How to collect "Olympic" thanks to email-mailings. Case Black Star

My name is Alexandra Solodkaya, I’m email star-marketer Black Star. In 2018, with the help of newsletters, we collected the “Olympic” - 50% of the tickets for the L'One concert were bought via an email channel. I want to tell you how letters help us sell tickets to events.


Alexandra Solodkaya, Black Star Email Marketer

The contribution of various channels to the sales of tickets for the L'One concert at the Olympic. Mailings gave half:
')


In the article I will talk about the basic principles of strategy building, collecting the base of subscribers and the series of letters that we use. It will be useful to organizers of events: concerts, conferences, seminars, master classes and music festivals.

We collected base

The base for events is usually collected through several sources. Here are the main ones.

Subscription form on the site. The most popular way to collect contacts. Suppose you have a landing page with details of the event: when it will be, how much it costs, how to buy a ticket. Here you can place a subscription form with a bonus.

For example, in Black Star we make a landing page for each event and start collecting contacts from scratch. In the form of a subscription we offer a bonus - 10% discount for tickets:


In addition to material motivation, there is an intangible - the opportunity to join the Black Star community.

The average conversion of this form is 3%.

It should be noted that the subscription forms work if the site already has good traffic - organic or paid. It is logical that the more users go to the landing page, the more contacts we will collect.

In addition to static forms, we also use pop-ups. Their message is the same:



What is important to consider when placing pop-ups on the site:

• Time of appearance It is better if the window appears when the user has already spent some time on the site or flipped through most of the page.
• The audience to show. If the subscriber has already subscribed, then he should not see a pop-up window. Those who closed the window, it is also better for some time not to show.

You can customize the display logic in most services to create pop-up subscription forms ( Popmechanic , LeadPlan ). From experience, I can say that it is better to buy a paid tariff in a similar service than to order a pop-up form from programmers. As a rule, developers are expensive and for a long time.

Forms in social networks. To collect contacts at conferences, webinars, workshops and other offline events often use targeted advertising in social networks. How it works:

1. We create a form for collecting contacts (subscription form).
2. Configure the audience that will see the message.
3. We get contacts of interested users. Contact information can be downloaded or customized to send it directly to the mailing service or CRM system.
4. We start the newsletter on the collected contacts.

An example of such advertising:


So in UniSender collected contacts on the email marketing day

How to set up targeted advertising in Facebook Lead Ads and Application Forms for Vkontakte .

When to start collecting base

For each concert we build a base from scratch.

For concerts of 10,000 people and more, we start collecting contacts in a year. For smaller events (5,000 - 7,000) - for 6-7 months. For example, at the concert of Mota in Crocus 04/25/2019 for 7,000 people, we opened sales on 11/15/2018, and the base began to be collected on 24.09. 2018 (7 months before the concert).

For small concerts in regional cities, we open sales in 2-3 months. There is no pre-registration here - we immediately launch a landing page and offer to subscribe for a 10% discount on tickets.

Compiling a mailing strategy

Letters before the event . The strategy of mailings for events I always start from the end - I start from the date of the concert. I immediately put 5 letters into the plan:

• On the day of the concert.
• 3 days before the concert.
• For 5 days.
• During the week.
• Per month.

For example, we send such letter 3 days before the artist’s concert.

Letters before the start of sales. Then I prepare a series of letters before the start of ticket sales. For example, we sent 7 letters to the L'One concert at Olimpiyskiy before the sale opened. They offered to buy tickets at a discount of up to 25% and choose the best seats in the stadium. Thanks to this approach, through mailings we sold a quarter of all tickets in the first 3 days of sales.



Letters at the start of sales. In the first 3 days after the start of sales, we will send one letter at a time. We write about the fact that every day the discount decreases (from 25% to 15%), and there is still a chance to buy the best places.


We send such a letter on the first day of the start of sales.

Regular mailings. In the period between the start of sales and the event, we manually send letters with info channels that relate to the artist. We talk about new songs, videos, films and events in which the performer participated. On average, it was 1-2 letters per week.


Wrote to subscribers about the new L'One documentary

In short, my distribution strategy looks like this:


First we collect the database, then we launch a series of letters and regular mailings.

Design, call-to-action and texts

For all the letters we make a single template that is easy to adapt to any artist. When there are 5-7 artists on tour at the same time, we often have to send up to 420 different letters. It is impossible to come up with a unique design for such a number of letters, so we use a universal template.

We design the layout together with the designer and copywriter. All letters have a single call to action - buying tickets:


Classic letter design: header, letter text, STA, basement

How to sell more event tickets

A few tips from practice that will increase ticket sales via email channel:

• Be sure to make a strategy for mailings . Decide when and what letters you will send, what design and CTA they will have.
• Create a HYIP around the start of sales . Let it be an expected event - connect the contextual and banner ads, social networks, newsletters and pushes. It's cool when artists or speakers at conferences join in announcements and talk about the start of sales of their audience.
• Let's discount tickets in the early days of sales . Thanks to this strategy, we sell 25% of tickets via email in the first 3 days after the opening of sales.
• Let's discount the second ticket . Agree, an 80% discount on the second ticket sounds more attractive than a 40% discount for two.
• Send letters with news about the artist or speakers at the conference . Such newsletters do not sell, but fuel the audience’s interest in the event.