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8 Ways of using Event Promotional Codes

It’s been a while since I last posted, but would like to share with everyone a recent brainstorming session with one of our clients, which stimulated very interesting ideas on criteria-based promotions can be used for events.

You have probably heard of event promotional codes being used for the events you’ve attended or organized. At the same time, it is often a straight-off dollar or percentage off tickets.

Thought Event ticketing promotions are often a challenge for event marketers, here’s a list of 8 ways on how criteria-based promotional codes can be used for

events:

1)   Session ticket

At times, event attendees may not want to pay the price for a full-ticket knowing that they only want to attend specific sessions within the event. Based on behavior-based email campaign analytics or customer segmentation via job titles, you can offer a promotional code to unhide session tickets, which can be offered at a fraction of the full ticket price. This can help assure your exhibitors and sponsored speakers that a minimum number of attendees will be there at your event.

2) Associations

Associations are often great partners to work with to offer targeted promotions to their members. In this case, you can create a promotional link with the embedded promotional code for the Association to do a direct email blast to their members to help push out your event messaging to their members.

3) By Geography

If for example, you are holding an event in Thailand but am hoping that foreign delegates would attend the event as well, you could offer discounted tickets as incentive if they are not from Thailand, since they are likely to incur additional expenditure in terms of travel and accommodation. At the same time, you can offer hotel accommodation options in your registration process as an optional item, to recover part of the cost if you have some commercial tie-ups with hotels.

4) Company

At times, some of your exhibitors may have a wish list of who they want to target in terms of industry or companies that they want to target. In this case, you can create a criteria where only attendees who registered using their company email domain will be eligible for the discounted ticket.

5) Gender

Although Mother’s day just ended, how about a thematic promotion targeting females in the future? Or if your event is on International Women’s Day, perhaps a gender-specific promotion will blend well into the occasion?

6) Group Early Bird

You’ve probably heard about Group or Early Bird Ticket pricing but have you heard about Group Early Bird? Basically, this is a method where you can apply a promotional code where you set a criteria upon minimum number of Early Bird tickets being purchased.

For example, if your standard ticket price is $1,000 and Early Bird pricing is $800. You can apply a further $100 off if there are 3 or more Early Bird tickets being purchased. This will help to ensure a minimum number of tickets at an early stage be purchased to help convince some sponsors to come in and take up the sponsorship packages.

7) Discount with Merchandise Purchase

If one of your aim is to push merchandise sales rather than ticket sales, yet you want to charge for tickets to your event, one alternative is to offer discounted tickets based on merchandise sales. Branded merchandise sales based on your event will also help your event brand exposure beyond the lifespan of your event, which will be worth your while if your event is recurring.

8) Exhibitor Promotions

Your exhibitors are probably keen to let their clients or potential clients know of their participation in a tradeshow as well so having exhibitor promotions to let them push out the promotion to their own database would help in pushing your ticket sales as well.

Criteria-based promotions may well be the flavor of the year so start exploring for your next event. It may well prove to be a hit with your segmented target audience.

photo credit: Express Monorail via photopin cc

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