This Little Trick Can Help You Sell 45% More Event Tickets

In the beginning of the website age, we used to describe websites as a front desk for yout business that’s always staffed. That wasn’t exactly true because while a good quality website could provide content that may answer your visitor’s question, it was largely up to the visitor to find it. A website provided self-service help.

Today, for many sites, that’s changed. On the more innovative event web pages, you’ll find live chat available. Here’s what you need to know about it and how it can help you sell up to 45% more tickets. Sound good? Keep reading.

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What Is Live Chat and Why Is it Helpful for Selling Tickets?

Live chat is an enabled feature that allows website visitors to key in a message or question to you. It saves them the difficulty of traipsing around your website trying to find the answer. And it makes visitors more likely to convert particularly if their ticket purchase is hinging on one thing like can you accommodate a food allergy?

Potential Attendees Love Live Chat

Live chat allows visitors to get immediate answers to their questions without a phone call or waiting for an email. But there’s more to it than that. People love chat because:

They can multitask. Type in a question and while you’re waiting for a response you can continue doing what you were doing. The questioner could even be in the middle of a conversation with someone else.
Better information because it’s a two-way conversation. Ask a question and not understand the answer? You can get clarification much quicker than the back and forth in an email. Once in a live chat, it works much like texting and your answer is immediate.
They don’t like talking on the phone but still want something that resembles a conversation.
It can be done anywhere there’s an internet connection. Instant chat makes it convenient to ask questions at work without the email trail. It’s also perfect when you’re in a cubicle and don’t want others to be a part of your conversation.
It helps navigate language barriers. Distinctive accents may be hard to understand over the phone. Typing a question or receiving an answer may be easier to translate for some people.
Chat allows for after-hours questions to be handled when the office isn’t open. There are businesses who will man an active chat line for you so that you can answer attendee’s or potential attendee’s questions 24/7 even when you’re not available to do so. This works well to address the needs of people in other time zones.

How Live Chat Improves Event Ticket Sales

Often people are asking questions about something their registration hinges on. They’re frequently ready to make a decision “if.” If they get this answer to their question. If their needs can be accommodated. If this is true.

Event ticket purchases, like other purchases, can be largely emotionally driven. That means if the potential attendee doesn’t get the answer they need at that moment, they may reconsider their interest. For instance, let’s assume an attendee has a question. If that question is answered in a satisfactory way, they will buy a ticket at that moment. If not, they won’t. If you have live chat, they can get their question answered while they are still very excited and interested in your event. If they have to wait until the next day for an answer via email, they may have experienced an unbudgeted for expense or some other reason that killed their interest.

Additionally, we’ve been programmed to expect instantaneous responses to questions. Voice search is becoming the norm with Siri, Alexa, and Google. We don’t even want to spend the time it takes to type anymore let alone listening to a phone ring. Live chat satiates our need for instantaneous answers.

Forrester Research conducted a study called “Making Proactive Chat Work” where it found, “Many online consumers want help from a live person while they are shopping online; in fact, 44% of online consumers say that having questions answered by a live person while in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a Web site can offer.” This translates to events as well. As mentioned earlier, there are sometimes those simple questions that hold up a ticket purchase.

Live chat can also help the tech novices through the registration process before they get discouraged and leave the site. As easy as your technology may be, there are still some people who won’t feel entirely comfortable going through it. Live chat can help them from beginning to end, ensuring that the sale is complete.

Live Chat Improves Revenue by Cutting Costs

Not only can live chat increase conversions leading to higher ticket sales, it can reduce expenses spent on administrative tasks and interaction. Every minute a member of your team spends answering a question is one they are not working on their daily tasks. Phone calls and emails can be quite costly when you factor in time lost.

Online chat allows for quicker responses, less time spent per person, and the ability to use canned responses to improve efficiency.

Live chat also improves personalized attention but at a much lower cost than a phone call. In the case of emails and phone calls, you can only service one potential attendee at a time. With online chat, you could be in the process of answering several questions at once when you factor in the greeting, question/answer portion, and the closing. It takes the attendee time to type and in that time that you are waiting, you can simultaneously be assisting someone else.

In Conclusion

Live chat is good for your attendees and you. It helps you handle more questions with less effort and resources while selling more tickets. Potential attendees are less likely to get lost in the buying process because their questions can be answered at the moment they have them,