You know how valuable your event is, but sometimes other people need a little convincing. A great way to do that is to convey a sense of urgency by advertising pricing changes to a well-informed audience. These are called last-chance offers, and we've seen them have great success increasing registrations when targeted to an interested audience. Read on to learn the details so you can start moving that needle today!
Most events open registration at a discounted price and gradually increase ticket prices until the event begins. Today we'll talk about how to use those price changes as leverage to gain more registrations.
If you’ve read some of our other posts, we constantly beat the drum of the importance of segmentation. There are many campaigns where you want to target your full website traffic audience. But segmenting assists the bottom of your sales funnel, so it's crucial to focus on an audience that is primed and ready to attend your event. They just need a reminder and an incentive.
Select any page on your event's site that indicates interest in attending. Typically, that would be one of these pages:
Building your segments to target only visitors of those pages (or the equivalent on your site) will ensure you're sending gentle reminders to people who already want to attend instead of making awkward introductions to people who have never heard about your event before.
You always want to reach your audience where they are rather than making them come to you. If they’ve already visited your website, all you have to do is reach them where they are one more time. With display and social ads, that's easy.
Some noise has been made in recent years about the waning effectiveness of display advertising. That objection applies considerably less to retargeted advertising. It still delivers results. In fact, retargeting is 10 times more effective than standard display advertising. So put those creatives out there on the web and social media — Feathr’s platform makes it easy to do so.
Some examples of successful Feathr customers' last chance campaigns. Note the focus on urgency and rate changes.
Save your money: Who doesn't love saving money? Because you are only advertising to people who are already interested in registering for your event, seeing your ad gives them an "oh, right" moment. There's no time to register like the present, especially when the present is their last chance to buy before the ticket price jumps up. Capitalize on that thought process and you'll see a jump in registrations.
Get your ticket while you can: Nothing creates urgency like scarcity. The combination of an expiring discount and the idea of selling out before your audience buys their ticket can have a powerful effect on the decision of a person who is still on the fence about attending. Even if there’s no danger of selling out, your prospective attendees don't need to know that (please note that Feathr does not recommend saying it will sell out, but ambiguity isn’t always a bad thing).
Vary your message between the two above examples, and combine them too. Switching out creatives and A/B testing your offers are great ways to keep your campaign fresh and avoid the dreaded banner blindness.
If you're like most event organizers, you offer early birds the best rate. Early birds help you estimate total attendance and make other important decisions. They deserve a great rate. What's important is to make your audience aware of pricing changes whenever they happen and give them every opportunity to register at a discounted tier before they miss the chance. No one wants to miss their chance.
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