Mobile ticket sales are up drastically year over year. Most ticketing companies realized the power of buying from a device years ago and have been developing new technology that put the “mobile first” mentality at the forefront of their business model moving forward. The trend means customers can now use their devices throughout the entire event life cycle.
“An astounding 57 percent of traffic on our website traffic last year was using a mobile device, up 50 percent from 2015,” said Jamie Vosmeier, senior director sales and marketing, The Fox Theatre, Atlanta. “Overall revenue from mobile is up by 48 percent.”
“From 2015 to 2016, mobile adoption of visits grew by over 140 percent,” said Lisa Langham, manager, Client Partners, Spectra Ticketing & Fan Engagement. “Clearly the trend is for people to be looking at their phones and then purchasing. Up to 30 percent of ticketing at Spectra is happening on mobile. Several years ago it was only four percent. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it at 50 percent by the end of 2017.”
Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of product, Eventbrite, said her company has been investing heavily in mobile since 2011. “Ticketing is one of the leading industries charging into mobile. Mobile traffic has accelerated dramatically over the past year; 55 percent of our traffic is now from mobile devices. We’ve been developing tools to accommodate that for many years now. Mobile isn’t just a notion anymore, it’s the new way of doing business from beginning to end of the ticketing experience.”
EVENT DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTED COMMERCE
“The goal is to make it easier for the consumer,” said Langham. “Consumers are watching TV and shopping on their phones today. That’s the way buyers are headed. We need to make sure we are on top of this as an industry.”
“Marketing must be designed for both desktop and mobile and have any links take you to a mobile responsive site,” she said. “This makes the transition from event discovery to purchase as seamless as possible.”
Russ D’Souza, founder and president, SeatGeek, said that 20 percent of his companies purchases were last minute, and that the conversion rate was much greater for SeatGeek on mobile than on a desktop. “Mobile lends itself to ticketing in ways that other ecommerce verticals can’t,” he said. “The entire experience is perfect for ticketing. Looking at 2016 vs. 2015, we have seen the percentage of day-of purchasers go up by 50 percent from where it was in 2015. In 2016, more than a quarter of the transactions on SeatGeek came the day of the event.”
“Consumers are doing more and more on their mobile phones,” said Keith Goldberg, chief revenue officer, Vendini. “The days of going to your desktop to purchase tickets are gone. Conversion rates are getting better. Every time we release something that makes the mobile experience better, we see it move the needle. Payment drop out is our biggest issue. Every click costs you 20 percent to 30 percent. We have to address this as an industry and make it better.”
Spectra and Eventbrite are seeing great results from partnerships with Facebook and Instagram. The power of social media’s impact on the ticketing world is dramatic. A quick look at Facebook statistics will convince anyone that it has carved out a major place in event discovery: Facebook has 650 million people using the platform every month. Forty-one percent of Facebook users in the U.S. engage with public events each month. Thirty-five million people view a public Facebook event each day. Forty million events were created by Facebook users in 2015.
Cross-device retargeting is a big part of the appeal for Spectra. “Fans who look into buying a ticket while sitting in front of their computer may be reminded of the event later while scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram app on the go,” said Langham. The overall return on investment (ROI) for Facebook and Instagram ads managed by Spectra is 11:1.
“We definitely believe in distrubuted commerce and have adapted to the idea that tickets can appear on a partner’s website, like Facebook, and we want to do everything we can to facilitate that purchase,” said Mendelsohn. “In redirect, conversion rates always suffer.”
TOUCH FRIENDLY
Mobile is challenging because of the size of the screen, and many of the people Venues Today spoke with, emphasized that the industry still needs to break down barriers of entry.
“The mobile flow is essential in making it easy to buy a ticket on your device,” said Langham. “We now have the option to select your section and view the section you’ll be in. This has helped conversion. But we still need to know if that button is big enough to touch and respond to.”
Choosing a seat can be challenging. “People don’t like to pinch and zoom and squeeze,” she said. “With the size of screens, and size of our fingers, the experience is still clunky. As tech becomes more sophisticated we’ll see big jumps in mobile purchase.”
MOBILE DELIVERY
“Your phone is your ticket,” said Vosmeier.
“That’s the way most people want their tickets these days.” Mendelsohn agreed. “We’re sending more and more QR codes that exist only on the phone; hard tickets are a thing of the past.”
“It’s becoming like an airport ticketing experience, and hardly anyone uses paper tickets in the airport anymore,” said Joe Choti, president and CEO, Tickets.com. “Paper tickets are dying. We have a sports team that’s 100-percent digital. A rugby team in the UK is using all affinity access cards. Everybody has embraced digital, some more so than others.”
SEND, EXCHANGE, SELL
“Sending tickets is very important in furthering the mobile options and making it really ‘mobile first,’” said Choti. “Exchange tickets and giving customers the flexibility to change nights is important. You are better off letting someone exchange a ticket than losing them coming into your venue.”
“We’re turning attending patrons into financial patrons,” Choti said. “Digital ticketing, done right, provides a frictionless ability to purchase tickets wherever they are, whenever they want, on the device they are on. They can display those tickets digitally or forward them on that device.”
“This allows us to know who is coming to a venue,” he said. “And it opens up a world of opportunities to market to people. By sending a ticket you create enough of a stub account for the venue to market.”
Choti pointed to a sports venue that had a million-dollar lift by marketing to nonfinancial patrons. “From a renewals perspective, we saw 82-percent growth year-over-year using digital renewals.”
“Venues want to know not just who bought the ticket, but who is using the ticket,” said Goldberg. “Every order is 2.2 tickets. That means a venue knows only 40 percent of who is actually coming in the gate. Venues want to market to 100 percent; we can do that now by allowing fans to exchange and sell right from our platforms.”
IN VENUE
“Mobile is now a wallet,” said Mendelsohn. “Not only can you pull up tickets; you can buy things. This lets attendees flow seamlessly through an event and that enhances the experience.”
2016 was the year of the RFID bracelet; RFID has moved into the mainstream, particularly at festivals, said Mendelsohn. “And we found people spent two to three times as much with a cashless system. That’s powerful data.”
Upsells and in-venue seat upgrades are a fantastic opportunity. “It used to be we’d get them in and be finished with their sale, but that’s old thinking,” said Langham. “Social media is playing a big part once people are in their seats. So much of the event experience is now shared. Spectra’s PAC Social lets fans interact with the experience. At halftime a fan can tag their photo and it gets displayed on the video board. You are reaching beyond people in the venue this way, fans become marketers.”
EXPERIENCE
Experience is a company that exists only because of mobile technology. Their software integrates with all team and venue apps and allows a fan to upgrade a seat or have a special experience like going down on the field. “We are 100 percent mobile,” said Greg Foster, CEO, Experience, a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises. “We are attracting a new generation of fans.”
“Once a ticket is in phone we look to partners like Experience, which are essential, “said Choti. “Fans see other fans walking up and down on the sidelines and want to know, ‘how do I do that?’”
“We are agnostic to whatever system venues or teams have in place for ticketing,” said Foster. “We work with Ticketmaster, Spectra, tickets.com and lots of others. Integration on the back end has to happen.”
NOT JUST FOR CUSTOMERS
Venue manager and event organizers are also moving the mobile revolution. Eventbrite’s Organizer product allows venue operators to use their phones as mobile scanners, gives them real-time data and allows tracking of ticket sales leading up to an event. Spectra’s Access Management tool enables venues to scan mobile barcode tickets delivered to their customer’s smartphone so that the phone becomes the ticket. Access management also provides real-time attendance and scanning data.