Announcing a new layout. Simple + Calendar. When you first add a production you can choose this to add a nifty calendar of show dates to the right side of your ticket page. You can also edit any existing production and add it. It’s on Step 1. Don’t forget to go to Step 7 and click ‘Save’.
When you click on a highlighted date it will scroll you down to that date on the ticket page and highlight it.
The photo is for Capital T’s production of ‘boom’. You can click on the link and buy your tickets. I’ll be seeing this one. I really enjoyed ‘HUNTER GATHERERS’.

And finally we get to the landing page. One of the first questions that usually comes up is “how do I link this to my website”. There are lots of complex answers to that. But the simplest is now the landing page. You can get the link to your specific landing page by going to ‘Productions’ and clicking on the Links icon. It’s the first link listed. Here’s what it looks like:

It will show all the shows you’re currently selling tickets for. It will list any passes you have up for sale, and if you have the ‘Donation Link’ checkbox checked on the ‘Donation’ tab under ‘Global Settings’  you’ll see a place to accept donations as well.

It’s always up to date with your latest information. Hope you find it useful! 

A question I used to get a lot was, “Can’t you just deposit my ticket sales directly into my bank account?” For a while PayPal was really the best way to do this, but my payment provider Batchex recently added this feature, so I was able to add it to BuyPlayTix.

In the application click on ‘Settings’, then choose ‘Global Settings’. On the Billing tab you’ll see an option for Disbursement method. Choose E-Check then enter your account and routing numbers (these are generally the two numbers in the lower left corner of your check). Don’t forget to hit ‘Save Changes’!

 

Unfortunately this is still not instantaneous. Due to when payments from the various processors hit BuyPlayTix’s bank account, an E-Check will probably get the money into your bank account about as fast as a paper check. But it saves you a trip to the bank!

One of BuyPlayTix’s coolest features is one of its least used. Did you know that every time you sell a ticket you can have that contact’s email address put into your email marketing application? Well as long as they opt-in to your mailing list. We do still obey the law.

Currently BuyPlayTix exports contacts to MailChimp, YourMailingListProvider, and ConstantContact. In BuyPlayTix 4.8 I moved this out into its own page off of the Settings page. Just look for Contact Settings.

You can setup all 3 of the providers here, but let’s try out the newest one - ConstantContact. First click the ‘Authorize BuyPlayTix’ button.

After a few seconds you’ll be redirected to ConstantContact’s web page. Enter your account information and login:

Next you’ll need to grant BuyPlayTix access to your account.

And you’ll be redirected back to BuyPlayTix. If everything went according to plan it will now say that your username is logged in. Now every email that comes in will go into your ConstantContact account.

Have you logged into BuyPlayTix recently? Noticed anything different?

The Navigation is now on the left. Hopefully this will make it easier to get down to work.
 

BuyPlayTix 4.8 is out. If you have any problems please contact me at support@buyplaytix.com.

I’ll be detailing the release in blog posts over the next few days. But for now, bullet points:

• UI Tweaks - should be easier to use BuyPlayTix on both normal displays and tablets/phones.
• Constant Contact Support - Automatically export your contacts to Constant Contact.
• E-Checks - You can now setup BuyPlayTix to automatically deposit into your bank account via E-Check.
• Landing Page - The default landing page has been improved to handle shows, passes, and donations.

I’m guilty of it. I know there are scheduling features in pretty much every marketing tool I use. But do I use them? Somtimes… maybe. Not really.

But perhaps I will more now. I spend time crafting content for my theatre company. But usually at 11pm at night after I’ve spent 4 hours working on a marketing image, I unleash it on the world. At 11pm. And no one notices.

What to do? Use those scheduling features. And the good folks at bit.ly have written a roundup of when people are actually clicking those links. As they say in the article:

It’s easy to see that just like your neighborhood restaurants, each social network has its own culture and behavior patterns. By understanding the simple characteristics of each social network, you can publish your content at exactly the right time for it to reach the maximum number of people.

So this blog post is going out at lunch time. Hope you enjoy reading it while you eat!

So I’m going to be honest at the beginning of this post. I don’t have much data on Pick Your Price tickets. Those are the tickets where you let the audience decide how much to pay. BuyPlayTix has this feature, but frankly it’s new and I don’t have enough data yet to draw any data based conclusions.

I do have a hunch, though, based on some very scientific personal reflection.

My company - Loaded Gun Theory - tried this once. But not with online ticketing. We had Pick Your Price only in person. And by far people chose to pay almost nothing. Pretty sure we had at least one person offer us the lint from his pockets.

But that was offline. And I think that’s where online ticketing offers a benefit. I had this really negative experience. I was swearing about how f’ing cheap people are. And yet if I had $9 in my pocket and was going to a show that cost $15 normally would I go by an ATM…

….

Probably not. Unfortunately.  I’d probably give them $5 and buy a beer with the remaining $4. Hey I’m being honest.

But the trend I am seeing with the online Pick You Price (if it is a trend) is that by not requiring people to pay in cash I’m opening up a lot more price points. And they’re more likely to pay full price or just under. At least that’s what it looks like from where I’m sitting.

So if I was going to do another Pick Your Price I’d probably do it online only. But I’d still work it into the budget that every ticket could sell for a penny. Just in case. 

BuyPlayTix version 4.8.1 was released this morning. It includes many bugfixes, and one new feature

Include Service Charge 

This is a frequently requested feature. Now you can include your service charge in the ticket price. So if you want to sell four $15 tickets instead of having a $60 ticket price with an additional service charge in the cart, the customer would just see their tickets in the cart. When you go look at the Credit Card Report you’ll see that rather than $60 you’ll be getting:

54.30 after 5.70 service charge

 The option is on Step 3 of the Add/Edit Production Wizard.

The guy who is constantly teaching me something new about theatre, Travis Bedard, recently posted a link to an IndieGogo fundraising effort for Crossroads Theatre Project. It’s called the $1 play project and from the website:

For the people who’ve seen it, enjoyed it, and want to experience it again and for the people who missed it but would love to come see it, I’m doing Tulpa, or Anne&Me again.
I need you to contribute just $1 to make that happen.

Sounds great, right? $1 is trivial for most people. But if you go look at the donations a funny thing has happened on the way to asking people for a dollar. As of this writing 9 people have donated $1. But 11 people have donated $20. So if this project had not had tiered pricing. Those 11 people would have potentially donated only a dollar each. And the producers would be $209 poorer.

There’s a valuable lesson here for theater. We should always have tiered pricing. We may not sell any $50 tickets, but it would be silly to not give a patron the opportunity to give it, wouldn’t it?

I always recommend to BuyPlayTix customers that they select 3 tiers. Usually in $5 increments. Although if you’re starting price is over $30, $10 increments might not be out of the question.

I attempted to draw some meaningful numbers from BuyPlayTix’s sliding scale data, but quite frankly it appears fairly random. Some nights nobody buys a high dollar ticket. And some nights the majority of tickets sold are in the highest bracket. 

Most importantly the lowest price should be the base price you determined you needed when you chose your ticket price. Because tiered pricing is about not leaving money on the table. It’s not about discounts.