Ticket sales during Covid have been challenging and complex. As CTO of our white-label SaaS Ticketing Platform, I know the challenges of the past year first hand.
Our ticketing companies’ customers all have different pressures and requirements from their governments. Many regulating agencies now require museums and sports clubs to offer online tickets to reduce crowds and lines. Seat maps have needed adjusting to add more spacing between seats. The list goes on.
But in these challenges, there are opportunities. Events managers, venues, and ticketing companies have had the chance to improve their technology and prepare for a certain surge in sales from people who can’t wait for lockdowns to end.
Here are some of the important changes we’ve made this year to help our customers increase their ticket sales during Covid and after mass vaccinations lower severe restrictions on entertainment, leisure, and travel activities.
Capacity management
We updated our capacity management features. This has been critical for ticket sales during Covid. How many people are allowed to come into a venue, museum, pool, or event? How many are allowed at one time?
Every customer has a different requirement based on the types of tickets they sell and the country they live in. So, rather than use algorithmic changes that wouldn’t work for some businesses, we opted to make our capacity features customizable and flexible.
For any event or venue, you can adjust the following:
- Seat-based admission - No one wants a seat left for sale. Because our customers’ venues have different levels of existing spacing between seats, we kept this feature flexible. For example, if your venues seats are spaced apart fairly well, you could block out every other row. Other companies might need to make groups of seats, and block out every second or third seat. You can create the right seat map for your needs.
- Time-based admission - We improved our ticketing platforms’ ability to handle time-based admissions. You can allow ticket holders to enter in waves. For example, you can set 200 people to come at 3 in the afternoon. Then another 200 can come an hour later. One of our newer features allows you to configure different day schemes. Perhaps on the weekends, your hours are longer and you set capacity per time slot, but on the weekdays you don’t need to reduce capacity by time, because the venue isn’t that busy.
- Access control - We also added the ability to scan people out. You can track how many people are in your venue at one time. For example, if you can only allow 300 people in your museum at once, you can scan visitors out when they leave, so that the person at the door can see when they’re able to let someone else in.
Platform updates that put our users first
Emotionally and financially, it’s been a difficult year for many of our customers. Ticket sales during Covid have been slow. Our customers have processed far fewer tickets. For us, this means they needed less customer support from us. While this is largely tragic, there was one small silver lining.
This past year, our product team was able to devote more time to improving the UX of our platform. We made our seating engine more user-friendly. We also increased some of the administrative powers of our platform. This includes the accounting features, more customizable fee structures, and more valuable reporting.
Ticket sales during Covid and beyond: 2021 event season
Ready for some good news? While ticket sales during Covid have been tough, there are positive signs of what’s to come in 2021 and 2022.
One of our customers is a ticketing platform in the Netherlands. As you may know, the Netherlands government has announced that festivals will likely be able to open this coming summer.
Our customer expected 4,000 website visitors when selling tickets for a festival. Instead, the website had 33,000 people coming to the website to buy a ticket.
People are desperate to get out with their friends and family. Even those who don’t normally travel, attend events, or visit museums are likely to do so when it’s allowed.
We’re excited for what the warmer months of this year have in store for our customers.
Improvements and opportunities post-Covid
For businesses that normally would’ve been too busy to learn a new ticketing system, we were able to onboard them successfully and show them the ropes. This sets them up for better business practices going forward. We were also able to offer our Covid Aid Package, which offered months of free use of our platform.
We all hope that cases will drop low that even if there can’t be a complete end to Covid, enough to put an end to extreme shutdowns and governmental restrictions.
When this happy future arrives, our customers’ businesses will be even stronger.
- More online ticket sales - Online ticketing sales can increase total revenue by making it easy for customers to make a purchase. Also, when large events open back up, governments still might want to reduce crowding at the gate by requiring online sales and phased entries. Oxynade powers both of these.
- Data to power marketing campaigns - Companies who sell tickets online instead of at the door are able to collect really valuable data about their customers during the checkout process. For example, they can collect their email address and physical address. Companies can then use this in the marketing campaigns. They can send notices about special upcoming events, coupons, season passes, merchandise, and more.
- Small, local events harnessing the power of SaaS ticketing - We’re really happy that, although challenging, this time has allowed more small, local businesses, particularly sports clubs, to get started with SaaS ticketing. Many local events and venues have used the break from business to modernize their ticketing sales. This allows them to stay competitive in the post-covid environment.
The past year has been incredibly challenging. But it’s also is an opportunity for events and venues to set up their businesses for future success with modern technology that increases revenue.
Do you need a SaaS ticketing solution to help you sell more tickets in 2021? Learn more about Oxynade.