6 key features your online ticketing solution should have

It doesn’t matter if you are either on the lookout for a new ticketing solution to help boost your venue and sell more tickets online, or evaluating to change the current one you are using; a good all-in-one software should have certain features in order for it to be worth the investment. 

If we have learned something from the COVID-19 pandemic, is that we should bring our business as online as we can, and for a leisure venue, that means selling most of their tickets online.

We don’t know about you, but we particularly dislike it whenever we have to use different tools to manage the same information. We would much rather want to have everything in one place, and not have to switch from app to app, jumping around different tabs in our internet navigators. 

You could also be interested in: Get to know how 6 venues within the leisure industry boosted their revenue by implementing a ticketing solution. 

That is why we decided to make this small “checklist”, or ‘must-haves” in order to help you in your evaluation process. We know, it can be frustrating sometimes to decide between all the options out there in the market. For us here at Convious, the best solution is the one that helps you sell more tickets online and manage your business, all in the same place. 

If you think just like us, keep on reading!

1) Manage Visitor Spread

In this "new normal" era, crowds and queues are unacceptable due to health risks and government regulations. To reopen and keep your venue in business,  a safe and predictable spread of visitors is now a necessity for the industry. You need to prepare responsibly for visitors to come and enjoy a safe and fun experience. The correct ticketing solution can help you just with that: manage visitor distribution from your online ticketing booth. 

Convious Crowd Control for the Leisure Industry: use Artificial Intelligence to manage visitor spread. 

2) Manage Orders

This is basic, right? Can you believe that there is software out there in the market that does not allow you to do this? Handling orders is probably the day-to-day in your business management. So, what should you expect from this feature?

• Have the possibility to see all the orders in the same place:  You want to have control and actually see what is happening in our venue. How many visitors do we have planned for today? For tomorrow? For the week?
  

• Manage your tickets: It’s not only important to see them, but actually to do the main functions that your day-to-day requires. Think actions such as refunds, resending online tickets through email, printing out tickets, changing visit dates, changing ticket times, etc. 

3) Configure Prices

If you are in the leisure industry, you probably know that pricing is king, and is one of the main factors that will have a direct impact on your revenue. 

A good ticketing solution should at least allow you to manually change prices quickly based on certain factors that affect your business: things such as demand, availability, weather, etc, you name it.  

A GREAT ticketing solution should do that automatically by using an AI-powered system software that immediately measures supply and demand and establishes prices based on the factors we mentioned previously. This is called Dynamic Pricing. 

Let me give you an example: You are a theme park that sells online tickets. If you have a dynamic pricing strategy running, your prices will automatically change based on the factors that affect your business the most. If it is a rainy day, your prices will drop. If it is a weekend, you will probably want to sell at higher prices. 

A great operating system will work 24/7 doing these updates that, even though they sound small, will definitely generate a big impact revenue-wise.

4) Tools that will help you engage with your visitors

If you sell online, then you know the importance of driving traffic to your website. Imagine all that effort going to waste? This happens if you don’t have the correct engagement tools. 

We actually have a complete blog post about the best marketing tools that will help you engage and convert those visitors into paying customers if you are really into this topic. 

What should you be looking for here? 

• Self-service is the key!  A platform that will help you configure all of this whenever and wherever you want to. This means that you should not be expected to depend on a graphic designer or a programmer to have these tools up and running on your website.
  

• 100% personalization. I mentioned previously about not depending on a designer, but this does not mean that the engagement tools should not LOOK like there was a designer involved in the process. A good ticketing solution should be able to work with 100% personalizable templates so they look native to your website. This is how we do it at Convious:

5) Get Sales Insights

It’s always nice to have a clear and clean overview of how your sales are currently going. After all, it is one of the most important factors when talking business. Most of these insights should be displayed in a dashboard that will help you make the correct decisions. Let me show you some Sales Insights we give to our Convious Partners.

For us, at Convious it is important that our partners are 100% in control of their business, and for that to happen information is the key. We showcase relevant information including:

• Average order size
• Average order value
• Checkout Conversion Rate
• Website Conversion Rate
• Total Revenue
• Products Solds 
• Revenue per Product
• Average ticket prices
• And more

If you are already selling online, then it is possible that you are already generating this information. A good ticketing solution software should be able to collect it, process it, and showcase it to you in the simplest way possible. 

Even the most relevant data becomes useless without an understanding of it.  In the end, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. 

6) Analyze your Web Traffic

I briefly mentioned the importance of generating website traffic before. This is extremely relevant when selling online (of course you knew that!) and that is why a good ticketing solution software should be able to display this information and get actionable insights into your website traffic. 

You may be thinking: “Well, Google Analytics already takes care of that”.  And my answer is “Of course! Just make sure your software integrates with Google Analytics” 

Insights such as acquisition channels, device types and popular days and hours are extremely useful information to generate insights such as: 

• Revenue attributed per channel
• Revenue attributed per device 
• Understand your traffic (online visitors) to optimize your conversion rates
• See if you are attracting more new users or more returning users

Knowing how your visitors behave online should help you to brainstorm some ideas to optimize your strategy and sell more direct. 

As I said before if you are already selling online, you are generating valuable data. Don’t you think you should benefit from it? Combine your data with an AI-powered ticketing solution software and you will see unimaginable growth.

Everything starts by selecting the perfect solution.