WordPress Event Ticketing

Input from the customers is, in many cases, invaluable and sharing their experience provides a point of view that you as owner of the website or event organizer simply don't have. Event organizing is, like many other businesses, heavily relied on customer satisfaction. The equation is very simple: the more your customers are satisfied, the better it is for the future of your business. And it's not only the event you're organizing that matters - customer experience from your website is equally important. Of course, you will do your best to cover it all and will surely used tried and proven methods that guarantee high level of customer satisfaction but you shouldn't neglect opinions of your customers either. By surveying your customers, you are showing them that you care about your business but at the same time, you're giving them their voice and collecting valuable information from them. With Tickera, there are several ways of achieving which we will cover in this post.

The classic, email engagement approach

If you made any transaction on any website in the last few years, chances are that you have received an email with the subject that says something like We would like to know your opinion. These are exactly these surveying emails that you will be using on your website. So, you may or may not know but Tickera has integration with several email campaign service providers: Mailchimp, Sendloop and Customer.io. Most notable and widely used of these three is certainly Mailchimp. So we will focus here on the features provided by Mailchimp. However, other providers also offer similar email engagement techniques.

Mailchimp automation

So, if you have installed and configured Mailchimp add-on for Tickera, you are now able to collect email addresses of your buyers and (optionally) attendees. These email addresses will be stored to Mailchimp's list which you can use then for email engagement with your customers in all sorts of ways. Let's imagine a scenario where a customer lands on your page and buys tickets for your event. Once they finish the checkout, they will receive an email sent by Tickera where they will receive their tickets. So, it wouldn't be a good idea to bombard the customer with surveying emails as many may find it confusing and even miss the email with their tickets or, at the very least, it is very unlikely that they will open this followup email. Give a customer chance to "breathe" a little and focus on getting their tickets downloaded. After, say, two days, you can send them a followup email where you can ask them, for example, what do they expect from your event or any other question that your customers are likely to reply to and which provides valuable input for you.

To do this with Mailchimp, you will be using Automation feature. This is quite intricate feature with lots of options. There are dozens of predefined "journeys" as they call these automations but for the purposes of this post, we won't be using these but will rather create one from the scratch. So, when you log in to your Mailchimp account, in the menu on the left, you will notice Automations item. Click this and the new page will load where many of the journeys we mentioned earlier appear. On this page, simply click the Create Journey button in the upper right corner.

On the next page, enter a name for the journey that you are creating and select the audience list from the dropdown menu and then click Start Building button.

The next page after this is where all the magic happens. This page doesn't show much but this is about to change soon. As you can see, there is currently only one big Choose A Starting Point button which does exactly what it says: it offers you to select what will trigger this journey. So, click that button and a popup will appear with many options but we will be focusing here on Contact Activity.

Let's say that this journey will target your new customers. For this, you should use Signs up starting point since their email addresses will be collected during their checkout. Of course, if your scenario is different, you can use basically any of the available options as starting point. After this, we should add another journey point by clicking Add a journey point button below your previously selected starting point. This point will serve just as a simple time delay so you can select here Time delay and then enter number of days/weeks before an email is being sent. Finally, the third step is to actually send an email so we will add another journey point and will select Send email. Now, when you select this, you will be prompted to select an email template that will be sent to the customer. When you click select template, you will be redirected to Mailchimp's vast selection of pre-built templates that you can use or modify based on your needs or you can create your own. When done, click Save and return to journey. When everything is done, your journey should look something like this:

Another variation that you can use instead of Send email point is Send email with a survey. This will allow you to create a survey right within the email. The beauty of this is the ability to use survey results as starting points in your future email campaigns and target customers with high accuracy for their engagement but at the same time collect their insight about your service.

As you can imagine, with a little bit of work, you can create quite intricate and detailed mechanisms for engaging customers via email both before and after the event. Also, since your audience list will certainly grow with each purchased ticket, you can use this to announce your future events and increase chances to sell more tickets by engaging your previous customers. One trick that is widely used in scenarios like this is to deliver a coupon code via email to customers who previously purchased ticket on your website. They will certainly like the fact that you're appreciating their loyalty but at the same time this will increase likelihood of them making another purchase so it's pretty much a win-win situation.

Surveying during checkout

This is another way of engaging your customers that is quite different by nature and provides you with more "instant" results. For example, you can use Tickera's Custom Forms to create a simple questionnaire that will load on the cart page and where customers can provide their insight.

While creating a custom form for this, you can decide whether answering these questions will be required or optional. However, based on the experience, it wouldn't be a good idea to block customers from finishing the checkout before they answer these questions as this would be very poor user experience and would certainly result in high cart abandonment rates which, as you can imagine, will have quite a negative effect on your revenue. So just leave all these fields optional but rest assured that many of your customers will answer them. So, what do you do with this information then? Well, you can export it by utilizing our CSV Export add-on where you can have a list of attendees with all of their answers in .csv file format, you can access this information in the order details in the back end of your website, display this in Checkinera apps and even place it on the ticket itself.

It wouldn't be a good idea to block customers from finishing the checkout before they answer these questions

If, however, you're running Tickera alongside WooCommerce via Bridge for WooCommerce add-on, you can utilize plugins such as this one that provides similar functionality as Tickera's Custom Forms add-on from the user standpoint but offers quite nice reporting features that may help you getting instant information about, for example, how many customers answered specific question with Yes and how many with No.

The downside of both of these approaches in comparison with the email campaigns is the inability for future engagement. These instant surveys during checkout will only provide you with the information that you will get during the checkout but a followup will be basically impossible unless you use one of the email campaign services such as Mailchimp.

Wrap up

Regardless of the approach that you will be using, the goal is the same: get to know your customers and their needs. And if you care about your business, you should seriously consider about the feedback of your customers and listen closely to what they have to say. More often than not, this is a key factor for your future decisions and will help you shape and steer your event towards maximum customer satisfaction.