As an event ticketing platform assisting presenters & hospitality enterprises all over the world, we have analyzed every possible dimension of successful and not so successful events. Here’s Yapsody’s 10 step guide on designing the ultimate event experience. 

1. Be Clear on your Event Objectives

The most successful events we witness in terms of selling out tickets and drawing more footfalls are those whose organizers have a clear picture of their event objectives. Your event goals are the purpose of your event – to party, to celebrate, to educate, or to persuade. Narrow down these event objectives and check if they are relevant, achievable, and measurable within the designated time-frame. Once you figure them out, every other process falls into place. 

2. Delegate Tasks Equally

Whether your event is big or small, your team members should be firing on all cylinders. They should be clearly aligned with your event marketing strategy and their role in achieving them. While creating an event on our ticketing platform, you can assign tasks to your members equally through our User Management System. So, if one member needs to manage the Ticket Pricing and the other needs to integrate Event Marketing Tools, they don’t need to depend on one single person handling the dashboard.  

3. Map Out Your Event Venue

An event venue can make or break your reputation. Imagine an outdoor event planned during the monsoons without having a contingency plan of moving indoors. Similarly, mapping out the event venue will help you arrange the entry, seating,  standing, dining, and exit points. Ask for a seating chart from the venue owner which will help you assign different price points for different seating sections. 

4. Make Your Sections Easily Navigable

Imagine a music festival with attendees from all over the world. Not only do you need to surpass the language barrier, but also make sure all the sections of your events are easily navigable through simple signs or instructions. Position the food, bar, and smoking sections easily accessible from the main stage.

Easy access to these counters + reasonable pricing = More revenue. 

At no point during the event should your attendee feel a disconnect from the event experience. Also, don’t make your attendees cross rivers and mountains to access a restroom.  

5. Streamline The Security & Check-In Process

This is where we see many event attendees lose their cool. Nobody wants to wait for hours just because you didn’t create multiple check-in points. Make sure security checks are handled before anything else. Once they’re in the clear, validate their tickets through a QR Code scanner.  

An attendee might turn up late but it’s your job to not make them wait any longer. Imagine being stuck in a queue while hearing your favorite band strumming their latest summer single. Our ticketing system supports 12 prominent languages & over 150 currencies to bridge any communication gap between event presenters and attendees. 

6. Don’t Make Your VIP’s Wait 

After all, they are VIP for a reason. Create a separate line for guests belonging to the Reserved Seating sections. A luxurious black-tie event in a casino is not synonymous with sweating it out in a line. Keep your VIP guest list updated before they start pouring in. They are paying top dollar for your tickets which should be reflected in your event experience. 

7. Make Your Main Stage Memorable 

The main event stages of any EDM festival or an expo delivers the “larger than life” experience. The stage design and audio-visual setup of your main stage create an atmosphere that energizes your guests. With the right budget, you can go for a holographic setup as well for that futuristic leap. Every year, thousands of events organized all over the globe blow up on news and social media just because of their main stage setup.  

8. Will They Do It For The Gram? 

Now, that you’ve taken care of all the essentials, you’re waiting for that euphoric audience reaction. You created a brilliant event marketing campaign, brought the best artists to perform at the hottest venue in town, and sold out the venue. As an organizer, it’s normal to expect an outpour of Instagram posts and stories #tagging your event. Your event success will be heavily reflected on social media through user-generated content. Even something as small as a signpost or a quirky art installation will have your event attendees pulling out their phones for a selfie. So, while you’re planning an event, always ponder “Will they do it for the Gram?”

9. Expect The Unexpected 

An event organizer hopes for the best and prepares for the worst. In the entertainment industry, we’ve seen things go haywire even with months of planning. Your artist might catch the flu or miss a flight. Or maybe the rain gods decided to generously flood your venue. As an event planner, you should always be ready with a contingency plan A, B, and  C. This is truly a testing ground for any event presenter to prove his mettle and not disappoint his audience. 

10. Go Above & Beyond

Event planning and organizing is a constant hustle. But the returns are tenfold – financially and emotionally. Treat every event as your first and last and you’ll surely go above and beyond for every minute detail. For you, it might be the 10th event in a month, but for an attendee, it might be his first. Create a memorable experience and you’ll have them coming back to you for more. 

We hope our 10 step guide resonated with you in planning your future events. Do share your personal experiences in creating the perfect event experience below in the comment section. 

Don’t forget to SIGN UP with us if you’re an event presenter looking for an end-to-end event ticketing platform.

The post Designing The Ultimate Event Experience appeared first on Yapsody.

Website

Every manager knows that their guest experience begins way before arriving at the front desk. Not only do you need a user-friendly and fast website, but it also needs to reflect your hotel persona. Your social media handles further solidifies your online presence.  Your website should also be mobile optimized and effortlessly lead your guests to the BOOK NOW option. Make sure that their first contact with your brand sets the standard for things to come. 

Check-In Process 

Probably the most over-looked factor, the check-in process can elevate your guest’s mood or annoy them. After travelling all that way to reach your hotel or event, if you can’t find their name under the reservation list, they might lash out. Perhaps, your hotel can easily manage the check-in check-out process on a normal day. But during the holiday season, when your hotel is a venue for a famous band to perform, you will need an Inventory Management System that can handle Reserved Seating and Ticket Scanning. You can still go for the “stamp on the hand” method of confirming entry for that old school touch. 

Personalized Packages

Whether it’s a business trip or a family trip, everyone loves an all-inclusive package that covers food, alcohol, entertainment, spa, and gym which would be otherwise be charged a la carte. Carefully craft a package that has live entertainment acts for your resort or casino hotel. Don’t overpopulate your website with 50 packages when 10 of your best will suffice. Exclusivity is key in hospitality. You can further personalize their packages if it’s their birthday, anniversaries, weddings, and so on.

Partner With Other Businesses 

By partnering with tourism businesses nearby, you can add value to your venue by amplifying your brand presence. A lot of your guests would love to explore nearby tourist attractions such as museums, theme parks, vineyards, breweries, and so on. You can club these under short-term packages for those who are always looking to go the extra mile. You can give the local gift shop some space in your hotel as tourists are always looking for memorabilia to take back home.

After The Stay

Brand loyalty is what every hotel earns if they pulled everything off perfectly. A key touchpoint for hotel owners to work on is earning their guest’s revisits. The real task is working on post-checkout surveys and feedback from your guests to evolve your future service offering. Create logic-based questions that can help you improve service levels in the future. Satisfaction in the hospitality sector is driven by improving through complaints and general feedback. How fast you can turn a negative into a positive becomes an indicator of your brand value in the market.

Yapsody has been a hospitality industry leader in providing volume talent buying services with internal routing since 1995. You’re just a SIGN UP away to elevate your guest experiences in your hotel.

The post How to Elevate Guest Experiences in Your Hotel appeared first on Yapsody.

Add a Seating Chart

Speak to your venue-manager and procure a venue seating chart that can be uploaded on our ticketing platform. This will help you map the sections with the seating chart uploaded by you and dictate the prices accordingly.

Add Reserved Seating Sections

You will have an option to add a General Admission or a Reserved Seating section as per your Seating Chart. You can also add multiple General Admission and Reserved Sections as per your Seating Chart. Once you’ve finished adding rows and columns, add colors to seats to designate pricing tiers. 

Create Holds

With Yapsody’s Box Office Interface, you can easily create and book hold tickets for multiple categories such as VIP and artists to assign their seats beforehand. 

Ticket Customization

Your seating plan is incomplete without a stable ticketing system. With Yapsody, you let your ticket design reflect your brand. Use event imagery and illustrations to get your attendees excited about your event. What’s more? Add upcoming event details in your ticket to promote your next event.

Payment Integration 

Yapsody supports 170+ currencies and over 10 payment gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and WePay for you to choose from.  You also have the flexibility to separately enable payment method for the Virtual Box Office and Online Ticket Store. When it comes to making payments, Yapsody gives multiple choices to your attendees like credit, debit and pay later option.

Notify Presenter Policy (NPP)

For us, every event presenter is equally important, whether you sell 10 or 100,000 tickets for your event. If your attendee is having doubts, we’ll send an email to you requesting clarification on the same and then your ticket buyer will be updated about it. This ensures 100% customer satisfaction. We re-direct ticket buyers for Refund issue to you and also send you an intimation email about the same. If your ticket buyer wants to buy tickets for an already sold-out event, we immediately inform you about it. This has helped our presenters to boost their online ticket sales even after an event is sold out and generate additional revenue.

YapScan

Lastly, your event should be seamless during the check-in and ticket validation process where you cannot afford hiccups. YapScan turns all your event managers smartphones into a fully functional ticket validating device that can be used for scanning e-ticket barcodes, cross-checking names, e-ticket numbers, or simply scrolling through the attendee list.

As we head off into the Holiday season, your community might be anticipating the next big bash. If you’re an event presenter looking for that competitive edge,  get a flat 25% off on your ticketing fees by using our holiday promo code –  HOLIDAY25
If you don’t have a Yapsody account yet, sign up now and sell your first 50 tickets with NO ticketing fee & collect money directly in your designated payment gateway account.

The post Creating The Perfect Event Seating Plan appeared first on Yapsody.

Get Site-d!

Your website, or your online ticket store, will probably be the first SIGNIFICANT impression that you’ll make on your customers. So, make sure you make a good one. When you register with Yapsody, we don’t just give you a platform to sell tickets – we give you an online ticket store with a customized URL (e.g. www.yourevent.yapsody.com) where your customers can

• Interact and connect with you in your local language (Click Here to check if your local language is supported by Yapsody)
• Add multiple events to the Shopping Cart so that they can Check Out with a single transaction
• View entire history of their past transactions, and of course
• Buy tickets!

You can also have a customized section for FAQs to answer possible queries of your customers.

Social Media

Social Media is just never enough promotion. Never. Enough. It is the easiest way to spread word about your event and reach a large audience. Plus, it’s much easier for someone to simply click the “Share” button to let people know about your upcoming event or concert, than actually talk and explain. Yapsody provides you with Social Media widgets that help you with your promotion. You can embed these buttons in your Facebook page, your blog, your Tweets and divert traffic to your website, registration page, or online ticket store. And there is no known job that can’t be done with a few buttons set loose, is there? *wink*

Because Sharing is Caring

Get out there, be a good kid, and share your event on social event sites like www.eventful.org and www.upcoming.org. These websites allow you to publish your event details in order to drive more traffic and increase your target audience reach. Thankfully, a lot of them are free and let you put up your description, event date, time, venue, pricing, and website address.

Did someone say “free”?

The moment you read that the social event sites are free, you’re already Googling your way through twenty of them. So, why not give back some free stuff to the virtual world as well? Discounts, promotional coupons, freebies – they are little packets of happiness. People love free, no matter what it is. Yapsody lets you add different types of discount offers to your tickets: early purchase, group discounts, promo codes, and a lot more.

The “E” in “Email” stands for “Evergreen”

Emails always work. And when I say ‘always’, I mean it. You can easily import your customer list into your MailChimp contact list with our easy-to-use integration tool. Use it to send across event updates, newsletters, and interact with your customers easily. Frequent emails show you care, and that you are active. With blue ticks and ‘Seen’, people have grown used to instant responses.

Many of them might be old-school knew-that-one-already tips, but they still work. And I’m sure they always will. Just like my jokes. My jokes don’t work? Maybe because I don’t pay them enough! Okay, maybe I should take that one back. *facepalm*

The post Tips and Tricks to Promote Events Successfully appeared first on Yapsody.