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Most festival organizers focus their energy on the offline experience. Elevating your digital offering can give you a fighting chance and help you shift those extra tickets to sell out your event.
To elevate your digital offering, you should engage your visitors throughout the year digitally, so they become dedicated followers of your brand - ensuring they never skip any of your events. Even better, they will spread the love and bring onboard new visitors.
Here are 11 of the most successful mobile marketing ideas for your event to ensure you stand out in a crowded market.
1. Pre-register for Exclusive Access
By offering pre-registration, you can gain valuable insights, such as how popular your event is and how many people will buy a ticket once the ticket shop is live. You can easily activate a custom queue to avoid overloading the store if there is high demand.
Pre-registration also offers a more positive experience for attendees because they don’t have to commit themselves yet. Still, they will receive relevant updates, including exclusive access to the ticket shop. Creating a pre-registration form can be done quickly via Pages, which you can even brand in your style. A drag-and-drop editor lets you drag and drop fields visitors must fill out, such as their contact details. These data can be collected in your Customer Data Platform (CDP).
2. Promote Your Event Offline and Online
Of course, your visitors will not by chance land on this form; you need to promote this. The most logical first step is sending it via SMS or email to your current database. Perhaps you do not have a database yet. Then you can easily promote your form with a social media campaign. The added value of having your database in a CDP is that after converting, you have the contact details of your fans, and you are no longer dependent on Mark Zuckerberg.
Probably not all your visitors are active social media users (anymore), so you must be creative to catch their attention. A good way is to bridge the gap between offline and online by using print ads at bus stops or restrooms with a QR code or an SMS code (e.g., text EVENT to 4004). This QR code or SMS leads to your desired page, such as the pre-registration.
3. Kick off Your Ticket Sales
Once you’ve gathered all the data of potentially interested visitors, you can kick off your ticket sales by sending them a personalized message, via their preferred channel, such as WhatsApp or SMS, with the initiation of your sales. A bonus is that SMS campaigns have an average open rate of 98%.
To increase your conversion even further, you can send a reminder after a certain period. By using marketing automation, you ensure that this message is only sent to the segment that hasn’t bought a ticket yet because it’s quite a doodler when you receive a reminder while you’ve already bought your ticket.
4. Let Your Visitors Share With Friends
Going to a festival with your friends is, of course, more fun than by yourself. So, sharing the link to the ticket shop with others should not be a hurdle. You can even convince your visitors to share it by using a simple ‘Share with friends’ WhatsApp button on the thank-you page. When clicking the button, your visitor will be redirected to WhatsApp with a pre-written message and a link to your shop. This possibility immediately broadens your target group, a win-win.
5. Create a Pre-event Buzz
Another sure-fire way of providing a great event experience while collecting visitor data is warming them up in the lead-up to your event, for example, with a win action by sharing their preferences, such as their favorite artist, to win a meet and greet.
In addition, you could offer them a reminder to download the event app so they have everything in one place during the event, such as their wallet, a site map, and any important updates. In the meantime, you immediately know who has downloaded this and who hasn’t.
Finally, it’s a perfect upsell opportunity. You could send a quick reminder to buy tokens, so they don’t have to wait in line or for the merchandise to show up in style. Upselling becomes a piece of cake with our Mobile Order solution.
6. Personalize Your Messages
No one feels special receiving an email with a generic “hi there” greeting. Personalizing your messaging can help here. It offers a nice touch and will strengthen your relationship with your visitors, in the long run, keeping them coming back time and time again. You can automatically send personalized messages by using dynamic variables from the data collected in your CDP. See the example below:
7. Surprise Visitors With a Voice Message
Another unique way to amaze your visitors is to have one of the artists call them. But how does that work? Of course, an artist cannot reach everyone himself; that would be very time-consuming, not to mention costly. No, a message is recorded in advance that starts after a visitor takes the call from an unknown number. A fun way to use this is to announce the festival’s headline or to use the CDP and send everyone a voice message from their favorite artists. You want the visitors to pick up the phone call, so it is wise to send an announcement earlier in the day, e.g., “Today you will receive an anonymous phone call with a nice surprise, believe us - you don’t want to miss this.”
8. Stay in Touch During the Event With an App
It’s rare for festivalgoers to read their emails during the event they’re attending. So, to stay in touch with them now, you must ensure that the information they receive is super relevant and arrives through the most appropriate channels. An app is a great way to go here - because you can send push notifications that appear immediately on your visitor’s screen. When you link this to the CDP, for example, you can send out a message when their favorite artist is about to play. Another way to ensure your messages are relevant is by applying geofencing technology, which uses the visitor’s location to send messages. For example, they might receive a push notification when they walk past a specific restaurant offering them a discount coupon.
9. Send Welcome Message Immediately After Ticket Scan
Another cool way to engage with your visitors during the event is by immediately sending them a mobile welcome message (e.g., with WhatsApp, Push, or SMS) when their ticket is scanned. This is easily done via marketing automation. In this message, you can link to a Page with all the necessary information, such as the event map or a link to a mobile order environment to buy food, drinks, or merchandise. An excellent opportunity for you to upsell/cross-sell, too! If they did not download the app yet, this would also be the perfect opportunity to let them know they can access a plethora of other helpful information if they download your event app.
10. Post-event Sweep Up
It’s not just about before or during the event. You’ll want to keep your attendees engaged afterward, too, by staying in touch and thus making sure your next event is just as successful. You can do this by asking for feedback via a survey on a Page after the event to ensure the next one is even better. You can make this happen by sending a trigger 24 hours after their ticket is scanned, while you’re still at the top of their minds and they’re still buzzing from the event. Other messages you can send throughout the year include an exclusive look at the next event line-up or behind-the-scenes videos, which will get them excited, wanting more, and thus more likely to pre-register for your next event.
11. Congratulate Your Fanbase on Their Birthday
To make your messaging super personal, it’s always a great idea to send personalized messages, such as a birthday message offering a surprise discount. This will help with year-round engagement and help improve your relationships, bolstering fan loyalty. Don’t worry; you don’t need to create thousands of birthday reminders to make this happen; it can all be done automatically via our nifty software.
Tip of the Iceberg
While there are many ways to improve and make more of a success of your event with mobile marketing, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more possibilities, all of which can be personalized to you, depending on your goals.
Our team at CM.com is ready to think along and take the mobile experience to the next level.
