It’s the perfect time of the year to start using an event ticketing system or to rethink your current system. New, innovative features for ticketing systems are developed frequently, and with so many offerings it may be difficult to determine which are important to consider.
In an effort to ease your shopping process, we’ve outlined five features that are must-haves when looking for a new event ticketing system.
- Customizable Event Pages
- Analytics Integrations
- Responsive Design
- Cloud Solutions
- Real People Behind The System
The look and feel of your event page should mirror the branding of your event. Thoughtful ticketing partners will ease the pain of front-end development by simplifying the process for its clients. Look for ticketing systems that allow simple changes on the event page, such as banner uploads, background colors, and font styles, to be made by anyone in your organization. Easy design options will help save you time!
There are various marketing and analytics services you may already be using – Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords. An ideal ticketing system will be able to integrate your ticket sales with these third-party services for seamless tracking across platforms and enhanced analytics. For example, if you are running a Facebook ad campaign for your event, you will want to be able to track which conversions (tickets sold) are a direct result of the campaign.
A fan learns about your upcoming event through a mobile tweet, but when they click the link, it leads to an unresponsive page. In other words, you just lost a conversion! As mobile device usage rises, it’s absolutely necessary that your ticketing partner offers responsive design on any device. Responsive design ensures that attendees don’t encounter barriers to purchasing tickets, like slow load times or distorted images, and it also helps with your SEO rankings.
Web-based solutions to ticketing are a must; your ticketing system should not require installing new software to provide flawless ticketing solutions. As an event professional, you are often on the move, and may not always have access to a “home base” that houses proprietary software. Cloud solutions to ticketing allows you to manage events and access important data from anywhere, and are often accompanied with more advanced functionality than their traditional platform counterparts.
Features are important, but what about the team of professionals dedicated to helping you organize the best event possible? A ticketing partner will offer support for account set-up and answer basic ticketing questions you may encounter, but the best companies go above and beyond. Does a company have offerings for on-the-ground assistance on event day? Is there a department committed to helping you market your event and optimize your pages? The best case scenario is choosing a ticketing firm that not only has an advanced platform for ticket sales, but also has the right team of experts behind it.