Increase Ticket Sales: Best Pricing Strategies and Tactics

You’re carrying on a tradition and passing it to the next generation. That’s why you joined your rodeo committee.

While your passion is your primary motivation, money makes everything that happens at your rodeo possible. And, with more money, you can do more for your community and improve your rodeo.

So, you need to sell more tickets and find ways to generate more revenue. It all starts with your ticket sales.

We’ll cover pricing strategies and tactics that increase ticket sales and how to know when to raise prices.

Top three pricing strategies for rodeos

1. Cost-plus pricing

With cost-plus pricing, you determine how much it costs to put on your rodeo. Then, estimate how many tickets you’ll sell. Divide the cost across your tickets, then add some margin. 

The margin will help cover costs if you don’t sell enough tickets. If you do sell more than enough tickets, you’ll have money to invest in your rodeo and arena next year.

2. Competitive pricing

Rather than focus on your rodeo’s costs, competitive pricing looks at rodeos in your region. Gather pricing information from rodeos near you to understand the going rates for rodeo tickets.

When you have the pricing information, you’ll probably see a range of prices for general admission, reserved seats, etc. These details tell you the lowest prices and the highest prices people charge for tickets.

Base your ticket price in these ranges to draw a crowd at a competitive price.

3. Value-based pricing

As your rodeo becomes more and more popular, you’ll want to move to a value-based pricing strategy. The experience of attending your rodeo becomes more and more valuable as you attract cowboys and cowgirls and excellent specialty acts.

You can increase prices based on the value experiencing your rodeo offers to your attendees.

Top five tactics to increase ticket sales

Once you've chosen a pricing strategy that increases ticket sales and gets revenue flowing sooner, consider incorporating the tactics below to sell tickets effectively. 

1. Create a higher value ticket

Offer a VIP experience or access to a beer garden or any other perk that increases the value of attending your rodeo.

Your high value ticket can include a meal, a cocktail party, a meet and greet with the cowboys and cowgirls, a behind the scenes tour of the rodeo before it starts, … etc. You know your audience and what makes your rodeo unique. Use this knowledge to create a special experience for your VIP attendees.

Even if the high ticket item doesn’t sell out, it creates another revenue stream for your rodeo.

Case Study: Eagle Rodeo

This year, the Eagle Rodeo added a VIP ticket. The ticket generated an additional $7,000+ for the rodeo.

2. Price the best seats higher

Take a look at your arena and past sales data. Which seats offer the best view? Which seats sell first?

There’s probably a lot of crossover between the best seats and the seats that sell first. Either way, consider increasing the prices for those seats. Better seats offer a better view of the rodeo, and fans are willing to pay more for a better experience.

Some people aren’t, so you’ll also see increased sales in lower-value seats.

As you consider which seats are going to have what price, keep your loyal fans in mind. Some of them may be used to getting the same seats each year at the rodeo, and may balk at an increased price if you increase it too much.

3. Offer bundles and group discounts

Creating deals also helps increase ticket sales. Even though you’re offering a deal, you’re capturing more revenue because you sold more tickets.

Sometimes all you need to do is offer a discount for people to decide to invite one more friend or family member to the rodeo.

4. Regularly increase ticket prices as the rodeo date nears

Getting revenue flowing sooner makes it easier to pay vendors, contractors, announcers, etc. Open ticket sales at least four months in advance. Reward the early buyers with lower prices, and increase prices once a month as the rodeo gets closer.

And, if you find that opening box offices is a major headache, charge your highest prices to the last minute ticket buyers. Your attendees will quickly learn that buying tickets in advance is a better deal for them. They’ll start buying tickets earlier, which makes it more likely you’ll sell out before your event starts.

5. Leverage marketing and growth tools

Your pricing strategy should also include room for marketing campaigns that increase sales. For example, you can work with local businesses to sell tickets. You can also run a deal in conjunction with a holiday or special event.

You can also find ways to turn your attendees into marketers for you.

Referral program

You can offer rebates for attendees who get their friends and family to buy tickets. Rodeo Ticket’s software makes this strategy simple to set up and track.

Discounts in exchange for social shares

You can also generate buzz on social media and increase visits to your ticketing page by offering a few dollars off when a ticket buyer shares a link to your ticketing page on Facebook.

Abandoned cart email reminders

And, when ticket buyers get interrupted before they finalize their purchase, you can automate reminder emails with a link that sends them to the page where they left off. It’s easy to get more ticket sales completed with these emails.

Case Study: The Strawberry Days Rodeo

The Strawberry Days Rodeo has had a lot of success with Rodeo Ticket's growth tools. In one year, they generated 16 times more ticket revenue from the rebates offered in their referral program. They also had 11 times the return on discounts offered for social media shares. And, they completed 1,000+ ticket sales with automated abandoned cart email reminders.

Now, they regularly sell out every single night of the rodeo well in advance. They don't have to open their box office, and they've been able to increase some of their ticket prices.

When to raise prices

While some price increases are designed to drive sales, larger, overall price increases focus on generating more revenue per ticket.

Scalpers

If you’ve got people buying tickets and then scalping them at a higher price, people are willing to pay more money than you’re charging to see your rodeo.

When you raise your prices, it deters scalpers because it increases the risk of scalping tickets and can lower the value of a scalped ticket. People are only willing to pay so much for a rodeo ticket whether they’re buying from a scalper or not.

Rodeo Ticket’s software offers additional tools to help you fight scalping. You can place order limits by cart or event time. You can also block known chargeback offenders from buying tickets from you in the future.

Selling out

The other signal that you can raise ticket prices is when you start to sell out regularly. If you’re selling out, that means there’s more demand for tickets than there are tickets available.

You can increase your prices because attending your rodeo is such a valued experience and you’ve got an excited and engaged audience.