5 min read
Audience members want to book theatre, music, and event tickets online. But more than a transaction, your website’s often their first experience of your organisation - and a great online experience can be the first step in a great relationship. That’s why we believe a website is a journey, not a destination. Let’s dive into your ticketing website design and explore what you can do today to make an impact.
Why you should invest in your ticketing website design
Our data shows that 74% of transactions for tickets, donations, memberships, and more are generated online.
Your customers want to and will book online. And that should be no surprise, considering how familiar they now are with shopping online, for everything from groceries to gifts. But if they don’t enjoy your online experience, they’ll start dropping off - leading to a lost sale today, and lost donations, subscriptions, or membership income in the longer term.
With the right website, you can sell tickets without any demands on staff time, with data linked straight to customer accounts, and with automated prompts in place to offer customers the most relevant upsells, multibuys, and giving campaigns.
But your website is important not just because it can directly generate income. For many customers, the first interaction with an arts venue is through its website. So, you need to create an online user experience that’s in line with your brand, your values, and the quality of welcome you’d offer to anyone walking through your doors.
Building the business case for a new website
You should be able to see your own figures easily, using data from your ticketing system in combination with Google Analytics. If you're using Spektrix run the Event Sales Report to explore how your different sales channels are used.
Use those figures, and take inspiration from the examples below, to develop a proposal for continual investment in your website.
A website’s not something you build once and never touch again. It should evolve with your business needs, adapt based on feedback from your customers, and grow with new technologies.
Understanding your customers and your business
What makes a good website? It’s an online space in which your audience members can do what they want - find key information, make a booking, or sign up for your communications - and which helps you to achieve your organisational priorities.
When you’re designing a new website or improving an existing one, ask yourself:
- As an arts organisation, what do we want to achieve?
- As supporters of the arts, what do our customers want to do online?
The answers will depend on the:
- size and type of organisation
- type and frequency of events you put on
- age and interests of your patrons
- and many more factors that you’ll know inside out
A gallery with multiple timed entries every hour, hosting a single exhibition for the next six months with over 400 daily visitors will have very different needs from a 60-seat fringe theatre hosting a new show every other day.
If your business model is unique, shouldn’t the user experience you are providing online be unique as well? Income generation is, of course, a vital business priority - but the first step in growing revenue is often to show customers the special qualities of the user experience you can offer.
How your CRM supports the online journey
There are various ways in which your CRM and ticketing technology can connect with your online journey.
Third-party booking websites
Some CRM systems hand visitors off to a completely separate site at the point of sale. From the moment a customer clicks ‘Book Now’, they’re transferred to an external domain, and you’ll have limited scope to brand or configure their online experience. Not ideal.
Integrations
Keep bookers on your site, integrating the checkout flow onto your own pages via iframes or an API. This means that customers can buy tickets, subscriptions, memberships, and more without leaving your site. You and your web developers can tailor the user experience to match your brand and customers’ interests, while your technology manages all the complex logic of the purchase. This is often our top recommendation, especially for organisations who are excited to customise their buying journey.
Subsites
Create a great booking experience, without spending a lot of time or money. Spektrix subsites are out-of-the-box ticket-booking pages that you can load up with your branding and add to your own domain in minutes. Subsites work great as your main booking journey, or for a parallel experience e.g. a festival, season of work, or resident company. You get speed and convenience – with no extra cost – while still being able to access all the functionality and insights of your CRM.
Putting your CRM at the heart of your ticketing website design will empower you to build up a complete picture of each customer through repeat visits, online behaviours, and transactions. This data yields a more and more personalised experience with every visit, offering customers a seamless, reliable booking journey which helps them feel valued and helps you boost the overall value of each basket.
How 3 arts organisations used their websites to improve customer experience and meet business priorities
This blog is based on in-person sessions which I presented at the 2022 Spektrix User Hubs and the Arts Marketing Association conference in the UK. Before those sessions, I spoke to a number of Spektrix users about their business priorities and how their websites were supporting them on their journeys.
Catering to customers with access needs
New Wolsey Theatre has a great journey throughout the purchase path, highlighting accessible performances. First of all there is a dedicated page that has filtered through all accessible performances, including events that are audio described, British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted, and captioned. As a customer, I can see additional information for certain seats, such as ‘Best view for signer’, and by logging in I can be shown the most suitable seats for my individual needs.
Increasing income through charitable giving
Honens International Piano Competition upsells and highlights different ways to give, through one-off or monthly donations. By combining multiple options on a single page, they create a seamless, visually appealing user experience and enable the donor to move between the two types of donation with a single click.
Building customer loyalty
Opera Holland Park is placing an emphasis on converting bookers to members. Pricing displays both the full price and members' price, incentivising customers to become members. The web developers are able to use the value of the customer's basket to dynamically display how much they could save if they became a member, driving revenue and loyalty with every transaction.
Want to explore more examples? Check out our round-up of the best event websites.
4 steps to kick off your web improvement journey
If you have 1 hour...
Buy a ticket.
Even better, get someone else who has never used your website before to do it - like a secret shopper!
Go through the journey as a customer and see whether you are able to complete each step without friction. Are there any buttons that could more clearly signpost customers to the next steps? Did you see anything you didn’t expect or found confusing? Was there anything you expected to see but didn’t appear? And most importantly, does it cater for the audiences you are trying to engage with?
If you have 1 day...
Check your analytics.
Where are your customers dropping off? Go back to that page and reconsider whether the language and styling are clear. Is there anything you can do to improve their experience?
If you’re using Spektrix, read our guidance for website tracking. Our CRM links up with Google Analytics 4 and Meta Pixel to put all the insights you need at your fingertips.
If you have 1 month
Make a case for investment in ticketing website design.
Start by working through all of the steps above and prioritise your findings so your web developers can help with anything which needs their expertise.
When you’re working with Spektrix - or thinking of doing so - we’re happy to help you develop a brief for a new or improved website or to find a new web developer. And once that’s in place, we’ll work directly with you or your web developer to continually improve your integrated customer journey, all as part of our inclusive service charge. Just talk to our Client Success team about what you need.
If you’re not yet using Spektrix, learn more about our integrated technology and inclusive support, helping you to imagine better web journeys for your audience members.
IMAGINE BETTER WEBSITES
Nina Primeraki is Client Integrations Lead at Spektrix
* Figures are based on Spektrix users globally