Event Marketing & Experience

How to Use Discount Coupons for Your Online Event

Victoria Rudi
November 25, 2020

Table of Contents

With the right strategy, coupons provide a fantastic way to entice attendees, drive ticket sales, and boost brand awareness. That’s why to help you unlock all these benefits, we’ve drawn up a short but comprehensive guide on how to manage the discount coupons for your online events.

What’s a discount coupon

Now as self-explanatory as this might sound, it’s worth explaining what exactly a discount coupon is and how this can be applied in the context of an online event.

Put simply, a coupon is a code which grants you access to a discount or free ticket. If a potential attendee knows a valid coupon code, they activate the discount themselves by entering the code when they go to make the payment for the ticket at the shopping cart.

It really is as simple as that, and in case you’re wondering, yes you can offer multiple discount coupons which we’ll get to below.

Why use discount coupons?

Put simply, discounts form a larger part of your ticket pricing strategy, so whether that’s early bird rates, discount codes, or referral codes, none of this can be made possible without the ability to apply discounts to your ticketing.

Remember, the more options you have at your disposal the more flexibility you’ll have when it comes to ticketing, making it much easier to sell and avoid any slumps between first minute and last minute sales.

No matter what your goals are, by providing mouthwatering ticketing options, you’ll be able to:

  • Create an attractive emailing campaign (mentioning the incentive for registering earlier than others)
  • Run successful peer-to-peer campaigns (persuading people to promote your event in exchange for a discount coupon)
  • Encourage people to take action (by registering for the event) and create that fear of missing out feeling
  • Sell tickets quicker than usual and assure cash flow
  • Generate more interest in your event and gain more sponsors

Different types of discount coupon codes

A solid discount and ticketing strategy is normally based on three types of discount: the earlybird, specific discount codes, and promotional. As the most popular methods, all of these can, and should usually, be applied to your event promotion strategy.

The earlybird

An early bird offer encourages attendees to register for your event at a discounted rate providing they sign up before a certain date. This usually coincides with a tiered ticket pricing strategy which gradually increases in the lead up to the event.

The premise is simple, by enticing attendees to register from the off you build momentum for your event and boost your bottomline by getting revenue in the door. Moreover, it creates a buzz amongst attendees by creating a FOMO mentality. After all, no one wants to miss out on a bargain or special offer.

Discount codes

The term ‘discount code’ is a broad one and that’s because it encompasses a whole array of different groups which you’ll want to offer these various codes to. Whether it’s the speakers, clients, VIPs, or anyone else, you’ll want to prepare discount codes that cover all of these different groups.

For example, for any speakers and VIPs you’ll want to offer them a discount code with 100% off, whereas for others such as referrals or social media followers instead you’ll want to offer them a set percentage off the ticket price.

Partner and sponsor promotions

Partners and sponsors play a vital role in making any virtual event a success so it’s important to offer some sort of offering in the way of a set amount of free tickets and also a general discount code. This is a great way to incentivise partners and sponsors alike to promote your event.

Not only does this ease the workload of promoting the event yourself but it also enables you to work collectively, expanding the reach of potential attendees that you can attract and giving you much more exposure in the process.

Who should the discount coupons go to?

Up until now, we’ve touched on different groups the discount coupons should go to. But to really iron this one out and provide you with a bit more clarity, here’s a list of where your discount coupons should be going.

  • Speakers
  • Sponsors
  • VIPs
  • Media partners
  • Clients
  • Prospects
  • Your online community (social media, email list, and so on)

Our experience using discount coupons at Get Together

From our learnings at Get Together, our first online event that Eventtia run, a great initiative is to get your sales team on board and create a discount coupon for each sales rep.

This works on a number of fronts. First, it gives your sales team a fantastic opportunity to get a conversation started by inviting them to the event. Second, if the clients or prospects attend, then even better, because the event should always provide a fantastic showcase of the company and it’s product or services.

Importantly, this gets much needed buy in from everyone involved and if you’re looking to take that a step further, then another idea you can follow is to run a contest and offer an incentive for the sales rep that get the highest number of people to attend your event. With any well-designed event management technology, like Eventtia, this can be made possible, giving you the ability to track how many tickets have been redeemed per coupon.

How to create a discount coupon code using Eventtia

For all the talking we’ve done about managing and creating a strong ticketing strategy, none of this would be possible without a virtual event platform, like Eventtia, that gives you the option to create multiple discount codes for attendees.

Check out this quick video to see just how easy it is to create a coupon using the platform. And don’t forget if you’d like to read about how to do this with the full set of actions, you can do so by accessing the article on our knowledge base, here.

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Victoria Rudi
Senior Content Specialist
With a Master’s degree in Event Management and a keen follower of SaaS technologies, Victoria is an event content master, producing insightful and valuable for Eventtia’s blog and beyond

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