In an ideal world, registrants would race to click the “Buy Now” button the moment your tickets go on sale. But the reality is, people are slow to commit and struggle with procrastination, which can cause you stress as your event date draws near. But fear not, because we have data that will help put your mind at ease and some tips to help fight against purchase procrastination.

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Our Data Scientist evaluated 477,398 attendees across 1,961 events and found over 50% of people purchased their tickets within 20 days of the event.  Yes, you read that right 50%!  And 25% purchased within 4 days of the event. So if each year you find yourself waking up in a cold sweat months before your event because ticket sales are slow, know this is typical across most events.

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This info is not to encourage sitting back until 20 days before your event. On the contrary, you will want to continue to hustle (as you likely already do) in the months leading up to assure the word gets out about how amazing your event is. In fact, here are two tips to help incentivize buyers to get their tickets early.

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Schedule Price Increases

We have talked with a handful of event promoters and this has been the number one most effective way to get people to purchase early. When we look at the data, there is often an influx of sales within 24 hours of each price increase. So be brave and be willing to do a few price increases if you are wanting to make sales early. Use Actions to schedule these out ahead of time.

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Promote. Promote. Promote.

The key to the price increase tactic is to assure people know it is happening. Talk up how attendees can get tickets to your event at a discounted rate, but only for a limited time. If people don’t know there are price increase(s), they’ll wait to buy tickets closer to your event and just see the high price. Part of the tactic here is long-term. So when next year rolls around, people will remember they need to hurry to not be dinged by a price jump.

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Our goal is that this data would help your decrease your stress level as you work tirelessly to promote your event. Simply because the facts show regardless of how great your promotion is, a majority of people are going to procrastinate to the last minute to make their purchase. This information should help you better project expectations for upcoming years and to be reassured that as scary as it might be to have that number of sales happen to close to event day, the good news is, people are still buying, just procrastinating to do so.

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Our Data Scientist continues to be hard at work crunching for more interesting data. We are excited to share the finding with you in some upcoming blogs, so stay tuned and keep up the great work!