Facebook

This is like the default sub-topic in every event-related blog, isn’t it? And that doesn’t imply you have to automatically skip this part; it implies that there’s so much about Facebook that you just haven’t put to use yet. If you’re ready to shell out a few dollars, you can use Facebook features exclusively meant for businesses. You can upload your customer list and find the ones with an existing profile on the network. Once that’s done, you’ll be equipped with a custom audience that can access your posts and ads. You will also get access to a lot more customer data and the best part is – you can keep returning to your existing customers even as you keep adding new members. Along with that, you get insights into the likes and dislikes of your customers which, from a sales and marketing perspective, can be used to devise foolproof strategies.

Batchbook

Yeah, because everything with a ‘-book’ is a buzz. For less than $40 a month (and a 30-day free trial), you can get this exceedingly sophisticated CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform that gives you all data pertaining to your customers in a single place.

Batchbook lets you

• Create customer profiles
• Create to-do lists
• Club customer data obtained from all social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc) with existing contact information
• Do all of the above on your mobile phone

It’s easy-to-use, highly resourceful, and it’s mobile friendly. For $40, that’s ridiculously too much!

KISSmetrics

Quite similar to Facebook and Batchbook in terms of profile building, KISSmetrics is rather data-driven. It tracks where your customers go while on their mobile, tablet, or PC in terms of digital content. It comes with a 14-day obligation-free trial and later charges close to $80 per month for the ‘startup’ package, which enables unlimited customer profiling and lists. KISSmetrics gives you an insight into the kind of content that makes people linger and campaigns that stir maximum interest.

OnePulse

OnePulse is THE platform that lets you connect personally to your customers. You can ask questions about anything related to your brand or event, and receive responses from customers in real-time via the OnePulse mobile app. It’s like WhatsApp for companies to communicate with their customers. You can also invite customers and form a private OnePlus community to get instant feedback regarding their experiences with your brand. The big win about OnePulse is that it’s pocket-friendly – you’ll be charged around $31 for 100 responses from the OnePulse community, all-inclusive, while getting a private community of customers into OnePulse is absolutely free.

Yapsody

Biased? I’d say we’re smart and extremely fair since we gave everyone else a fair chance to make an impression before we made our move at the end. So, last and no-way-the-least, Yapsody is one of the very few (and best amongst these few) event ticketing platforms that lets you maintain a close rapport with your customers. You will get your own Virtual Box Office (Online Ticket Store) and also a customized URL to let your customers know all about your event. This is going to be a hub for personalized FAQs that you can put up to help out your customers, your contact details so that they can directly get in touch with you, social media tools and widgets to enable spreading the word easily, and a MailChimp integration tool to easily import your contact list. Really, are we just an online ticketing system? I doubt!

The post Unique Ways To Get To Know Your Customers Better appeared first on Yapsody.

Here are 7 quick tips that will help increase your event visibility on Facebook and Instagram.  

1. Start Early 

Every event organizer knows the hustle of reaching out to a wider audience to build up that guest list. We’ve witnessed event planners who start almost a year in advance to get that early start. Starting early guarantees you an ample amount of time to revise and replan depending on the ground you need to cover. And once you start early, you can start pushing out teasers of your upcoming event to embed your brand in their minds. 

2. Share Your Events 

Once your plan is fixed, it’s time to create your event page and share your events. After creating your events through our online ticket store, you can start sharing your events on social media easily. The more channels and groups that you share your events in, the more chances of people noticing it. Make sure your ticket buying links are updated on Facebook and Instagram before sharing. 

3. Update Your Feed Regularly 

Just don’t bombard them. To stay on top of their news feed algorithm, you need to update your guests regularly with event tidbits to stay relevant in their minds. They deserve to make a ticket-buying decision only after they’re convinced that your event is well worth it. Keep updating your social media feed with artist line-ups, sponsors, keynote speakers, behind the scenes, food & dining options they expect and so on. 

4. Use Event Marketing Tools & Services

Not having enough time to create and manage your event marketing campaigns shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid it completely. Signing up on Yapsody is the only prerequisite to access our event marketing tools and services such as premium Event listing, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and MailChimp. Better yet, our in-house marketing specialists will take care of your campaigns for you. 

5. Hashtag Your Way To The Top

Instagram hashtags are the best way to organically increase your visibility. You never know where your potential ticket buyers are until you spread your wings. Create and use an event-specific hashtag with your brand hashtag that creates an instant recall in your ticket buyer’s mind. Use location, venue, and city-specific hashtags for a targeted approach. Also, learn how you can make your event Instagram-worthy. 

6. Create A Contest and Giveaway

Contests and giveaways awaken the adrenaline rush of participation winning something for free. As an event marketer you can do plenty to up the ante –  free tickets, group discounts, artist meet and greet. Facebook and Instagram are perfect for creating a contest as your followers are more likely to tag their friends on it. Thus, increasing your event visibility. 

7. Give Your Guests The Spotlight 

Event attendees want to be a part of your social media as it’s the ultimate proof of being a part of your event experience. This is where your hashtags come into play in furthering your visibility to potential audiences. You can set up a contest for attendees such as best dressed, whackiest selfies, or anything that brings your event into the light. User-generated content is organic and works in your favor to bring in more audiences for your upcoming events. 

Don’t have a large team to streamline your event marketing? Leave it to us and our in-house marketing specialists to boost your event visibility. The only pre-requisite is to sign up and create your event with us.

The post 7 Tips To Increase Your Event Visibility On Facebook & Instagram appeared first on Yapsody.

Understanding what type of communication works best for the audience you are looking to target is essential. Once you have selected your target audience and your method of communication, then pick from these choice options ideal for event marketing.

1. Facebook

With a minimum of 2.19 billion monthly active users, Facebook has retained its position as the social media channel with the widest reach. The network allows you to reach the most varied of audience in terms of geo, gender, as well as age. Today, everyone from your newly born to your 96 year-old grandma is on Facebook. Even the house cat has an account. This is the channel for you if you are looking to reach out to the maximum audience to sell tickets online.

2. Instagram

Instagram has a slightly different approach to advertising and appeals to those with a high sense of visual aspect in their event. It’s popular with the millennial generation, especially women. Ideal for art festivals, dance performances, F&B events and the likes, Instagram is poised as the perfect social media channel to promote your exquisite pictures and videos.

3. Twitter

If you are looking to reach the wittier section of the millennial generation, Twitter is the network for you. It’s a fast-moving platform said to reach its post peak within 18 minutes. It’s best to have a new witty remark ready to keep relevant.

4. Snapchat

Snapchat is considered the trendsetter among social media channels. It offers you a unique mix of a younger crowd slewing towards the fairer sex.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn works great for more serious marketing. It targets professionals when they are in the mindset to make complex decisions. LinkedIn is especially useful in the Education industry, as targeting can be highly specific, and reach out to the exact audience for a particular program.

6. Pinterest

This is the only network that reports higher usage in rural areas as compared to the metropolitan mainstream. It is widely used to promote DIY workshops, craft fairs, and cooking-related events.

Choose Wisely

Remember, while marketing on these platforms, you not only need to keep the target audience in mind but also how you present your content to them. For example, while long textual marketing techniques may work on Facebook, visuals are the way to go on Instagram.

The post The 6 Ultimate Social Media Channels for Event Marketing appeared first on Yapsody.

• One billion hours of video viewed on YouTube every day
• Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook daily
• Time spent watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% year over year
• Videos are six times more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than photos, and three times more likely to receive retweets than GIFs
• Snapchat has 10 billion daily video views

Here’s how video marketing can boost your social media marketing plan for events:

1. Broadcast live and get more attention

Using the ‘Facebook Live’ feature, you can broadcast videos to your audience in real-time. Apart from Facebook, social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope also provide the live video feature.  You can rope in your event’s performing artists and use this feature for promotion in the run-up to the event.

According to Facebook, users spend 3x more time watching live videos than videos that aren’t broadcast in real-time.  Your Facebook followers automatically opt-in to get notifications when you are “going live” which further increases visibility. Once your live broadcast is complete, you can upload the video to your timeline for those users who missed it. This feature is also helpful to give a sneak peek of your event to potential attendees who might show interest at a later point in time.

2. Grab attention early and sell tickets quickly

It’s important to grab the attention of your audience within the first 10 seconds or less, failing which they’ll stop watching your videos and move on. Within the first few seconds, you must convey the purpose of the video to your viewers and also offer some interesting information about your event, like early-bird discounts, and offer for meet-n-greet with artists, etc. You should capture interest during the first or second frame of the video before users have a chance to scroll away.

3. Optimize for search to garner more views

As you would have noticed, most social media platforms have inbuilt search options wherein you can search using terms such as hashtags. Consequently, make sure that your videos are SEO optimized to get noticed in the search engines of these platforms as well as external search engines. To make sure your videos are optimized, add proper headline and description to your video posts. Also, add relevant hashtags on Twitter and Instagram to boost search results. On YouTube, apart from the title and description you can add keyword tags to your videos.

4. Keep clear call-to-action in your videos

A call-to-action is an invitation to your viewers to take action which is why you should end your videos with a bang. Video content marketing needs to garner certain user actions, whether it is getting them to visit your event, share your video, or purchase an event ticket. The most effective place to add a call-to-action in your video is at the end. While creating videos, you must define a proper flow viz. ‘Introduction – Content – Call-to-action’. Keeping call-to-action at the end helps to motivate them to take your desired action.

5. Take your audience behind the scenes

The reason your audience follow you on social media is to know you better and get glimpses of how you run your business. When you do the latter, they connect with your brand. Once they get connected to your brand, it improves brand loyalty which is vital to growing your business.

So, showing videos such as behind-the-scenes, artists performing rehearsals, or the crew setting up the event – can garner interest and brand familiarity as well as engage your audience.

6. Capitalize on trending topics and hashtags to boost engagement

Like all other posts on social media, you need to leverage trending hashtags and topics while posting your videos. Capitalizing on these can help you connect with your audience regularly and eventually lead to fulfilling 3 content-goals. Delivering content that interests your audience, increase engagement level, and boost the number of views for your videos.

7. Run video ads to a targeted audience

You can run video ads to a targeted audience, including relevant users whom you haven’t already connected with on social media and get them excited about your upcoming events. Marketing videos on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have ad options that focus on increasing  views and engagement.

If you want to be sure about your video ad campaign, make sure your YouTube marketing is on point. If you get good engagement and views after posting a video on your page, you are more likely to get better results when you turn that video into a video ad campaign. It will eventually help you save a lot of money, which you can otherwise use to promote your event on other channels.

To sum up

After having implemented the above elements if you do not check the performance of your videos, all efforts go in vain. Monitor video analytics components such as the number of views, reach, average view completion rate, average view duration, etc. – to keep a tab on the effectiveness of your videos.

To sum up, video marketing stands out as one of the most in-demand forms of marketing currently. If you aren’t including videos in your social media mix right now, you are incurring a lost opportunity.

The post 7 Ways to Leverage Video Marketing for your Events appeared first on Yapsody.

With Facebook literally connecting us all, event management and ticketing has become rather simpler. Facebook helps you reach out to more and more potential customers and thus, that automatically increases your ticket sales. Let’s see how you can optimize your effects:

• Make sure you create an event page on Facebook. An event page would contain relevant details about the event, like the date and the venue. That way, people can check out your event and let you know if they are interested or not. Also, interested goers can share the event link with their friends. This helps publicize your event. As your event picks, so do your ticket sales.
• Track your users. Let’s say someone lists your event as interested. Your next step would be to lure him or her in. Now that you know their interests, you could keep reminding him or her about the event and even resort to multi-channel marketing. Increasing the frequency of reminders will surely catch the attention of the event goer, and he or she might just buy the ticket!
• Improve your search options. If an interested customer has heard about your event but is unable to locate the event page on Facebook, you lose out on event attendees. Your events shouldn’t be hard to find. The marketing campaign should be so extensive that entering a few keywords should be enough to pinpoint your events. We recommend the use of hashtags too. These are useful if you are searching for something that is already trending.
• Event attendees want something that immediately piques their interest and makes them want to take a step. Your Facebook events should be attractive and appealing enough. Use images. Use catchy and fun headlines. Go for interesting captions. Do whatever it takes to draw the customers to your event page and to your event ticket selling websites. Marketing is a game; it’s all about how you lure in the maximum number of customers.

Facebook, today, is one of the largest platforms for event promotions, paid and otherwise. So come on, join the wagon!

The post Selling your tickets through Facebook appeared first on Yapsody.

What you need is some organized way of measuring how effective your event marketing on social media has been. There are tools for calculating the impact of your social media stint. Use social media tools

Social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have their own set of analytics that you can avail if you are promoting a casino event, concert event, theater event etc. by paying the company. Other users are not aware of these, but you can make use of these in built analytics to determine the reach and response of your social media promotion. Some of them are as follows:

Twitter Analytics

This tool of Twitter allows users to estimate the engagement their post has had with the other users of Twitter. All the data are provided to the user in a demographic format. Users can check the graphs of followers’ interests their location and other information. You can also see the number of views, shares and retweets that your post has invited.

Facebook Page Insight

If you have created a page for your event on Facebook, tracking its organic reach and engagement among users is not difficult at all. Through Facebook page insight one can get all demographic data like

1. Organic reach: views from non followers.
2. Viral views: views from people who were directed to the post by friends.
3. Engagement: the number of likes, shares, comments, mentions, etc.

LinkedIn Company Analytics

With this neat tool you can monitor your followers and other competing events. Here too you can avail specific demographic data regarding your followers and their activities. LinkedIn has some paid tools like:

1. Mention: track responses to your posts.
2. Brandwatch: advanced tracking of followers, their location can be obtained through this.
3. Trackur: gives you data about how active people are on your page.

Key Performance Indicators

You must also promote on Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr to make the event survey easier. Once that is done, check your events KPIs. Through this you can measure how successful the promotion has been. This is through measuring of the number of people who called up, made enquiries through mail and track actual event ticket selling occurred. Social media tools like Hashtracking calculates the number of times your hashtag has been used.

The post How to Measure the Success of Your Event Promotion in Social Media appeared first on Yapsody.

Impressive Profile

Begin your Twitter journey with an attractive profile. You can’t overload with information in the limited space of the ‘Bio’ section but wise use of it can make it look very impressive. Structure your intro using catchy keywords relevant to your business and using some creativity. After creating your profile, ask yourself – will it invoke interest in readers? If it is yes, well done, you are good to go ahead.

Content Power

Now, take a look at the nature of the content you are going to share. Is it powerful enough to engage readers? If your tweet lacks quality, it is not worthy of reading. No one will visit your profile if you continue to share boring content. Keep a tab on your competitors and target audience to understand what type of tweet works on Twitter. Include links, event videos and images to grab more attention.

Making Connections

Devote a little time and make connections with users. You can start by following them, liking and retweeting their tweets, joining Twitter chats; and if they have a query, respond to it. This is how you can communicate and build a relationship with the audience. You know this is a good marketing strategy.

Increase Tweeting Frequency

Twitter is a fast-paced medium, where countless tweets keep popping up regularly. There’s every chance that readers may have missed out on what you have just tweeted. To make yourself noticeable, keep tweeting consistently – increase the frequency of your tweets. There shouldn’t be a long gap between your first and the second tweet of the day. Schedule your tweets using social media scheduling tools so that readers get the impression that you are active on Twitter. But, don’t forget quality control in all your tweets.

Promote yourself

Leave no room to promote your Twitter profile because that’s how one will start noticing your presence on Twitter. Share your page with all your email contacts. Use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest to promote your Twitter profile. Provide Twitter handle in the business cards, company’s websites and most importantly, in your blogs so that interested readers can follow you.

Well, these are some ways to increase the count of Twitter followers organically but earning followers is a time-consuming process.

Signing up with Yapsody comes with a lot of perks for the event marketer, so come on board and elevate your event marketing.

The post 5 Ways To Increase Twitter Followers Organically For Your Event appeared first on Yapsody.

Sadly, not every sales executive comes up with the best of the performance. There is always up and down in the sales graph. In such a situation, the company should take a note of what it can do to get the maximum out of their sales team.

Well, here are some sure-shot methods that will help you reap the best from salespersons:

How good you are as a motivator

When you don’t get the desired result, gushing out fiery smokes from your ears and yelling on top of the voice won’t help. Calm down and provide your team the much needed support. Sit with them and look into the areas where they have gone wrong and need help. Instil confidence in them. Give them a proper briefing of the event; involve them from the beginning. Bringing them into the picture at the last hour with little planning will yield no result. Encourage your sales team with attractive rewards, incentives, bonus, trips, or a dinner with the company’s big boss.

Breaking out from the four-wall closed room

Sometimes, having a discussion in a four-wall closed room freezes your mind and stops the free flow of ideas. Break this norm and take the team out from this closed environment. A friendlier and relaxed atmosphere means less pressure; there will be more exchange of ideas that will always work to the benefit of the company.

Time is Precious

Don’t waste the valuable time of your salesperson. We often see that many sales representatives are occupied in entering data, finishing some insignificant admin work, resulting in a waste of time. The organization must find out ways to minimize the wastage of time. Understanding target audience thoroughly; providing sales team with a support staff to do all the admin work; equipping them with handy tools; and options of quick communication should be explored to save their precious time and increase productivity.

Exploring Online Marketing

Making best use of online marketing can be helpful in meeting the required targets. However, getting maximum ‘register now’ button clicked is not the only way to gauge the success of online marketing. Keep the sales group updated about the latest digital marketing tools. Limiting them to tools such as Google Adwords, SEO, Newsletters will restrict them from earning more revenues, especially when the market is really competitive. Feed them with regular social updates on trending business mantra, familiarize them with time saving and business friendly applications. Allow them to use social sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Google+ to run sales campaign and generate more leads and conversion.

Utilize these simple and easy methods, and maximize the revenue.

The post Your Sales Team can do much better, believe it! appeared first on Yapsody.

I won’t deny, social media definitely consumes a lot of time, and for busy people like y’all, it can wreck your schedule. But, there are ways to manage it, and here I’m going to explain five top ones:

ON THE CLOCK

Event planners practically live off clocks and calendars, so this shouldn’t be a tough one. When you sit down to post event updates on social media to sell your event tickets, you might get distracted really easily, especially when there’s always that ‘View 10 New Tweets’ and ‘20+ New Stories’ popping up again and again. To top it all, you now have push notifications on your smartphones for all twenty social media apps that you’ve installed.

Give specific time windows to these outlets and only be active on them during those intervals. First thing in the morning, plan out your social media ‘schedule’ and stick to it. Turning off your notifications will definitely work since you won’t feel the urge to go back every 10 minutes to check your feed and spend so much time on it. Also, make sure that whenever you’re working on a platform during the time allotted to it, work ONLY on it – create content, engage with your followers, interact with people and so on.

A LOT AT ONCE

Having pre-produced content in bulk always helps, because you won’t have to fidget with new ideas and find ways to execute them right at the eleventh hour. Whenever you manage to squirm a little time off, maybe just before you sleep, after you wake up, during breakfast, or while traveling, you can list out tips related to your industry and post them on Twitter. These same tips can be converted to infographics that you can post on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest (try using PicMonkey or Canva for the same) and also include your logo in these pictures to increase your branding.

Yes, content creation might take some time, but scheduling it is a cakewalk for an event planner, at least. Use apps like Hootsuite to schedule hourly Tweets, and follow a similar approach with Facebook posts as well.

SMALL IS BIG

When you have ideas on your mind, you want to jump into the implementation. And if you take a really big leap, you might just fall and break your head. This simply means that just because there are a hundred social media outlets out there, you don’t have to be on each one of them all at once. Instead, start with platforms that you’re familiar with, or the ones that are popular in your niche. Later, when you are smoothly managing these platforms and are still left with enough time to start promoting on others, you could expand to more channels.

HOW FREE IS FREE TIME?

As I already mentioned, you could use up your free time (or ‘dead’ time, as they call it) for following up on your social media accounts. This is usually the time where you anyway can’t do something else that’s really productive, for example, when you are waiting in the checkout queue at the supermarket, or waiting for someone at the restaurant before a meeting. You could utilize this time to check your feed, retweet people on Twitter, and you could also create new content using your phone.

SCHEDULE YOUR CONTENT

This is probably a continuation of the second point. For every kind of content that you want to put up online, you can have a rough idea in your mind about the where, when, and how. Divide your content into categories, and then plan how much from each one of it are you going to post in a day, or over a week. So, you won’t have to spend another hour contemplating the kind  of content you want to post, instead, you’ll have a domain that’ll give you a line of thinking when you’re considering what to post.

IN CONCLUSION

So, there you go. Now that you know it won’t be that difficult to manage your social media accounts, you can utilize that time you spent stressing out for coming up with new social media strategies, all the while keeping these five tips at the back of your head.

The post How To Effectively Manage Multiple Social Media Accounts appeared first on Yapsody.

I see presenters spending so much on advertising and marketing campaigns that have zero (why am I using this word, or number, so much!?) effectiveness. What they don’t realize is that the conversion rate (percentage of website visitors who end up registering for your event) should be their prime focus. For example, if a 1% conversion rate meant 600 attendees, 2% will directly imply 1200 registrations. Now that you know how serious this is, let’s go ahead.

Oh, and I totally forgot, all these methods are going to cost you zero (again!) money, just like Yapsody’s General Admission events (that’s how marketing is done, folks).

CONTENT

The primary rule of website content is that all of it should aim at selling your event, directly or indirectly. All. Of. It.

Once you’ve fitted that in your head, drill these rules, too:

• Start with your conclusion
• Use headings
• Keep the content crisp and brief
• Bullet and number information
• Summarize
• Highlight important information
• Respect privacy and copyrights

Now that we know the rules, let’s play the game. The kind of content that you could put up on your website includes:

• Information related to top speakers, previous participants, and also feedback that previous attendees have given, celebrity endorsements, press mentions, pictures from your previous events etc. in order to build trust.
• Up-to-date information i.e. always keep an eye on prices and discounts that your website displays. You could also embed a Twitter/Facebook feed or run an active blog.
• Nothing that doesn’t serve the purpose of getting people to register for event. This is usually the annoying banners selling foreign products, newsletter subscriptions, or auto-playing videos that can be really distracting and ward off potential registrants.

CALL TO ACTION

This is how you have to actually provoke website visitors to register for your event. To the eyes of the audience, it’s just a button, but to a presenter, these four elements actually build the button:

Offer your registrants something that’s beyond good speakers, food, venue, and agenda. It’s only when you offer them discounts or free coupons that you actually grab their attention.

Create a feeling of urgency to persuade them to register immediately, or they might exceed the time limit or the event might sell out. Limiting the time and quantity makes people who are probably not even interested get in the flow and register.

If you’re hosting a great event, you shouldn’t be hesitating in assuring registrants that they are guaranteed complete refund on cancellation or in other similar scenarios. This makes you more dependable and eradicates double thoughts from their minds.

Your call to action statement should be a strong imperative verb that invites the viewer to perform a task immediately, almost subconsciously. Verbs like “Buy Tickets” or “Register Now” possess the characteristics of a strong call to action.

COSTING

Start off with chalking out the average price of your ticket, and construct all ticket categories, special offers, and discounts around that price. For example, if your average ticket price is $30, your tickets should range from $25 to $50. Make use of these tactics to maximize sales:

• Have a minimum of two categories always (VIP and Executive, for example)
• Have at least three ticket types that trigger urgency (Earlier than Early Bird, Early Bird, Standard)
• Special offers can comprise of discounts for tickets amounting to more than $100, group discounts for 5 people and so on.
• Code discounts are yet another way to offer discounts that can be made exclusive and limited in time/quantity so that people feel the urge to use them.

NEVER offer tickets at a lower price than you did before for the same event. This is highly frowned upon in the events industry because your attendees will be infuriated if they purchased tickets to your event 3 months prior to the event, and people are availing “last minute discounts” to get them at a cheaper rate.

CHECKOUT

Your advertisements and promotional gigs may have lured people into visiting your website, but if your registration and checkout process is not impeccable, your conversation rate may take a dip. Make sure you keep the following points in mind when you craft your registration process:

• Make your registration form as simple as possible. If you have fields that may be unclear, don’t forget to add help text.
• Make it concise. Don’t ask for irrelevant and unnecessary information.
• Account registrations seem to lengthen the process to visitors, so try to avoid them.
• Localize language, currency, and payment methods depending upon the market and your target audience, because this is said to boost registration by up to 300%.
• Restrict the registration process to your website and avoid redirecting your visitors to another webpage, as this discontinuity and inconsistency may tamper with your brand’s identity.
• Use the right event registration and ticketing software that caters to all your needs. Yapsody offers you a ticketing platform that is user-friendly and professional at the same time, and has a number of other features *embed a link to the features page here* at your disposal that can help you plan out your event efficiently.

CONCLUSION

Your marketing campaigns are bound to fail if your website, which is practically the face of your event, isn’t up to the mark. Make sure you incorporate these four C’s as you work on your website, and your conversion rate is very likely to boost up.

The post Ways To Sell More Tickets With Zero Budget appeared first on Yapsody.

PERSONALIZED EMAILS

Since we’re talking about maintaining a personal relationship with your customers, emails can work wonders. Apparently, personalized emails improve click through rates by 14%, which is huge if you’re familiar with the significance of numbers in marketing.

Design your email in a friendly tone and include a catchy call-to-action. Always include individual names of your customers to give it the extra personal touch, which genuinely shows that you are considerate about your audience.

There are many tools that help you craft your emails to suit your requirements and optimize your mailing list. If you’re an event presenter, hosting an event using Yapsody will help you on that front because we have a MailChimp integration tool that lets you import your contacts in order to send newsletters and invites.

TARGETED EMAILS BASED ON DEMOGRAPHICS

Instead of sending out a mass email to all the people who constitute your target audience, you might want to segment them based on your customers’ demographics because segmented emails get 50% more clicks as compared to mail blasts. The reason is simple – there are different reasons why different people belong to your target audience. Some of them may like you because your content looks relevant to them, while a different set of people might like your promotional gigs. You could separate out your customers based on quite a few factors, namely

• Gender
• Location
• Age
• Education level
• Purchase history
• Social media usage

Create mailing lists with people having similar attributes and send specially crafted emails to each one of them.

While most marketers usually collect relevant data during the signup process, recently they’ve discovered that third party apps like Facebook can also give them access to their customers’ details. When a person who’s interested gives his consent while entering your Facebook contest, you can actually gain access to his Open Graph data. Segmenting your customers couldn’t have been easier!

CATCHY CALL-TO-ACTION

When you include Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons in your email, make sure they’re clear and catchy, but not gaudy at the same time. You have to send out a clear message of what exactly the person will be discovering or doing by clicking on that button, and you have to make it visually catchy. Around 41% marketers have ranked CTA optimizations as extremely valuable, so you know this is some serious business.

CLEAR SUBJECT LINES

It is very difficult to strike the right balance between crisp and descriptive while coming up with a subject line. Your subject line has to fulfill many requirements in just 8-10 words, like

• It should be relevant and specific
• You should be clearly identifying yourself
• There should be an urgency of time depicted
• It should include your CTA

Some good examples for subject lines for contest invitation emails could be:

1. Our Sweepstakes is ON! Enter before Christmas to win $150!
2. Want to Win $150 for Christmas Shopping? Enter Our Sweepstakes NOW!
3. Show us Your Love by Voting and We’ll Show Ours by Giving You $150!

NEWSLETTERS

If you are an event presenter, you may be sending out regular newsletters to your subscribers and customers. You could simply have a section dedicated to your contest in one of your newsletters, or you could have an entire newsletter only for your contest. Include enticing contest images and a very brief description that interests them and intrigues them enough to click on that CTA button and participate right then.

INCLUDE AS A SIGNATURE

This is a new and different way to use email signatures for promoting your contest. Office workers spend 28% of their time reading and sending emails, which gives you enough time to make an impact through a regular mail. Simply include a very brief sentence about your Facebook contest and a catchy link or button in your signature, and ask your team to do the same. You can use a trackable link to keep a track of the number of clicks you get through these signatures.

ASK NICHE BLOGGERS TO PROMOTE YOU

Firstly, be aware of the people who influence your target audience. Next, reach out to them through promotional emails and request them to mention your contest in the content they put up. If you really want this to work, you have to make sure that your approach answers the basic what, where, why, when, why, and how that might prop up in their minds regarding your contest. Use Technorati or Klout to find out who are the key influencers in your industry. You can incentivize the promotion by giving them free coupons or gift cards in return for writing about your contest.

FOLLOW UP EMAILS FOR THE NEXT CONTEST

Once your contest is over and you’ve chosen your winner, it’s not the end. In fact, it’s quite like the beginning (remember what the snitch said in Harry Potter? “I open at the close…”).

Follow up on your entrants by sending them thank you emails or details about the next contest. You can also give them an advantage in the next contest because they participated in the previous one. The idea is to keep them engaged with your brand and updated with your latest on-goings. A happy customer is the one who can relate to your brand and feel connected.

IN CONCLUSION

Email marketing, I repeat, is an extremely effective tool and you can get tons of entrants by using it wisely. Just make use of the above tips and you’ll be good to go!

The post How to Promote your Facebook Contest using Email Marketing? appeared first on Yapsody.

THAT GOOD OL’ MAIL

Some things never go out of style, and mails are one of those things. Even though people ignore junk folders in their email inbox, they open EVERY mail that they get in their mail box (except bills, maybe. Nobody likes opening bills). You could check out USPS’ Every Door Direct Mail service that lets you enter your address, ZIP code, or city and state for your target areas, and narrow down your audience using a simple tool. Also, a lumpy mail is an amazing idea because even when people know it is maybe junk mail, they’ll still open it excitedly. Put in balloons, Christmas bows, pens, or invite cards to make the envelope lumpy.

WORD OF MOUTH

Again, an old technique that’s an amazingly effective marketing technique. Many people attend events because their friends or relatives are attending it, too. You could take word of mouth a step ahead and ask your trusted attendees to spread the word using small palm-sized printed invites, or Christmas packages containing an invite and cookies, maybe.

MICRO-SITE

Put up a micro-site dedicated only to your Christmas event, and have good SEO for the site to make it revolve around keywords that your target audience is likely to search in this season. Have a warm welcome video that embraces the Christmas festivities on your site, ways they can share the event with others, social media integration, DDTVs, and a link to your main website.

FACEBOOK

Purchase advertising benefits to promote your event in front of your target audience on Facebook. Get your graphic designers to work on a cover photo and profile picture for your event. Design digital content that your attendees can easily share, and encourage them to share it on their groups and pages. Event pages can be highly beneficial for your event if you put them to optimum use.

COMMUNITY EVENTS

Attend other events in your community or where your target audience is likely to be and hand out invites to your event or simply let the word of your event slip in your conversations. You can even formally partner up with these event presenters to publicize your event during theirs. Always remember, you won’t get something till you ask for it.

EMAIL MARKETING

Like mail, email will always stay in style. As a matter of fact, emails have better conversion rates than social media. Build highly targeted email lists and send out crisp newsletters informing the receivers about your event. Encourage them to share your event with their folks so that they have company, and you have a successful event or concert.

A Very Merry Christmas, y’all!

The post Effective Promotional Strategies For Your Christmas Event appeared first on Yapsody.