How Theatres can Boost Profits and Save Time with Instant Gift Certificates
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Vikram, Head of Growth and Co-Owner at SimpleTix, brings a performance marketing background from SeatGeek and early stage startups to SimpleTix’s partnership and growth efforts. A lifelong live event enthusiast, he’s focused on expanding the tools organizers rely on to connect with their audiences.
In the competitive world of live, interactive theatre and entertainment, finding new ways to entice your audience is crucial.
Not only do you have to produce cutting-edge entertainment that keeps audiences coming back for more; you have to develop a seamless ticketing experience on your website. With more and more audience members searching for entertainment and booking tickets online, it’s imperative to provide exciting offers that are easy to take advantage of right from your website.
One of the most effective ways to increase profits is by offering digital gift certificates during checkout. Gift certificates inspire ticket buyers to consider friends and family when making their purchase. Tickets to a live show are a wonderful gift for birthdays, anniversaries, retirement and bachelor/bachelorette parties.
The simple act of offering a gift certificate during the checkout process makes your audience start thinking about all the people in their life who would enjoy seeing a show. Your job, as a dinner theatre or interactive entertainment group with a growing web presence, is to make gift certificate purchases easy to process for your staff and easy to purchase for your audience.
One of the best ways to do this is with SimpleTix gift certificate codes. SimpleTix allows you to sell gift certificates on your website in the same way that you sell tickets to shows. This automatic, error-proof feature generates a unique gift code at checkout, which clients can immediately share as a gift with their loved one or colleague.
With gift certificates, there’s always room for error. Staff might accidentally enter a code twice, or enter the wrong code altogether. What’s more, it can take hours out of your staff’s already-busy day to manually process gift certificate orders.
Because SimpleTix instantly generates a unique & single use gift certificate code at the time of purchase, theatre staff is freed to focus on more important aspects of production like touring, marketing, and season ticket sales.
SimpleTix can also create gift certificates based on seasonal deals being offered on your website such as “Black Friday” or “Cyber Monday”. For instance, let’s say your company is producing a holiday-themed show and you want to offer $50 gift certificates for just $25 each. The SimpleTix software will automatically recognize and offer the correct gift value to your customers as they check out, with zero heavy lifting for your sales staff.
Some of the most popular interactive theatre groups in the world are using SimpleTix to streamline gift certificate sales right from their websites.
The Jazz Academy of Music, a Maryland-based nonprofit that produces the Mid-Atlantic Jazz Festival along with dozens of live jazz events throughout the year, uses SimpleTix to simplify eticketing and sell gift certificates online. Users can choose gift certificate denominations from $5-$500, and easily share the automatically-generated, one-time use gift code with friends or family.
Interactive Theatre International (ITI), the production company behind the international sensation Faulty Towers The Dining Experience, is also using SimpeTix gift certificates to great effect. Theatre fans throughout Australia and the U.K. are using SimpleTix’s gift certificate feature to instantly gift theatre tickets and other ITI products to their friends, loved ones, and business associates.
According to Alison Pollard-Mansergh, Executive Producer and Artistic Director of ITI, “this new feature saves staff hours of time because they don’t have to manually create new codes.”
Offering online gift certificates is a fantastic way to boost profits and free up your staff’s time to focus on increasing ticket sales and building event buzz.
To find out how your theatre company can get started with SimpleTix gift certificates today, visit https://www.simpletix.com/blog/for-live-performances/.
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