Blog
How Museums Can Easily Convert Visitors to Memberships on SimpleTix
-
by
EverWonder Children’s Museum in Newtown, CT uses hands-on exhibits and programming to cultivate a lifelong love of learning in the fields of science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. By easily converting visitors into memberships using the feature-rich ticketing platform, SimpleTix, they can cultivate and grow their community of learners. At EverWonder, children are encouraged to think, inquire, and wonder about the world around them. It was founded in January 2011 by a group of mothers who wanted to create a rich children’s museum experience for their own community. For the first years of its life, EverWonder existed as a mobile entity without a physical location. Two years later, they opened a physical location called The EverWonder Experience, and in April 2015, EverWonder Children’s Museum opened in a larger location with dedicated space for birthday parties and field trips. Like many museums, memberships help sustain the EverWonder’s mission and provide members with exclusive benefits throughout the year, like early bird access and discounted pricing for special events. Annual memberships are good for up to two adults and four children. Grandparents often buy a membership so they can bring their grandchildren during visits. EverWonder wanted to make it easier for visitors to purchase an annual membership. As Niki Giordano, the museum’s office manager, pointed out, “Members bring other people, and they are your best advertisers.” SimpleTix made the conversion to memberships easy Visitors to EverWonder can convert their general admission ticket to an annual membership and have their full price ticket deducted from their membership payment. To deduct that ticket purchase previously, staff had to transfer the amount to a gift card and then apply the gift card against the membership. “It worked, but it was clunky,” Niki admitted. However, new members can also save $20 on their membership if they were referred by another...
Pricing, Ease-of-Use and Square Integration Drew Fourth Generation Farmers to SimpleTix
-
by
In 2021, fourth-generation farmers moved from their large family farm in Maryland to a smaller one in west Texas, pumpkin cannon in tow. Brandon and Taylor Huffman’s goals were threefold: Simplify, downsize, and create a community-oriented experience. Twenty-two years of running a popular pumpkin patch came in handy. They created the springtime Sunflower Festival and fall-time Pumpkin Festival. As Western Belle Farm took shape, they talked about how to streamline sales operations to maximize profits and make their busy lives easier. “This is a true passion for us, and there is nothing we love more than brainstorming new activities for children to play on, growing specialty crops for guests to enjoy, and overall creating a truly ‘fun’ place for our community to come spend a day.” - Taylor Huffman Western Belle Farm found the ideal ticketing platform in SimpleTix At the top of their ticketing platform wishlist was Square integration for seamless online and in-person sales. They also wanted reasonable processing fees and an easy-to-use platform that makes ticketing simple. Like many farms, they didn’t want to be locked into a two-year contract with a ticketing platform whose feature-set is four years behind. In other words, they wanted a Ticketspice alternative. “When we first heard about SimpleTix, we were really excited about their pricing,” Taylor Huffman said. “We were also impressed by their customer service and the small company feel of having the owner directly involved. After the demo, I felt the system was so easy that even a new admin could learn it and build out tickets.” SimpleTix helps farms maximize profits Lower processing fees per ticket has a ripple effect. It translates to lower ticket prices, even with sales tax included, and still allows Western Belle Farm to make a reasonable profit per ticket. Having the ability to...
Upgrade Your Email Marketing With Our New MailChimp Integration
-
by
In a sea of advertising bombardments, email remains king of the marketing realm. Many Eventbrite alternatives will tout the messaging functionality of their event ticketing software. But how flexible are these functions, and will they fit the needs of your events, and—more importantly—your loyal customers? Harnessing the power of email marketing can lead to unprecedented profitability. With SimpleTix’s new MailChimp integration, it couldn’t be easier. The power of two platforms in your event ticketing software Communication with your attendees is vital in this business. It doesn’t matter if your event operation is a concert hall, a haunted house, or a drive-in theater, you need to reach out to customers in a thoughtful, effective, and integrated manner. Gone are the days when people would scan the local newspaper to see what events or gatherings were happening this weekend. You need to have a direct line of communication with your customers, and Mailchimp gives you that opportunity. Connecting SimpleTix with Mailchimp can save you steps, and it lays the groundwork for marketing your events better. If you aren’t using email as an integral component of your marketing plan, you’re leaving money on the table. While the task of mastering this method of communication may seem daunting, there are plenty of free resources available to help you understand the ins and outs of email. Look into online videos, blog posts, and other media to see what suggestions the experts are touting. Your website CMS may have courses that will cover the basics and get you running an effective email marketing campaign. Compelling subject lines, exciting images, and clear content within your emails will help your message stand out in your customer’s inbox and increase open rates. Over time, you’ll track which of your emails do better than others, so you can see what’s working and improve...
Making Memberships Easy with This Eventbrite Alternative
-
by
Members are your most valuable, engaged, and loyal customers. They excitedly click on your bulk email campaign messages, they wear their lanyard or membership badge with pride at your events, and they invite all their friends to come to your future happenings. Studies suggest that members are four times as valuable as your other attendees. You can’t leave this market segment just sitting there. And by adopting a state-of-the-art Eventbrite alternative as your ticketing platform, it really couldn’t be any easier to create the connection that membership programs build. That dedication, that loyalty to your brand, and the attractions you bring to your customers are all within reach. Remember your members. Selling memberships is a great opportunity to build buzz and improve your bottom line. While some loyalty programs are free to customers (think airline mileage points and restaurant clubs), it’s good to associate value with that relationship. Let your members know that this isn’t just some swipe card that comes in the mail and collects points—no, let them know that it is exclusive and full of value. They will pay to be among your most honored guests, and they will feel more special in the process. Do you already have a membership program for your attendees to join? If not, we’ll show you the easy steps you can take to get it going today! But if you already offer a membership program to your attendees, fantastic! The following details will still help you see how SimpleTix is the best Eventbrite alternative to help boost your new or existing membership program. How to tell which customers have membership potential? If your Eventbrite alternative event ticketing software works well with Square and Mailchimp, you will have no problem segmenting your sales and email campaign data into useable and effective target groups....
General Admission Ticketing: Setup Guide for Event Organizers
-
by
General Admission Ticketing: Setup Guide for Event Organizers If you run a farm, festival, haunted house, or community event, general admission ticketing sounds simple until the real problems show up. You may need timed entry, capacity caps, fast check-in, clear pricing, and a way to sell extras without creating a mess at the gate. A lot of organizers still treat GA like a single ticket type and hope for the best. A stronger general admission ticketing setup does more than sell entry. It can help manage arrival flow and give you reporting on sales, scans, and attendees after the event. What general admission ticketing should actually do At the basic level, GA means people buy access without choosing a seat. That said, good general admission ticketing should also help you manage arrival times, attendance volume, and add-on sales. For example, a fall farm may sell 4:00 PM, 5:00 PM, and 6:00 PM entry windows. Meanwhile, a community festival may use one all-day GA ticket with a hard attendance cap. A haunted house may stagger entry every 30 minutes to keep the line moving. SimpleTix supports General Admission with timed entry and capacity management. In addition, you can add promo codes, quantity discounts, waitlists, and upsells from the same setup. How to set up general admission ticketing without creating gate chaos A clean setup starts with traffic flow, not the ticket page. In other words, decide how many people you can handle every 15, 30, or 60 minutes before you publish anything. Use these steps: Pick your entry model Choose all-day GA, timed entry, or timed entry with limited overlap. Set a capacity cap for each window Don’t just set a total event cap. Specifically, cap each time slot based on parking, staffing, and how long guests stay. Create clear ticket...
How the Right Ticketing Solution Can Create a Better Gameday Experience
-
by
The right ticketing solution can make the difference between your fans’ gameday experiences being memorable or worth forgetting. In this article, we’ll show you how our Eventbrite alternative can make your gameday operations easier and more efficient while increasing your fans’ satisfaction with their minor league game day experience. Learn how you can use SimpleTix to: Offer season passes Pre-sell individual game tickets Upsell concessions and merch Effectively deploying your event ticketing software can lead to increased attendance at minor-league games. Moreover, cohesive communication between ticket sales and service staff can also keep customer satisfaction at an all-league high. By deploying the right Eventbrite alternative, your ballpark leverage growth and customer loyalty, too. Season Passes With the right Eventbrite alternative ticketing software, you can offer your fans a myriad of ticketing options that fit their schedule and lifestyle best. Full-season tickets are the obvious option, and a fruitful segment to market to. Full-season ticket holders tend to spend more money at the arena buying food, snacks and drinks, team merch, and other upsells. But not all fans are looking to attend every single home game, some want options to attend multiple games throughout the season without the hassle of buying multiple individual tickets. Try offering your fans varied ticket packages that allow you to provide different bundles of tickets and other up-sells to your guests. Establishing a consistent revenue stream can also be achieved with half-season and event quarter-season ticketing packages. Presenting these options to your ticket purchasers is an easy option with SimpleTix’s event ticketing segmentation, which allows your game attendees to still be engaged with the team on that “super fan” level. A robust event ticketing platform moves past these rigid structures and offers various options: Multi-game ticket packages that assign fans the same seat for all 10 games....
Built to Help Farms Succeed
-
by
This year, we sought to make it even simpler for our 300+ farm clients to drive revenue from their events and make the most of their busiest season. Our partnership with Maize allowed us to offer better prices for farms and release a ton of new features that helped our farm clients sell over a million tickets in October. Vala’s Pumpkin Patch and Apple Orchard in Gretna, Nebraska used SimpleTix to sell tens of thousands of tickets this year. Here’s how they took full advantage of the SimpleTix platform. Multiple ticket typesVala’s sold general admission tickets, season passes, and reservations for campfires and party barns. Vala’s created even more ticket options according to the size of campfire or party barn. With SimpleTix’s peak/off-peak feature, Vala’s could disallow off-peak tickets on its most valuable days of operation.See how you can customize SimpleTix to your farm >> Pre-sold concessions and cateringVala’s tied its concessions sales into the ticketing process. Customers could pre-order everything from cider to pie to party platters when they bought their ticket, then use their digital ticket to redeem their concessions once they arrived on the farm. This helped Vala’s anticipate how much to prepare and keep the lines moving because staff didn’t have to handle as much cash.See how SimpleTix makes it simpler to run your farm >> Specialized upsellsVala’s created a specific set of higher-value upsells for parties who reserved the highest tier of bonfire or party barn. When a customer added a high-tier ticket to their cart, they were served this premium upsell list within the SimpleTix purchase process. Once they checked in at Vala’s, the staff could see their pre-ordered upsells and deliver them promptly.See how SimpleTix upsells can boost your bottom line >> Keeping the lines movingWhen tickets are bought in a group, SimpleTix...
Staying COVID-Ready: Four Tips for Your Holiday Event
-
by
With 85% of Americans stating they were planning on celebrating the holidays, even during the 2021 Winter COVID wave, it is easy to see how the spread of the pandemic would impact holiday event operations. In 2021, holiday retail sales alone were nearly 850 billion dollars, so celebrating the season is big business for your event operation. As a holiday event venue, your number one priority is to keep your attendees safe when they are at your ice rink, holiday play, or other amusement. While concerns like fire exits, clear paths of egress, and maximum room capacities have always been paramount in your safety plan, stopping the spread of COVID-19 at your holiday event needs to be prioritized as well. If there is one thing COVID-19 has shown, it is that large indoor gatherings of people are the first to be impacted by the waves of variants of the coronavirus. Venues and event managers are well-rehearsed in this reality. Spikes in positive cases tend to coincide with holiday event programming. Are you prepared if COVID cases spike again and you have to change how you run your ice-skating rink or other holiday attraction? By following these four simple tips, you can leverage your event ticketing software to help you meet these challenges head-on. Tip 1: Stay Informed to Be Prepared Sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have solid, science-based guidelines for large gatherings and live events. Your state or county’s health departments may have specific regulations or recommendations for your venue to establish based on local variants or conditions. As we have learned over the past two and a half years, the landscape of the pandemic can change at a moment’s notice. Keeping abreast of conditions and developments within your community will enable you to be flexible and adaptable...
Three Major Problems That Keep Your Ice Skating Rink From Running Efficiently
-
by
Ah, ice skating, the perfect winter pastime. Put on a warm, fuzzy hat, a fleece coat, mittens, and a scarf, and get some hot cocoa on a frosty January day! Perfect weather to head out onto the ice with family—perhaps for a romantic date or to learn to skate for the first time. It sounds like a wonderful time, but this lovely outing could be thwarted by a few problems. Crowded ice rinks, equipment shortages, and limited staff can ruin your guests’ winter fun. There’s a big difference between the silly fun of falling on the ice in the company of your friends and family and falling and creating a huge skater pileup on a jam-packed rink stuffed with frustrated people whose good times have been marred by simply trying to get a date for this outing! This year, avoid these issues! Partner with SimpleTix, the event ticket system that will save you time and money and ensure your guests will be able to make the most of their time on the ice at your rink! With SimpleTix, event ticketing is simple, straightforward, and hassle-free! Read on to see how SimpleTix can help solve your ice skating rink woes! 1. The Ice Is Too Crowded In 2015, approximately 50,000 people sustained injuries from ice skating. With that many people getting injured per year, it’s important to keep safety in mind when planning a trip. While serious injuries can occur, the most common types of injuries are bruises or contusions on areas of the body that take the hardest landing during a fall. As a rink owner, you want to prevent as many of these incidents from occurring as possible. Many families come from a distance to your ice rink, only to find that when they get there, the ice is...
4 use cases for timed entry ticketing that have nothing to do...
-
by
The event ticketing industry has undergone fundamental changes since March 2020. The way people interacted with each other during the pandemic brought to light new ways of thinking about how we gather together, and as a society, we have shifted some of these interactions. Some of these changes—remote work is an obvious example—‚are here to stay. Many of these modifications were for health and safety concerns, but two and a half years later, a few of these adaptations have morphed how we gather for our leisure or lifestyle pursuits. Timed entry event ticketing is one of these examples. As we move into the “new normal” of running events after COVID, expect some of these changes to our industry to stick around. Your attendees became used to timed entry as the “business as usual” way of attending gatherings during COVID, and many of them now still enjoy the benefits that these ticket types bring to their lifestyle. Timed entry ticketing makes your event workflow easier and your attendees happier. Some cultural institutions and other event venues are ending their timed entry ticketing options, but other operations are leaning into this option to make improvements in their workflow and customer experience. Timed entry ticketing seems like an obvious solution for drive-in theaters, museum exhibitions, and farm and agritourism events. Event managers that operate seasonal events like haunted houses or holiday light exhibitions will benefit from this ticketing category as well. Think about this solution the next time you see the line stretching down the block from your ticket gate right before your event starts. Timed entry removes friction points from almost every type of event. Timed entry is not as restricting as you might think. While you have ultimate control over the flexibility of your event ticketing software, your customers don’t have...
4 Event Ticketing Hacks to Make Your Drive-In Theater More Efficient and...
-
by
Are you taking advantage of your event ticketing platform to guarantee that you are maximizing the revenue you can achieve from all those excited customers, eagerly anticipating the late-night, double-feature picture show? There are so many touch points and opportunities to upsell and improve your guests’ experience with the right event ticketing application… does yours bring all the opportunities available to your operation? By deploying the best event ticketing software, you will ensure that your drive-in theater isn’t leaving any money on the table. Missed opportunities from the wrong ticketing systems are not unique to drive-in theaters. Christmas light exhibitions, haunted houses, and other drive-thru operations will see increased profits from the following hacks as well. Check out how these 4 hacks can make your drive-in theater more efficient and profitable. Hack #1: Going Digital Traditionally, drive-in theaters have been cash-only for tickets and concessions. Families would line their cars up fifteen minutes before dusk, file in, park, wait through a lengthy concessions line, and then hope to get back to their car before the feature film started. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. The best event ticketing software can transform the movie-going experience for both you and your patrons. A state-of-the-art digital ticketing system can enable 24/7 online ticket sales and open up a new line of ticket buyers, while also eliminating the cash shuffle at the gate and the concession stand, which increases your guests’ wait times. Not only will you have more real-time visibility into your drive-in’s finances, but the convenience of online ticketing options will likely drive an increase in ticket sales as well. The best event ticketing software offers your operation much more flexibility than traditional cash tickets purchased at the time of the film, and the system is intuitive and easy to use. ...
How to Eliminate Drive-Thru Holiday Light Display Frustration and Friction with SimpleTix
-
by
During the Winter holiday season and especially during the month of December, some of the most beloved and popular attractions are the local drive-thru Christmas light displays. As magical and lovely as these lights can be, holiday light drive-thrus can have issues that can make your guests’ experience less than ideal. Leverage your event ticketing platform to help you eliminate: Frustrations around sold-out events Traffic on the main roads Long lines at the entry Wait-times for concessions Instead of your attendees waiting in seemingly unending lines this year, why not make their experience a bit easier and merrier and help them plan this year’s holiday lights visit with SimpleTix, the Eventbrite alternative that will help save you and your attendees time and money so that they can focus on enjoying this holiday tradition with their loved ones. Holiday light attractions are just one of many types of events SimpleTix serves to make your attendees’ experiences smoother and more delightful! Timed Entry and Pre-Sale Tickets Some advantages to using SimpleTix when attending drive-thru holiday lights this year include timed entry and presale ticketing features. Presale ticketing and timed entry help attendees avoid those long lines, which allows you to be more effective with crowd control. Timed entry ticketing lets you place attendees in specific time slots, so they don’t arrive all at once. This way, the main neighborhood roads in addition to surrounding residential side streets won’t be bottlenecked in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 7 PM–you can stagger the guests to come throughout the evening. Timed entry is also key when it comes to overall safety because it limits the number of people and cars in a neighborhood or at a venue at any given time. With pre-sale only tickets, you can also limit the number of cars per day, again decreasing...