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Advanced analytics

There are endless ways to cut and splice your data to find those little nuggets of insight that will help you grow your event. And now thanks to AI, you don’t need to be an Excel whizz to break it down and spot patterns.

What you do need is a platform – like CM – that gives you full control over your data. Because while almost all ticketing sites allow you to natively access analytics, and tout this as a selling point, a large proportion of them also make it difficult to export that data and use it elsewhere. In other words, they let you into the showroom but never actually hand over the keys.

And that’s a problem.

Because, the real value of attendee data comes when it is combined with insights from other channels (e.g. website analytics) and applied to find answers to deeper questions, such as: Which social media channel drove the most sales? What has been the highest-converting event description? What distinguishes repeat attendees from people that come once and never again? Attendee data that is easy to access is the first step towards that.

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Promotion is tough. Long-term success hinges on growing your audience with each event and honing your targeting, messaging and personalisation to better engage attendees. Owning your data makes this much easier, reducing your reliance on algorithms and time-consuming marketing tasks.

At the very least, every event should be seen as an opportunity to expand your database and make the next promo cycle easier. Let’s say 25% of your sales come from your mailing list – grow your database by 15% each time you promote an event (using sign-up incentives during checkout or on-site tactics), and in theory your sales from that one channel will grow exponentially.

The problem is that unlike CM, which offers integrated marketing and ticketing, many platforms lack advanced email marketing features. And yet when promoters attempt to export data across to their platform of choice they are met with an overly restrictive and lengthy process.

This also limits how effectively you can target your audience. Clean, accessible data makes things simpler when it comes to building more sophisticated or personalised campaigns. You can easily segment attendees based on previous purchases, interests, or engagement levels, and create tailored welcome flows for different groups. This kind of targeted marketing generally leads to higher engagement, more ticket sales, and an overall better attendee experience.

More trust, less competition

The other element to consider in all of this is your attendees themselves. Data privacy is a growing concern and your attendees will likely want to know that their personal information is secure and not being passed along to shadowy third parties.

By maintaining control over your data, you can create a privacy policy and give them explicit assurance that their details won’t be sold off or shared with third parties. It’s a small thing, but one that could make you seem a more trustworthy and responsible event promoter as a result.

On the flipside of this, the recycling of attendee data can actually harm your event. As an example of how this might happen, let’s imagine you run a music event in a small town where competition is fierce. You've spent years building an audience, gathering email addresses, and pushing out content. Now, imagine the platform you're using promotes a rival event to your audience based on their demographic markers – which happens. That competitor now stands to benefit from all of your hard work.

With CM your attendee data stays with you. No competing events are marketed to your audience, and due to the integrated nature of the platform you are free to shape your attendee comms as you wish. Which, given the immense hard work and creativity that goes into promoting events, is the way it should be.

Leave attendees wanting more

What happens at the end of a meal at a high-end restaurant? Usually they give you some kind of parting gift – a sweet treat to send you away with positive feelings about the experience. It’s a simple psychological trick and one you can apply to your own event.

Platforms such as CM.com make it easy to send opted-in attendees a post-event perk. If you run a music event or festival, consider sending an exclusive playlist curated by the headliner, an NFT of the setlist, or special edition merch (which you can sell through your CM.com ticket shop) themed around the gig. If you’ve hosted a workshop, send attendees away with audio from the event or a breakdown of the key takeaways.
On social media, publish wrap-up reels or image galleries that will be engaged with and shared. You want to induce positive memories in the people that did attend – and a feeling of FOMO among those that didn’t.

Find other ways to engage

As an event organiser, it pays to build a year-round relationship with your fans – so that when you do have something to promote you’re not starting from scratch.

As boring as it might sound, this starts with having a good handle on data. With CM.com, you take complete ownership of your data and are free to segment it as you wish. This makes it easy to build automated welcome flows, birthday emails and regular newsletters – which can help you keep up momentum in fallow periods. And unlike many other ticketing platforms, you can import opted-in email addresses from elsewhere – your website, for example.

Content remains king but make sure to tailor it to your audience. Using analytics from the platform and survey data, get a feel for their preferences. What topics most interest them? Where do they hang out online? How often do they want to hear from you?

Then, look to build an always-on, cross-channel content plan with a few repeatable formats (monthly playlists, behind-the-scenes reels, artist Q&As) that takes all that into account. This could be as light-touch as sharing the odd meme related to specific topics on Instagram, or as involved as curating a weekly email newsletter series that features original interviews with artists your fans are likely to be interested in.

If you’re struggling to find or create compelling content from elsewhere, don’t be afraid to take them behind the curtain into your experiences as an event creator. In 2024, event brands or venues that are able to connect with their fans on a deeper level tend to win out. You don’t need slick, stylised content to compete.

Get ahead of the onsale

In the lifecycle of an event, there are two crucial stages – the moment tickets go on-sale and the week leading up to the event. Most promoters make the latter count, it’s those that are able to master the on-sale that really get ahead.

What makes a good on-sale? Clearly, you need to create as big a splash as possible and generate an initial surge of ticket sales and interest. The more people that know about your event early on, the more exponential growth you will see as they tell their friends and so on. This doesn’t happen by accident – so use any downtime you have to build momentum.

Create presale content that evokes feelings of scarcity, intrigue or a combination of the two. Scarcity marketing works because it creates a sense of urgency in the mind of the consumer. You might achieve this by communicating well before the launch that there will be a limited set of early-bird tickets available, or by including merch with each of the first x number of tickets sold.

Intrigue your audience with cryptic Tik-Toks or emails that tease the event’s content or line-up. Embed countdowns into your posts and stories. If it feels right for your event, use guerrilla marketing tactics to get people talking.

And be creative. Because while you don’t have the instant gratification of ticket sales in the off-season, what you do have is the space to figure out how you’re going to do things bigger and better next time.

People come to Amnesia because of its legacy

Amnesia was founded in the 70s by philosopher Antonio Escohotado, who had moved to Ibiza from Madrid. Originally naming it The Workshop of Forgetfulness, his dream was to create a destination on the island where people could come to escape their everyday lives, through music and partying. That dream came true. Within a few years Amnesia was drawing in bohemians from around Europe.

“Antonio wanted to experiment with different atmospheres,” says Bea, Marketing Manager at the club. “People came here to experience things they couldn’t in any other part of the world. It was the door in Spain to these new waves of music.”

In the 1980s, a new wave hit – electronic music. Amnesia, already one of the jewels of Ibiza’s nightlife scene, became the place – witnessing the birth of the ‘Balearic Beat’ and legendary Acid House nights towards the end of the decade.

While the club has expanded its offering in more recent times, collaborating with the likes of Elrow to put on around 160 nights a season, the culture of experimentation and escapism that defined its early years lives on.

“All the nights are completely different from each other. This is something that people really like because it changes the whole atmosphere of the club,” says Bea.

“The minute people are coming through the door, they feel free,” adds Agnieszka, Amnesia’s Ad Manager and Data Analyst. “We have a huge variety of DJs, a huge variety of fiestas and parties. Whatever you’re into, whoever you are, you come in and find yourself here.”

“We all have that same passion, from the owner to the last person that leaves this building,” adds Agnieszka. “It connects us all, within the team, on the dancefloor, it’s that one beat that we all have for this place.”

Digitalisation has been a process

For all that legacy, Amnesia has had to adapt to the digital world like any other business.“Digitalisation has been a process in the company and also the marketing team,” says Bea. “We’ve had to transform some of the systems and processes and embrace new technologies.”

To cement the club’s global reputation and engage fans, Amnesia have worked hard to build their social reach. The marketing team work around-the-clock to capture live content to “make the Amnesia nights go around the world” and delight their near 800,000-strong Instagram following.

Capturing the spirit of an offline experience online is something a lot of hospitality businesses struggle to do. Where Amnesia has succeeded is through replicating the energy of its club nights across its digital channels, consolidating offline and online into one seamless, multi-sensory experience.

Let’s take the website, rebranded and rebuilt earlier this year, as an example. Landing on the homepage, you get a sense of what it must be like to step onto the Amnesia dancefloor. There are gaudy colours, shapes that melt into one another as you hover over them, and bold statements that flash up and disappear in the blink of an eye. In the centre of the screen a video offers fractured glimpses of the club, spinning the viewer round into different rooms. It’s disconcerting and probably breaks a few design rules but the impression it leaves is clear: Amnesia is unusual, bold and an experience not to be missed.

CM is another department of Amnesia

In 2022 Amnesia began working with CM.com to evolve another critical area of the business – ticketing.

“We used to have paper tickets and we distributed them to the island in a manual way,” explains Aleix, Head of Sales. “After that we started to sell tickets on our website. We had our own system which was very, very simple.

“Now with CM, we have a lot of new things that our system couldn’t give us before. We have all the new tools and things that we didn’t have before. It’s given us a lot of new horizons for how to manage the club, how to manage the brand.”

Those new horizons include the ability to stay in touch with fans all year-round through CM’s built-in email and SMS marketing tools, which they use to tease new nights and segment audiences by country to create more personalised flows. Another step forward has been including merch as an add-on in the checkout process for buying tickets, which attendees can collect when they arrive. The online ticket shop itself is fully branded and customised according to the specific night visitors are looking to attend.

Crucially, with CM.com, Amnesia retain control of their data (unlike many other ticketing platforms, who make it difficult to extract) and use it to stay ahead of the game.

“Before, when we opened the doors during the day for every event, we didn't know how many people we should expect to come to the club,” says Aleix. “The reporting tools and real-time information we get now has helped us to find better solutions and take better decisions for the global management of the brand.”

So far the partnership has yielded two bumper seasons of increased ticket sales with more success to come as the two companies work closely on honing the experience for fans.

“The most important thing that we need from our ticketing partner during high-season, peak-season, is that constant contact. Full support during the day, all the answers that we need in a short time,” says Aleix. “CM.com is another department of Amnesia. They are out of the club. But the level of contact we have with them every day makes us feel like they are inside the company.”

Agnieszka adds: “All of the marketing tools help to add to whatever is already here, that true living organism.”