SkyTics – SkyBlog

How difficult is your selection and purchase process?  Can your patrons determine which seats are available and where they are located?

With SameSky Ticketing’s tiered reserved seating solution Patrons can easily determine which seats are sold, which seats are available, and where they are in the theatre. The image to the right is a the seat map from a Landing Page in the SST system.  Here the Patron sees the seat status of the entire venue and can quickly navigate to the section where they wish to make a purchase. In this seat color template the gray seats are sold and the yellow and red seats are available.

Once the Patron clicks on a section they are presented the Section View window, shown below, where they can click on their desired seats and proceed to checkout to finalize a purchase. On both the Landing Page and the Section View, custom graphics can be presented to brand a performance and remind the patron which performance they are purchasing tickets for.  On the Landing Page and in the Section View a seat key is displayed which presents the seat tiers and prices.  If the Patron clicks “Navigate” above the Seat Key display in Section View, they will see a small seat status panel of the venue similar to the Landing Page view, and may also navigate to another section by clicking on it in the navigate panel.

Once patrons decide which seats they want, they simply click on their desired seats and then click on the “Proceed to Checkout” button which takes them to an order summary page to finalize their purchase.

Next week I will discuss how you can leverage your patrons as an extended sales force to increase your revenues!

Bob

Bob Clay
Founder/CEO
SameSky Tickets

www.sameskytickets.com

Sales: 1-800-947-2393

Yesterday was April 15th and the overhead of tax prep and preparing to ship the next major point release has this week’s blog running behind schedule. SameSky Ticketing System (STS) 2.2.1 will ship today and adds many new features to the STS system. Key new features in  this next release are new tools for Event and Performance Management, Promo Code Management, Fee Management, a new graphical Roles and Permissions tool, user defined Delivery Types and Charges, and many new reports.

Check in next week for more details on this new release and how these features will directly impact your bottom line!

Bob

Bob Clay
Founder/CEO
SameSky Tickets

www.sameskytickets.com

If you ask an advertising expert “What are the two key tenants of advertising?” you will receive the emphatic answer, “Frequency and Reach of course!”  And indeed these are the primary axioms used in planning an ad campaign, but what does frequency and reach really mean to your online and box office ticket sales and how do they impact your ticketing bottom line?

Frequency is typically defined as exposure measurement, the number of times a target customer was presented an advert.  Reach is defined as the percentage of customers in a target population that are exposed to an advertisement at least once, this specifically means an unduplicated audience.  As you evaluate your possible media outlets to promote your events and sell more tickets you must determine two key facts:

1. Who is my target ticket audience demographic, age, income, ethnicity, and locale?
2. What media outlet or mix of outlets, Television, Radio, Internet, and Print, will provide the maximum exposure of my message to my target customer set?

According to data released by Kantar Media in March of 2010, total US advertising expenditures across all media, Television, Radio, Internet, and Print, fell 12.3 percent in 2009 to $125.3 billion, as compared to 2008.  This decline is in part due to a difficult economy, but it is also an indicator that classic television, radio and print advertising are not providing the value they did a few short years ago. This same report indicated that Internet display ads were up 7.3%, which is an indication of ad money flowing from traditional media to the Internet.  This relates directly to the issue of where is your target audience seeking advertising funded media entertainment, and where should you spend your ad dollars.

The question you, your marketing department, and your prospective advertising vendors must answer is this, for your ad dollar spend, where will you gain the best frequency and reach for your target demographic?  If your advertiser can’t provide a breakdown of audience exposures versus ad cost, then it is likely that your advertising investment is less than optimal.  The bottom line is this, to maximize your revenue potential you must maximize your ticket sells, and that can only be accomplished by reaching as many high value prospective ticket buyers as possible.

Check in next week for more tips on selling your tickets online, advertising, marketing, and SameSky Tickets’ suggestions on how to increase your revenue!

Bob

Bob Clay
Founder/CEO
SameSky Tickets

www.sameskytickets.com

While promotional code creation, management, and reporting are powerful tools to drive revenue,  it is critical that a ticketing solution also provide the ticket sales analysis tools to easily determine performance/event profitability.

In order to use analysis tools to their maximum potential, it’s important to fully understand the value of this information to aid in managing your business.  To determine the bottom line profitability of an event is straightforward, (total ticket sales) – (total costs) equals (total profit).  However, understanding the actual costs can be nontrivial and analyzing the revenue model of tiered seating, especially across multiple performances in multiple events can be a challenge without easily visible seat tier sales data.

To address these issues, SameSky Tickets provides summary and detailed real time ticket sales reports totaled by event, by performance, and with a breakdown of ticket sales per seat tier, including total complementary tickets.  With this information revenue per seat tier, per performance, and per event is easily accessible.  With this tier visibility one can discern:

• If a seat tier price is too high or too low
• If one tier always sells more seat volume or more quickly or not at all
• The revenue difference between a GA event and a Reserved Tiered Seating event
• If specific times always generate higher audience counts for specific event types
• The impact promotional codes have on ticket sales
• The impact of direct eMarketing messages on sales

Armed with this information an event or venue manager can better position their events, tune their performance times, seat tier mix, and their promotional efforts to maximum revenue generation.

If you haven’t read last week’s Skyblog “Where’s the Beef” on promo codes, you might want to scan over it as it is relevant to this blog. Check in next week for more tips on advertising, marketing, and SameSky Tickets’ suggestions on how to increase your revenue!

Bob

Bob Clay
Founder/CEO
SameSky Tickets

www.sameskytickets.com

A fast food hamburger ad had a famous tag line, “Where’s the beef?” and that is exactly the question which Advertising Efficacy answers. You may have heard this phrase used before, and wondered what does this mean.  Advertising Efficacy is simply the measurement of the effectiveness of your advertising efforts. Whether you are selling tickets or t-shirts, you have to get the word out that:

A. You have something to sell

and

B. It has value to your potential customers

Measuring your advertising effectiveness in reaching your potential customers is really easy if you advertise with one advertiser in one media outlet (i.e. one radio station).  You perform your ad spend for 30 days and chart your sales. Stop advertising for 30 days and compare your sales results to the previous month’s numbers.  Of course you must take into consideration all other potential sales impacting events, such as the quality of your ad, competition actions, economic factors, conditions effecting your customer demographic (weather, time of year, etc.).  So, once you build your “formula” then look at the difference in your sales between running an ad and not running an ad.  

Now, this gets much more difficult to analyze when you increase the number of media types and the number of advertisers you advertise with to more than one.  You could rotate from one media type to another, and then one advertiser to another, every 30 days charting the sales difference and see how your numbers change, but SameSky Tickets has a better way.

In advance of the next SameSky Tickets release, STS 2.2.1 which will ship this month, I want to present a new patent pending feature we are bringing to market, Promotional Code Advertiser/Media Tagging. With this new capability you can create a promotion code and tag it with a media identifier, TV, Radio, Web or Print, and an advertiser identifier “WXYZ Television.”  You may then view reports on the utilization of these promotional codes by media type and by advertiser. This will provide a real method of comparing the impact of specific advertisers to ticket sales.  It is true that not everyone will use a promotional code, but if you choose a code that is easy to remember and enough of a savings to entice your customers, you will obtain a representative sampling.  With this you can evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising dollars spent and determine which advertiser provides the greatest impact to your bottom line.

Check in next week for more tips on advertising, marketing, and SameSky Tickets’ suggestions on how to increase your revenue!

Have a great week!

Bob

Bob Clay
Founder/CEO
SameSky Tickets

www.sameskytickets.com

Welcome to SameSky Tickets new Blog site “SkyBlog”.  This blog will present ticketing industry information and short updates on SameSky Tickets products, services and plans.  In this first blog I want to introduce myself and my company. I am Bob Clay, the founder and CEO of SameSky Tickets. SameSky is a software company which has developed a scalable cloud computing architecture that leverages Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) solution. Our products are built upon this architecture with a modern LAMP stack fully utilizing the open source power and pricing advantages of Ubuntu, Apache and MySQL.

SameSky Ticketing provides complete event ticketing and venue management solutions with integrated patron/donor management, local box office, and online donation systems. SameSky is well positioned to service the ticketing requirements of small and medium sized venues, universities, and performing arts organizations. As these potential clients become ever more frustrated with current ticketing solution companies, we offer them a viable cost effective alternative with a low barrier to entry.  I also want to announce today that we just launched our new website format,

www.sameskytickets.com

Please visit our updated site to learn all about SameSky Tickets’ products and services!

This blog will be updated weekly so please stop by again soon.

Thanks,