How to recover your event abandoned carts and increase your ticketing sales
Do you know that about 98% of your visitors land on your registration page but don’t finish their order? That is correct, your whole event ticket sales is based on those 2% you do manage to convert into buyers. The rest of the 98% is full of event abandoned carts.
If your event relies on ticket purchases to finance its operations, this might be a very large issue that you are probably not aware of. If you could turn just 2% of the people that visit your registration section into buyers, you would double your orders, with the same amount of marketing effort. Pretty sweet, right?
So how do you do it? It’s really easy if you’ve upgraded your Oveit account to the Hub plan.
In your “Reports” you will see a button titled “Abandoned carts” which shows, of course, your abandoned orders. If you run a lot of events you will be able to filter by event, date and even a specific voucher, if it helps you track the right order. This way your event abandoned orders can easily be visualized and you can start reactivating them.
How do I reactivate my event abandoned carts?
Remember – the goal is convincing some of your visitors to become ticket buyers. Give them that extra budge needed when they’ve either forgotten they wanted to place an order, there might have been a sudden interruption or they are having some financial difficulty.
This will not work for every type of event or any type of order but in some cases, especially B2B events where there are a lot of high priced options, this might be really useful.
Engage with limited time discount vouchers for ticket purchases
In some cases just reminding your potential visitors that they forgot to place their order might be enough. Sometimes, that is not the case and you need a little more.
Especially with large orders (expensive tickets, group purchases) you will need to add a carrot and a stick to your messaging.
In this case the carrot would be a discount voucher. Say 15% off their order. But here’s where the stick comes into play. The voucher should be time limited. Otherwise a customer would postpone the purchase until they forget about it. Add a 48-72 hours time limit and you have some scarcity baked into your offer. This way you maximize the chances at reactivating this abandoned cart for your event.
Build a relationship – contact your customer directly and sell your event
Sometimes the best way to scale your event is to do things that don’t scale. While everyone is pushing their automation software (yup, including us), sometimes you need to create a direct link between you and your potential customers.
Especially in the B2B events market, larger deals are discussed and closed directly. When it comes to sponsorships or larger corporate ticket packages most large events have a direct connection with their customer. This helps them understand their feedback, upsell when needed or help consult whether the purchase is a good idea for the buyer or not. And this all starts with the data in the event abandoned carts.
The data is structured in such a way for you to understand the customer profile, their potential purchase and all of the customer forms options they might have filled in. If the potential buyer has agreed to this (depending on your country or region data privacy regulations) you can reach out to your future customer via phone or email. You will find the reasons that they abandoned their order their background, their goals, and if all things align you can encourage them to purchase the event package with a time limited deal.
Article written by .
Mike Dragan is the cofounder and CEO of Oveit and works daily on providing better tools for live experiences. Mike has a background in computer science and loves building digital products.