It happens all too often. A potential client peruses your website gathering information about an event that interests them. After much internal debate, they add two tickets to their cart, and then they leave your site. You are left without a sale, and for a short period, you can’t sell those two tickets.
In ecommerce, an estimated 69.6% of shopping carts are abandoned, leading to lost sales. Automated abandoned cart marketing lets you track these customers and reach out to them, encouraging them to come back and complete the checkout process.
How Abandoned Cart Marketing Can Improve Your Ticket Sales
Using automated abandoned cart messaging can help you recover more of your lost ticket sales. These messages have a higher open rate than other emails, and they have a higher click-through rate. Abandoned cart emails have a 40% open rate on average. Sending automated email and/or text messages to customers who abandon their carts is a cost-effective way to boost your sales without having to market tickets to brand new customers.
How it Works
TicketSocket recently partnered with ActiveCampaign and AttentiveMobile giving customers the ability to automate abandoned cart marketing and better manage their CRM. When a potential ticket buyer navigates away from your website without completing their purchase, their information is sent to ActiveCampaign, triggering an abandoned cart email or SMS message.
You can choose how you want the process to work. In general, this message is sent to a customer an hour after they’ve left your website, but you can set it up to be sent up to 24 hours later. You can customize your abandoned cart message with personalized language that appeals to your customers. Personalized language is one way to improve the customer’s experience all around and increase their chances of attending your events in the future.
Why People Abandon Carts
Customers change their minds all the time, and abandoned carts are common in ecommerce. Some common reasons people might abandon their carts include the following:
- Creating an account: People are protective of their data, and making them create an account to buy tickets to an event is a common reason to abandon their carts. Managing multiple ticket accounts is also cumbersome for some customers.
- Website issues: If your website loads slowly, or it’s difficult to navigate through the checkout process, people might get frustrated and leave your site.
- Coupon code issues: Another reason people abandon their carts is because their promo code didn’t work. Before launching your ticketing site, test your promo codes.
- Website distrust: If a customer has any reason to suspect that your website is not legitimate, they will probably abandon their cart rather than entering their credit card information.
- Sticker shock: If a customer sees excessive taxes, convenience charges, and other fees in their final total, they might decide not to go to the event and leave without buying tickets.
Other Tools You Can Use to Recover Abandon Carts
Along with the ActiveCampaign integration covered earlier, you can use AttentiveMobile and Facebook Ads to reach out to clients who have abandoned their carts without buying tickets.
AttentiveMobile
AttentiveMobile lets you manage your abandoned cart marketing via text messages. It’s similar to email, but your messages are pushed through to a user’s mobile device through SMS. In general, text messages outperform email in open rates and click-through rates. The average open rate for a text message is 99%, and most customers read them within 15 minutes.
Use this tool to send a personalized message reminding your customers to return to their carts and finish the checkout process. AttentiveMobile can track the items a customer left in their cart to create a specific message. These attention-grabbing messages include the name of the event and the number of tickets with a message and a link to check out with a simple click.
This graphic shows the actual revenue recovered from a festival event using AttentiveMobile to automate abandoned cart marketing.
Facebook Ads
If your ticketing website is already integrated with Facebook, you can create Facebook Ads to track cart abandonment and generate abandoned cart messages. It works with the Facebook pixel, which you can create in the Ads Manager platform.
When you have added your pixel, you need to insert a line of code that lets you track events and trigger automated retargeting messages. Once your customers have abandoned their cart, they will see ads that you’ve developed specifically targeted to existing customers. You could use the ads to offer an additional discount or a special promo code encouraging customers to return to your site and finish their purchase.
Or you can create an event-specific video ad with exciting clips promoting the specific event in a customer’s abandoned cart with a message capitalizing on their fear of missing out.
Other Ways to Use Abandoned Cart Data
ActiveCampaign also collects information for customers who buy tickets to your events through your TicketSocket site, including their email address and the type of ticket they purchased. You can use this data to improve your event marketing. Compare demographic information of people buying tickets at different tiers and use it to create targeted messages.
As the event approaches, launch an email campaign to upsell add-ons to existing ticket holders or start promoting event merch. Use these emails to inform fans of refreshments, souvenirs, and other items they can buy on event day.
Recover Your Lost Ticket Sales More Effectively With TicketSocket
As an event manager, promotor, or host, you know that promoting the event and getting people in the door is one of the most challenging parts of the event business. Our white-label ticketing and registration platform lets your brand take center stage. You can control the event and use our integrations, including ActiveCampaign, to refine the customer experience.
These integrations provide an all-in-one platform you can use to manage your event from start to finish, and now we can help you automate abandoned cart marketing to more easily recover lost ticket sales.
If you’re ready to improve your event marketing and ticketing, schedule a demo today.