11 proven ways to increase event attendance (with pro tips)

As an event creator, it can be crushing to see your should-be-packed venue half empty. Whether that’s due to no-shows or not selling enough tickets, the results are the same; a lacklustre event that feels underwhelming for those who do attend. This can lead to a bit of a vicious cycle. If word gets out that your event lacks atmosphere, you might struggle to sell out future events. Ouch.

Thankfully, there are lots of things you can do to both reduce no-shows and increase ticket sales. In this quick guide, we round up 11 relatively simple ways (that have worked for event creators across our platform) to amp up event attendance. Let’s get started 👇.

Our 10 tips for increasing event attendance

1. Send reminder emails
2. Use a mix of online and offline marketing tactics
3. Actively encourage word-of-mouth promo
4. Utilize LinkedIn’s Community Builder
5. Make sure your box office is mobile-friendly
6. Run a range of promotions and discounts
7. Send follow-up emails
8. Offer practical and thoughtful incentives 
9. Find out how your attendees heard about your event
10. Target previous ticket buyers

Send reminder emails

This is so simple but can be really effective when it comes to reducing no-shows. Sending email reminders as your event draws near can be especially helpful if yours is the type of event that people buy tickets for way in advance. Just be sure you use a ticketing platform that makes sending reminders easy, as Chris Hester, Owner and Performer at Hester’s Theater of Magic explains! 👇

“[People] would buy tickets [to one of our magic shows] months in advance, then life gets busy or their plans change and they don’t show up! Our old ticket provider could not send a reminder email unless we manually went in and clicked “resend” to every order individually. We simply didn’t have the time to do that and all their function did was resend the tickets. There was no personal touch. Ticket Tailor allows automated, personalized emails and guess what? We haven’t had a single guest forget about the show since we switched!”

Nice! 👏

• Read our Interview with Chris from Hester’s Theater of Magic >
• 5 simple ways to use email to boost ticket sales

Use a mix of online and offline marketing tactics

Sure, we live in a digital age – but it’s amazing how many event creators talk about using offline promo strategies like flyering when we interview them for our Customer Stories series. Relying solely on online marketing tactics can mean you’re really missing a trick when it comes to getting the word out about your event. 

“Marketing Anime Dallas involves a mix of online and offline strategies, including social media campaigns, email newsletters, partnerships with local businesses, and attending other anime events to promote our convention,” John Swasey, Chairman of Anime Dallas, tells us. ““Engaging with our community and leveraging word-of-mouth recommendations are also key components of our marketing strategy. We have connections with some local anime stores in Houston and Dallas, and they help us spread the word through flyers.”

• Read our interview with John from Anime Dallas >

It’s really simple – the more people that become aware of your event, the better. And strategically placing flyers in areas where your target audience is likely to frequent is a great way to get more eyes-on. This sort of leads to our next point…

Actively encourage word-of-mouth promo

Word-of-mouth recommendations are incredibly powerful in the world of events. Again, this is something we see event creators on our platform talk about time and time again. A lot of the time, the mantra is – create an amazing event, and people will talk about it. But there are other things you can do to oil the wheels of the word-of-mouth machine too, as Chris Hester tells us below (we love this guy):

“From waitresses, to other business owners, or anyone in a position to recommend things to do for tourists, we visit them, perform magic, and then invite them to the show so they can experience it for themselves. It’s exponential marketing because a tourist will ask a waitress for their favorite things to do in town several times a day! If you treat them special, they’ll do the same in return by recommending your show.”

Inspiring 😌💫.

Utilize LinkedIn’s Community Builder

One reason people might not show up to your event can be simply that they end up feeling a little daunted. Say, someone bought a ticket to your conference when feeling motivated but then, as the event draws round, starts to feel worried about turning up on their own. Cue an onslaught of doubt: Who will be there? Will anyone else be attending alone? What if I end up standing in a corner on my own the whole time? 

LinkedIn’s Community Builder is a really cool tool designed to counteract this exact problem. It helps attendees of an event connect with other attendees prior to the event taking place. Which means they can get a real feel for who else is going, and actually make meaningful connections before the day itself. In our webinar on this topic, Elinor Honigstein, who works in Business Development & International Growth Partnerships at LinkedIn, says: 

“We’ve had many discussions with events and ticketing platforms, and we realized that networking is very much at the core of events. However there’s an unfulfilled need, and the question is why? We discovered three issues here: the first is that people don’t know who else is going to be attending… and that when you enter a room with thousands of people it can be very overwhelming!”

She goes on to talk about how it can also be hard to know how relevant other attendees are to you and that it can be really hard to carry on the conversation after the life of the event. LinkedIn Community Builder was designed to tackle these core networking issues. So it’s well worth a try if you feel your ticket buyers could benefit from an extra boost of confidence when it comes to attending your events.

👀Tip: Ticket Tailor integrates with LinkedIn’s Community Builder tool – find out how it can help you build a loyal, engaged community around your event:

• How to integrate Ticket Tailor with the LinkedIn Community Builder

Make sure your box office is mobile-friendly

This is an interesting one. We all know it’s good to have an event website and/or box office page that works on mobile. But we don’t often think about why this is so important. Chris Hester explains that it’s actually been an imperative part of selling more tickets to his event:

“Since we're in a tourist area, most of our customers purchase tickets on their mobile devices. Ticket Tailor delivers a smooth, polished experience that looks great and functions flawlessly on any screen, ensuring a hassle-free booking process for our guests.”

As Chris highlights, having a box office that runs smoothly on mobile can be especially important for tourist attraction events, where ticket buyers are likely to be making spontaneous purchases on-the-go. If your website or box office doesn’t work well on mobile, you run the risk of tourists getting frustrated and moving onto the next attraction.

Run a range of promotions and discounts

Running promotional campaigns doesn’t have to be expensive or even too time consuming. There are some really simple ways to build hype around your event and get people talking about it. To get started, try things like:

• Social media competitions – ask people to like and share a social media post for the chance of winning two free tickets to your event.
• Schedule your tickets to go on-sale and off-sale at a certain time – selling limited tickets for a lower price early on creates scarcity and hype!
• Incentivise previous attendees – statistics show that customer retention costs less than customer acquisition. So it can be a great idea to email your mailing list offering discounts  to previous attendees.

Ticket Tailor’s Customer Experience Lead, Rhio Cory says:

“Using incentives of a varied nature is a great way to build excitement around your event and boost ticket sales. Event creators might shy away from doing this at first, not wanting to ‘cheapen’ their brand with deals and discounts. But there’s no need to worry about this at all! Brands of all shapes and sizes use fun and thoughtful incentives to reach a wider audience. It’s not about saying: “We’re desperate for sales”, it’s about making your events stand out, creating hype, and letting potential attendees know that you care about building a community with them. Ultimately, incentives work. That’s why pretty much all brands use them in one form or another!”

Send follow-up emails

Speaking of incentivising previous attendees – it can be good marketing practice to send follow-up emails to attendees as soon as your event has happened. Chris Hester talks about how this strategy works for his events:

“Sent a day after the event, these emails thank our guests, offer a discount code for a return visit, and include direct links to leave a Google or Tripadvisor review. Ticket Tailor gives us full control over when these reminders and follow-ups go out, making it an incredibly powerful tool for maintaining guest engagement. My follow up email is worded as if it’s a personal email from me to them, and Ticket Tailor allows you to address them by first name (automated) and include personal details from their order to make it feel even more direct.”

Sending follow-up emails is a really nice way to nurture the relationships you have with existing fans of your event. In turn, encouraging them to not only attend future events, but help spread the word by leaving you reviews, too.  

Offer practical and thoughtful incentives 

Sometimes it can pay off to think about any ways you can remove barriers-to-attendance to your event. These barriers might be very specific to the type of event you’re running. For example, we love how FunWithTrains allows unlimited free entry for adults, as long as a ticket is bought per child. 

“With all of us being parents, we feel we have a real insight into what other parents want at our events,” FunWithTrains’ creator, Joga Shoker, explains. “For example, one of our key principles is that we never charge extra for parents to attend events with their kids. This means that parents, grandparents and extended family can come and enjoy the atmosphere and see their loved ones having fun.”

This is a really nice touch and a perfect example of how thoughtful details can make your event that bit more appealing – in turn, increasing attendance.

Think about any potential reasons people might be put off coming to your event and how you can solve these. That might be through offering pre-organised free parking, or discounted taxi vouchers. You could provide free kids’ drinks and snacks at your event to help make things more manageable for parents. Or even discounts at a local hotel chain for any attendees that are travelling from afar.

• Read our interview with Joga from FunWithTrains >

👀Tip: Ticket Tailor’s Broadcasts feature makes it super easy to send event updates to your ticket buyers. So, in the run up to your event, you can send reminders of things like transport and hotel discounts, and any other incentivising information about your event.

Find out how your attendees heard about your event

We’ve all seen those “How did you hear about us?” questions when buying a product or service online. The thing is – they’re popular for a reason. When you learn how someone discovered your event, you essentially learn which of your marketing tactics are actually working. Which means you can channel more money and/or resources into those channels. 

Chris Hester talks about how they use a survey built directly into their events’ checkout process to gather insights on how their customers heard about them. Smart.

Target previous ticket buyers

Sometimes, in the bid to attract new customers, it can be easy to overlook your existing ones. But each time you run an event, you accrue a whole audience that you already know is interested in your offering. So your first port of call when marketing any future events should be to target these previous ticket buyers. Jon Baker, Festival Chair at Swanage Folk Festival explains:

“One of the most impactful marketing changes we made was the decision to target previous ticket buyers with more effective marketing emails. This, combined with early bird tickets, has meant we’ve sold an increasingly high percentage of our tickets much earlier, so we worry less when it comes to the weekend itself.” 

Targeting previous ticket buyers doesn’t mean every single past attendee will come to your future events. But it does give you a robust opportunity to sell tickets to those who are literally just waiting for a reminder about your next big happening to make that purchase.

• Read our interview with Swanage Folk Festival >

Create urgency with tiered ticket types & sell-out reminders

Offering different ticketing tiers — think Early Bird, VIP, General Admission, Group Discounts – helps to segment your audience and incentivise early bookings. It’s all about giving ticket buyers that feeling of getting something extra. For example, VIP tickets could come with exciting bonuses. And group discounts incentivise people to commit to a purchase now as a group, rather than waiting and buying tickets separately. 

Then, as each ticket tier begins to sell out, remind potential buyers of dwindling numbers to create a sense of urgency. With Ticket Tailor, you can use real-time data to automate “Low Availability” and “Last Chance” alerts, triggering emails or social posts about tickets running out. This powerful combination of tiered pricing and automated urgency creates excitement and drives higher attendance.

Ticketing features that help you pack out your events

No-shows and poor ticket sales don’t have to be a regular thing when you know how to actively encourage event attendance. These tips should help you do just that – and, like the event creators we’ve quoted in this article can testify, Ticket Tailor can be a very useful tool when it comes to streamlining all aspects of your event planning and promo! Sign up to Ticket Tailor for free and dive straight into using attendance-enhancing features like:

• Email Broadcasts – send reminders and incentivising information to ticket buyers.
• Customized checkout forms – ask ticket buyers how they heard about your event.
• Ticket Tailor x LinkedIn integration – encourage your ticket buyers to network before your event.
• Mobile-friendly box office – know it’s super easy for ticket buyers to make spontaneous purchases on-the-go.

From tools to sell merch and add-ons to customized seating chart creation – our platform is packed with features to help you ace your next event.

Find out more about our full suite of useful event planning and promo features here >