Venues, promoters, and organizations selling event tickets should understand the impact fees have on ticket sales. Ticket fees may be either a sales deterrent or a profitable revenue stream when your venue retains 100% of the fees collected. These factors should weigh in your decisions regarding fees:
Ticket fees can add 25-30% to your profits when you keep revenues collected. If your venue uses ticketing software with fees now, switching to ThunderTix and retaining those fees will greatly impact your bottom line. On the other hand, if you choose not to add a fee, a rise in attendance equally raises profitability and earns fan respect.
Knowing your fans allows you to determine whether or not they are sensitive to fees added to the face value of the tickets. If your target audience is predominantly children, low or no fees will result in increased advanced online ticket sales. On the other hand, if your venue is located in a high income area, adding fees may not deter ticket purchases. College-age fans, while being accustomed to fees, are generally very sensitive to ticket price and simply will not buy tickets when fees appear unfairly high.
In many instances, your target audience will not be clearly defined, and may span a wide range of demographics. Therefore, it is important to consider your overall audience, and create a fee structure that will satisfy your entire fan base.
The type of event will greatly influence your target audience to help determine fees. For example, if your venue is predominately used by national touring acts, the chances for the events selling out will increase exponentially. Adding a fee to the ticket's face value may be expected and have no adverse effect on sales. In contrast, if your events typically do not sell out or have a high volume of walk-up sales, the incentive to purchase tickets online will decrease.
The decision about fees must be based on the needs of your venue, events, and your market demographics, and NOT by the requirements of your existing ticketing provider. Ticket software comes in 5 general forms, and only one, ThunderTix, provides you with full control over your fees, the retention of those fees, or the choice to increase sales, gain fan respect, and charge lower prices by eliminating fees altogether.
Talk to us to learn more about how your venue raise profitability with no or low fees.