets you will need to sell on the day of the event. Streamline your pre-event sales by sending customers a Barcode or QR code that they can store on their mobile device for easy scanning at entry to the event.

On the day of the event, how do you monitor ticket sales? If you have allocated a number of tickets for on-the-day sales how will you manage this? It is not unusual for large queues to form for these on-the-day ticket sales, this can result in bottle necks leading to disgruntled customers, possible lost sales and not to mention the health and safety issues with such crowds. There are some solutions available to event organisers to alleviate these issues. This technology is developing rapidly and on site sales throughput can be improved by using tap and pay or other Wi-Fi or Bluetooth scanning technology that securely takes payment and automatically generates a barcode wristband or other receipt as proof of payment for entry.

Once you have mastered the payments process don’t forget to incorporate accurate customer profiling as this is essential in understanding your audience for a specific event. Customer data also helps to produce a CRM or marketing database that you can use for futures events.

The guys at FestivalPro can help you ace your event payments with low cost technology solutions saving you time and money. The Festival Pro software platform already includes streamlined ticketing and payments modules taking away this headache and providing key real time ticket sales and customer profile data.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels

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