You held an event, and you think it was successful. But was it really? Did attendees think the event was as great as you did? Will they buy tickets next time you hold a similar event? Will they tell other people to buy tickets to your next event? You don’t know the answers to these questions if you don’t send post-event surveys!
Timely feedback from ticket buyers is essential to ensure your future events are as successful as possible. Post-event surveys are the most important part of a continuous improvement strategy – so you’re not just holding events that are good enough, but rather, you’re holding events that exceed ticket buyers’ expectations every time.
Why You Should Send Post-Event Surveys
Event organizers should send post-event surveys to attendees via email after every event – no exceptions! In simplest terms, post-event surveys help you understand what went well, what didn’t work, and what changes can be made so your next event is more successful.
Digging in a bit deeper, post-event surveys can help you understand your ticket buyers, identify new audiences, build relationships, improve decision-making, and develop better strategies for future events. Let’s take a closer look at each of these ways that post-event surveys can benefit event organizers.
1. Better Understand Who Your Ticket Buyers Are
Who bought tickets to your event, and who actually attended? When you send post-event surveys, you can collect valuable demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data, which you can use for improved targeting in future event marketing investments. The ultimate result should be a higher return on your investments.
2. Define emerging audiences
By analyzing the answers ticket buyers provide to your post-event survey questions, you can glean a wealth of information, including making inferences about emerging audiences. These are people who may be interested in buying tickets to your events in the future and are valuable prospects for growth.
3. Build Relationships with Your Target Audience
When you send post-event surveys, ticket buyers feel like you value their opinions. You’re asking them for their advice about how you can improve the event in the future, which strengthens their relationship with your event. They’re much more likely to attend again in the future and tell others to buy tickets if they believe you’re listening to and acting on their feedback.
4. Improve Decision-Making and Strategic Planning
When you’re selling tickets to an event, you need to make decisions and develop strategies based on the principles of business in order to ensure you can cover your costs at the very least. Data is a key component of decision-making and strategic planning in business.
You never want to make decisions and develop strategies for future events based on assumptions. Instead, you want to base as many decisions and strategies as possible on accurate data. You benefit by being able to collect a lot of the data you need to improve decision-making and strategic planning using the insights gained from post-event surveys.
How to Create & Send Post-Event Surveys
Creating and sending post-event surveys requires a well-written survey and a well-developed process to send the survey to ticket buyers, but the methodology to collect feedback and provide the data to you in a usable format is paramount. You can hire a market research survey writer and use survey software to do this, or you can do it all automatically when you ticket your events through the AttendStar ticketing platform.
AttendStar automatically sends a post-event survey for medium to large-size events that sell tickets using AttendStar’s ticketing software. The survey goes out immediately after the event is scheduled to conclude, and is provided complimentary at no extra cost to the event organizer.
For smaller events and for event organizers who want to send the AttendStar post-event survey through a third-party survey software, it’s easy to do simply by adding your own custom survey link from within the AttendStar platform.
If you’re creating your own survey to send to ticket buyers, be sure to keep the survey short. This is where it’s essential to use an experienced survey writer – to make sure you get valid, useful data.
Some of the questions you can use in your survey include:
- Did you attend this event?
- What, if anything, did you dislike about the event?
- What was the best part of the event for you?
- Would you recommend this event to family/friends?
- Would you attend this event again?
- What would you like to see change next time this event is held?
- How did you hear about this event?
- Rate your experience on a scale of one to five for seating, parking, cleanliness, staff helpfulness, ticket price, ticket value, and so on.
The list of questions goes on and on, but with the goal of keeping the survey short, you need to be strategic about which questions you ask and how you ask them. Use a combination of closed-ended (e.g., multiple choice), open-ended (e.g., type a response), and ranking questions, and be sure to include demographic questions (e.g., location they traveled from to the event) to inform your targeting decisions for future events.
Don’t just stop there! Ask questions multiple times to ensure the data you collect is valid. You’d be amazed by the differences you’ll see when you ask people how they heard about your event at checkout compared to in a post-event survey at the conclusion of an event.
In addition, Google Analytics may report different information than what the customer will say, and answers may change based on the buyer journey and the context in which questions are asked. Bottom line, using a single data point from a single source is unlikely to be enough to make the best decisions for the future.
Types of Data You Can Collect
Post-event surveys are powerful research tools that give you valuable data provided by primary sources – your ticket buyers! Here is a list of just some of the categories of data points you could collect, note that AttendStar’s automated post-event survey collects information related to all of these data point categories and more:
- Demographic / Psychographics
- Geographic / Location
- Marketing Attribution
- Order Metadata
- Travel
- Ticket Price(s)
- Checkout Experience
- Ticket Buyer Support
- Overall Experience
- Seating
- Parking
- Venue
- Event / Venue Staff
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Additional Comments & Feedback
The key to success is to ask specific questions that answer or validate insights you’re hoping to obtain. Don’t just ask a ticket buyer if they liked the event. Ask them to rate their satisfaction on a defined scale and provide details about what they did and did not like. Learning that people liked your event is great, but learning specifically what they liked and didn’t like is so much better.
Key Takeaways
Collecting data using post-event surveys is critical to future event planning, marketing, and management. Collecting attendee and ticket buyer feedback is paramount to brand reputation and ensuring profitability at your next event, so make sure you collect, analyze, and use it!
Ready to sell event tickets and collect the feedback you need to be successful? Contact us to learn more about ticketing and the post-event surveys that are automatically sent through the AttendStar ticketing platform.
