Once you've started organising a number of events, you might find yourself wanting to do something special for your loyal visitors, or maybe even to catch the attention of new ones. You can attract your audience by giving them the opportunity to buy tickets before anybody else. To do this, you can use pre-registrations. In this blog, you can read how pre-registration works, the advantages, and the tools you can use to make the process as smooth as possible for both yourself and your ticket buyers.

What are pre-registrations?

The process by which people register in advance and thus have the opportunity to be the first to buy tickets is called pre-registration. Visitors who have registered before the rest of the crowd get access to the ticket shop before the rest of the crowd. This means they can get their hands on tickets before regular ticket sales officially start.

Why are pre-registrations so useful?

Pre-registrations allow you to put your loyal visitors in the spotlight and persuade new visitors to come to your event. Often visitors will be excited to be the first to register and buy tickets.

Of course, this has its benefits for you as an organiser too, as it allows you to gather info about your visitors before your ticket sales have even started. During registration, interested visitors fill in their details, providing you with valuable information, such as your visitors’ age, gender and place of residence. These are all things you can use to successfully market your event.

Our pre-registration app

In our App Library, you can find our pre-registration app, which our friends at D'Agostino Digital specifically built to make the process of pre-registration as smooth as possible. In the app, you can set up precisely what you would like your pre-registration page to look like, including the content you would like to show. You can also choose which MailChimp list you would like to add the pre-registrations to. You can see an example below:

The advantage of using this form over another online form, such as Google Forms, is that you can stylise the background and banner images to match your branding. That means you can do things like this:

Once you’ve created your pre-registration form in your styling, you can easily share it on whatever platform you like by copying the link in the top right corner of the app.

Create promotional codes via the Dashboard

Once people have registered by filling out our pre-registration form website, you’ll have the e-mail addresses of the interested visitors. To give these visitors easy access to your ticket shop, you can use our promotional codes. In this case, you don't provide them with a discount, but a unique code that provides them with access to the ticket shop (or specific hidden tickets in your ticket shop) and allows them to be the first to buy tickets.

You can easily create promotional codes in our Dashboard. You can create as many unique codes as you’d like and decide how many times they are valid per order. Want to know how? Read our tutorial on Promotional Codes.

Create Merge Tag in MailChimp

Once you’ve created your promotional codes, you can send them automatically via MailChimp to the people who have registered. For this, you need to make use of the so-called merge tags in MailChimp. A merge tag is actually a code with which MailChimp automatically adds certain personalised information to your email campaign. So in this case, we need a merge tag that automatically sends the codes that you’ve previously generated. MailChimp has a special merge tag for this, which makes this process easy. If you want to know how to set up this merge tag, please read our guide on merge tags.

Sending personalised emails

Now that you have your merge tags set up, you can send out an email to your visitors with their unique promotional code, which they can use to purchase tickets. In your email, clearly explain how (often) your visitors can use the promotional codes and (until) when they have early access to the ticket shop.

You’ll also want to encourage them to make use of your promotional code and buy a ticket. It's important to make your emails personal. People want to be addressed as individuals rather than as 'Dear visitors'. You can read how to make your e-mails more personal and how personalisation helps to create a stronger connection with your visitors in our blog.

Who has used your promotional codes?

Of course, it is good to know if your campaign is working and whether your promotional codes have been used. To check which codes have been used, go to our Dashboard. Click 'Orders' and go to the 'Order list'. Here you can see exactly which visitor has used which code. If a lot of your promotional codes have been used, that means there is already a lot of interest in your event.

If your visitors haven't been using your promotional codes that much, then it might be a good idea to adjust your (e-mail) campaign or to reconsider whether pre-registrations is the right move for your event(s).

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to reach out to us via info@eventix.io.