Last-minute ways to boost ticket sales for your Halloween events
If you’re starting to feel like you’re not going to sell all your tickets, trying these last-minute sales-boosting tips might just be enough to see you over the finish line.
Halloween conjures images of glowing pumpkins in windows, enthusiastic little trick-or-treaters, and eerie, moonlit nights. Traditionally, at least. But for many, the word Halloween means one thing: a great night out. Whether that’s a raucous rave, a fancy dress pub quiz, or a tongue-in-cheek themed disco – this is one night of the year you can guarantee people are up for getting their ghoulish gladrags on and hitting the town.
With so much competition, as an event planner, you might be struggling to shout loudest. If you’re starting to feel like you’re not going to sell all your tickets, trying these last-minute sales-boosting tips might just be enough to see you over the finish line.
(Pssst – you can totally use these tips for daytime events, too – like spooky trails for kids or Halloween family festivals.)
How do you sell out an event?
To sell out an event, creating a sense of urgency is key. It’s also crucial to keep your event at the forefront of people’s minds, and it can help to offer a few incentives too. Read on to find out how to sell out your Halloween event by:
- Emailing previous attendees
- Announcing a last-minute surprise act or theme
- Offering ticket bundles
- Getting your performers to promote
- Creating a sense of urgency
- Running a last-minute social media competition
Email previous attendees
Had a good turnout for events in the past? Emailing previous attendees is a great way to put your event in front of people you know could be very interested.
This is a low-effort, high-reward marketing tactic for any event planner, and could in itself be enough to see those last tickets go flying off the shelves.
Try to keep your email lighthearted and confident (no whiff of desperation here!), and think about throwing in a little incentive, too – like a free drink or VIP access.
Don’t automatically assume offering a discount on individual tickets is a wise move, though. For all it can be tempting to try and fill up those last spots by lowering the cost of tickets, it might end up cheapening your brand and putting people off.
Announce a surprise, last-minute act or theme to create a buzz
With so much competition on Halloween, it’s crucial to keep your event in the minds of potential attendees right up until the last minute. (Otherwise you risk their heads getting turned by another similar event!)
One way of doing this is to make a surprise announcement in the weeks leading up to your event to stir up a buzz and get people talking again. If you can lay your hands on a last-minute addition to your line-up, then great. You’ll be opening up your event to a whole new fanbase and generating a new bout of hype in one fell swoop.
If it’s not possible to secure another act, even just announcing a quirky, pop-culture Halloween theme for your event could be enough to get the word-of-mouth machine working. For example, you could announce that your event is going to have a Stranger Things theme, or retro ‘90s horror movie theme.
Offer a discount for group tickets
Offering ticket bundles can be a great way to incentivise larger groups to attend your events. For example, if your standard adult ticket price is £15, you could offer a bundle of four tickets for £48, which works out at £12 each. The bigger the bundle, the better the discount per ticket should be.
Top tip: Ticket Tailor has a handy bundles feature – head here for all you need to know >
Bundles are a great way to offer discounted tickets at the last-minute without cheapening your brand or coming across as desperate. Plus, by nature, they mean you’re selling to multiple attendees at once. Win-win.
Get your performers promoting, too
Got a great line-up for your event? Whether it includes bands, DJs or another type of performer – getting your events’ acts on the promo bandwagon is one of the most lucrative ways to attract attention.
Chances are, they’ll have told their fans about their gig at your event, but it can pay-off to give them a nudge to amp up their efforts.
For example, to make sure they’re posting regularly on social media, you could consider offering them an incentive. Why not try promising them a spot at another of your events if they do one social media post a day in the run-up to this one?
Create a sense of urgency
Just because you’ve not sold out yet, doesn’t mean potential attendees need to think you might not. In their eyes, you should be totally confident that your event will sell out.
Creating a sense of urgency is a proven way to generate sales. It basically works on the principle of FOMO (fear of missing out) – which, as most people know, is one powerful phenomenon that can be very hard to resist.
With this in mind, try to push out some urgency-generating messaging in the run up to the big day:
- Just 5 days left to get tickets!
- Only 50 tickets left, and going fast!
- We’re almost sold out! If you don’t want to miss out, grab up tickets now!
Run a last-minute social media competition
Social media competitions can be super low-maintenance and really effective at getting the word out about your event. They can also help generate hype around your event, hopefully leading to more ticket sales in doing so.
Your competition could be something as simple as getting entrants to like and share an Instagram or Facebook post for the chance to win two free tickets. Or you could do something a little more personal in getting people to share a photo of their favourite Halloween costume or Halloween memory.
There are lots of social media competition tools out there that take care of things like automatically generating a winner, for example:
Selling out an event doesn’t have to be elusive. With a few carefully planned strategic moves, there’s no reason you can’t see a last-minute boost in ticket sales to get you over that finish line. Good luck!
PS. Did you know Ticket Tailor is the leading Eventbrite alternative and is cheaper to use? We only charge a small flat fee per ticket instead of a percentage of each sale, helping you to keep the cost of your tickets down – all the better for selling out 😌.
We sell ticket events of all shapes and sizes!
Don’t just take our word for it!
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