How MailerLite helps this nonprofit sell ~25,000 event tickets each year
Selling ~25,000 tickets across 9 concerts isn't easy, especially for a nonprofit with limited resources. But Cienna Roget, the sole marketer at the Festival at Sandpoint, pulls it off with the help of email marketing.
Thanks to her well-crafted event promotion strategy and MailerLite’s advanced yet easy-to-use tools, email consistently generates sales for the organization’s concerts. Every time she sends a campaign, there’s a clear uptick in people buying tickets.
As event marketers, email is so important. When we look at our sales graph it always spikes when we send an email. If sales are slow, we know we can draft a campaign.
This article will explore the tactics Cienna uses to generate sales. There's plenty to learn from her approach, whether you’re selling event tickets or driving repeat sales in another kind of business.
Using MailerLite as a nonprofit
The Festival at Sandpoint is a nonprofit that helps people in Sandpoint access the arts through a series of summer concerts and music education opportunities.
The organization chose MailerLite in 2018, thanks to our 30% nonprofit discount on top of our already competitive pricing.
The brand stayed with us because we offer advanced tools that let them create impactful campaigns to achieve their nonprofit goals.
As a nonprofit we have a slim budget. I’ve been very happy with MailerLite. Especially the ability to send unlimited campaigns.
Cienna creates beautiful campaigns with MailerLite’s email design tools.
She sends relevant email content with groups and segmentation.
She tracks what works with analytics and reporting so she can double down.
Growing an engaged list
The Festival at Sandpoint has 2 superpowers: a concert series its audience loves and an email list packed with people who want to attend music events in the area.
The list is valuable since it helps the organization connect with customers more reliably than other channels.
Our email list helps us reach our entire audience. Many people who have attended our events subscribe to our list but don’t follow our social accounts. Plus, we don’t know who will see the post when we publish on social media.
Cienna uses 2 main tactics to grow the Festival at Sandpoint list.
First is letting people sign up to hear band announcements. She promotes this offer on social media using a link in bio page, and on the Festival at Sandpoint website using a pop-up.
The pop-up appears whenever someone spends more than 5 seconds on the website. This ensures that almost all website visitors see the offer, increasing potential conversions.
The lineup announcements offer works well for 2 reasons:
It’s valuable to the subscriber: It ensures that people who want to attend the events don’t miss out.
It’s a high-buying-intent offer: People who want to know who is playing may buy tickets if they like the artists.
The offer works because artist announcements are a big draw. These emails get the biggest open rates. People always want to be in the know.
The second method of subscriber growth is adding people who buy tickets to MailerLite. This gives Cienna a list of people who she knows are willing to spend money on attending concerts.
She can then promote the other events the festival is running that year, as well as future events for years to come.
Sending unlimited campaigns
The Festival at Sandpoint sells tickets whenever Cienna sends an email. Thanks to MailerLite’s unlimited email-sending feature, the only limit on the organization’s ability to drive sales is the campaign ideas she comes up with.
This stands out against many other email marketing tools, which limit the number of campaigns you can send in a month.
Cienna’s strategy is to break down all the information she needs to share into multiple emails. She’ll start the year by selling annual passes and gift cards, then move on to act announcements, ticket sale announcements, event details, and last-minute promotions.
We send emails year-round, but during festival season, we sometimes send emails daily or multiple times a day. At that time, we cannot have sending restrictions.
Splitting the announcements into multiple emails builds anticipation and gives maximum visibility to each event. Subscribers are more likely to buy than if she just sent a single email with a link to the tickets.
No matter what the message is about, people are always buying tickets. We usually get between 300 and 500 clicks to the ticketing platform on every email.
Generating sales with targeting
The Festival at Sandpoint has collected a goldmine of customer data since it started. This includes details such as:
The year people bought a ticket
The genre of concert they bought the ticket for
Whether they’ve bought a ticket for this year’s event
With MailerLite’s groups and segmentation, Cienna turns this data into targeted email campaigns that boost engagement and sales.
I love my groups! I have groups for people who purchase each year. And I organize them by the genre of the show they attended so we can send relevant promotions. Targeting campaigns increases open rates because people receive content they are interested in.
Cienna also uses segmentation to see who has bought tickets and who is yet to buy. She then sends promotional campaigns to those yet to buy.
I’ll use segments to send emails to people who have bought tickets in previous years but are yet to make a purchase this year.
Sienna also uses subscriber management to build lists for volunteers and food vendors that are separate from the customer lists. She now has a waiting list for food vendors that is 10 times the number of spaces that are available. They have no problem filling these spots each year.
Creating engaging emails in less time
Inbox competition is fierce, which is why Cienna puts effort into creating engaging emails. Many of the tools she uses were unlocked after switching from MailerLite Classic to the latest version of MailerLite.
Cienna thinks the new Drag & drop editor is a big upgrade. She likes the ability to change the default colors and have this reflected across the entire email rather than having to change each element individually.
This is useful because she often creates entirely new designs for each email to keep things fresh or match the color palette of the artist she is announcing.
You can change all the colors and font styles at once. It’s so much faster than in Classic, where I would have to do every single one.
Another new feature that stood out was the surveys. This allowed her to create an interactive experience while also gathering data she could use to improve future emails.
When I first upgraded, I loved the survey feature. Before we announced the concerts, I asked which acts people wanted to see and there were so many responses. I loved seeing this interaction. And I can use the answers to create segments.
A key part of creating engaging emails is discovering what works. She found that the new version of MailerLite has much-improved reporting features that help.
Reporting wasn’t a reason I switched, but now that I have it, I love it. I like the CTOR metric and all the graphs.
Email marketing is a proven promotional strategy
The Festival at Sandpoint’s strategy is one they’ve used for 7 years, and the reason why is simple: it works!
The ability to send promotional emails to people who you know are interested in your product is a surefire way to generate sales.
If you need to sell out your next event, consider implementing some of the tips mentioned by Cienna, and sign up for MailerLite to power the campaigns.
Promote your events with MailerLite
MailerLite has all you need to promote events and make repeat sales with email marketing. Quickly create forms and pop-ups, access advanced subscriber management tools, and create beautiful emails that result in sales. Try our easy-to-use tools free for 30 days.
