Creating a successful signup campaign

This guide explains how to run a use Signup Surveys to help run successfuly campaigns with TickX before going onsale. It outlines why signup campaigns outperform going straight onsale, including benefits such as early SEO value, a stronger database, opportunities for fan-only presales, and the ability to build retargeting and lookalike audiences. You’ll learn how to build your signup widget, embed it on your website, drive traffic, prepare for presale and launch moments, and analyse how many signups convert into revenue. The guide also covers how TickX integrations help automate CRM imports and amplify digital marketing performance after the onsale.

Why should I run a signup campaign rather than just go straight onsale?

There are lots of advantages including:

1. Your website will be live and generating value prior to the launch 

You should always get your website live as soon as possible, even if you don't have all the details of the experience finalised. This will give you a chance to build your mailing list, but will also mean that it starts being indexed by google, increasing your organic search ranking when you do go live.

2. You will build you database to generate an exciting onsale moment 

You will give your fans a chance to sign up to hear first. This means you can run a fan only presale, which often drives a significant volume of ticket sales. You can run this through your CRM platform, but we would recommend you send emails in batches so that you do not send too much volume to the site at once.

Remember any sale that comes through an email is much cheaper to acquire than via a paid advert.

3. Your database will help power your marketing beyond the onsale

You will have all the signups available in your database, which is incredibly important for the early days of your digital marketing strategy. This means you can retarget customers who have signed up but not yet purchased either via direct email, or digital retargeting. 

You can also use the database to lookalike audiences into various platforms including Meta, TikTok, Google and Snapchat. This can all be done automatically and securely via TickX. You can see our guide on how to you can do this here.

4. You can gather additional information about your customers up front to build a profile of your audience

TickX's signup widget allows you to ask additional questions after the customer has opted into marketing. These could include motivation to attend the event, or who they are attending with. This means that before you've even started selling tickets you can build up a picture of what your audience looks like.

How do I run my signup campaign?

You can run a successful signup campaign following the steps below.

1. Build your signup widget

This should be built in the same way as our post purchase survey. You can find more information on how to build this here. 

We would recommend asking two to three questions, which could include 'Who are you planning to visit with?' or 'Where did you hear about the experience?'. You can find more information on what to include here.

2. Implement your widget on your website

On your website we would recommend as much information about the experience as possible, to both encourage signups and help with SEO ranking. The signup widget should be the main call to action, visible clearly from the home page and the main header.

TickX has a Signup widget which you can build and implement on your website following our guide here.

3. Monitor and drive traffic to your website

You should look to run a signup campaign with some spend to get future customers to sign up before the main onsale. While you should save budget for when you are actually onsale, remember that building out a healthy database in advance will mean a healthy onsale, and marketing efficiencies driven by lookalike campaigns.

4. Import your signups into your CRM

TickX has a number of integrations with various CRM providers, which you can implement by following the guides here, or with assistance from your Account Manager. 

5. Publicise the onsale in advance

When you know the exact date and time of the onsale you should update your website and inform signups via email. 

6. Consider a presale

You can do an exclusive presale for signups only. Typically this is run 24 hours before the general onsale. TickX can provide a presale mode for our widget that can be unlocked via a code, or you could create a separate page for the presale. We would advise using a custom purchase flow for this so you can better track the sales.

7. Send your emails

The moment is here! However we would advise always sending emails in batches. This helps to relieve pressure on the website and also means customers are less likely to try to purchase the same ticket leading to disappointment. TickX can handle huge volumes, and we can also implement queues to protect the underlying website and ticketing system infrastructure, but running an onsale in batches prevents customer frustration at having to wait.

8. Analyse and learn 

You can view how many of your signups have gone on to purchase under Analytics > Signups and Surveys. This view allows you to see how much revenue has been driven from customers who signed up via TickX, meaning you can clearly see the return on investment on any marketing to drive signups.

9. Supercharge your digital marketing after the onsale 

Ensure your signup audiences are plugged into all the major marketing platforms so your digital teams have a boost on running campaigns to find more customers. Using TickX lookalike audiences leads to a significantly better Return On Ad Spend, and having this data in place means you'll be able to sell more tickets and find more customers faster.