BuyPlayTix Blog

Announcing a new layout. Simple + Calendar. When you first add a...

Mon, 21 May 2012 12:14:08 -0500

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’.

The Landing Page

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:53:04 -0500

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!

E-Checks

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:56:02 -0500

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!

Mailing Lists

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:31:04 -0500

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.

UI Tweaks

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:53:31 -0500

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

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:25:40 -0500

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.

The Best Time To Post

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:31:31 -0500

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!

Pick Your Price

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:40:00 -0500

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.

Release 4.8.1

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:13:52 -0500

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.

Tiered Pricing

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:48:30 -0500

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.

Choosing a price

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 08:45:00 -0500

My theater company Loaded Gun Theory started talking about budget and pricing for our next show last night. Much like I expect most theater companies we seem to always start from a random list of assumptions. Have you heard these?

“Well I think $15 is fair”
“Times are hard right now, so…”
“$20 is way too much there’s a price barrier there”

Actually times aren’t that hard right now in Austin. We have 6% unemployment. And we shouldn’t be ashamed to charge a fair price even when times are tough. Neither Walmart nor your favorite local merchant have any qualms about that.

But really I wanted to talk about choosing a price. As a group we tend to just start bandying numbers around and talking about “fair”. But we’ve been using BuyPlayTix since the beginning, especially the BoxOffice feature. So I know how many credit card sales we have, I know how many walkups we have. I can really break down the numbers.

And as much as I’d like to have bigger audiences, we have 250 people. Consistently. So that’s where I try to start with our budgeting. What is our proposed budget, and what price do we need to charge 250 people to get there? If we have a $3,500 budget with rent, design, and stipends then what do we need to charge?

$3500 budget / 250 patrons = $14 per ticket.

We are not immune to the fact that some people would like to see a lot of theater and $14 is a bit steep. So we’ll be using BuyPlayTix’s discount code feature to offer a discount for up to 20 people to buy tickets for $10. So let’s find out the maximum that can make us:

$10 tickets * 20 patrons = $200

So we’re losing 20 patrons to these tickets and we’re making $200. So let’s refactor our original equation with that in mind.

$3300 budget left / 230 patrons left = $14.35 per ticket.

So if we round up to $15 a ticket we should still be set for meeting our budget. But if we hadn’t accounted for those discount codes we would have ended up potentially losing $80.

Do you do this type of budgeting? How do you choose a ticket price?

Next up how Pick Your Price and Tiered Pricing affects your bottom line.

Now Playing! Have you noticed the new Now Playing list on the...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 10:54:29 -0500

Now Playing!

Have you noticed the new Now Playing list on the front page of BuyPlayTix? You can sign up for an RSS feed to be notified of new events. This is made to be easily read by search engines.

Yes. I would LOVE to advertise.

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 09:58:01 -0500

Do you have a show program? Do you need advertisers? BuyPlayTix has a miniscule advertising budget, but we’d love to advertise in your program. So send me a message at support@buyplaytix.com and let me know about your rates, your show, your company, and your city. I can’t say I’ll have the cash to advertise this month, but at the very least I’ll follow you on Facebook and Twitter.

Sales by Day

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:36:20 -0500

I’m going to start trying to share some overall statistical data with you from BuyPlayTix about how best to sell tickets*. The first thing I thought of this morning was, “I wonder what day would be the best day of the week to send a marketing email”? I typically do this on Saturday or Sunday because those are the days of the week I have the most free time.

To my dismay the chart looked like this:

Not only are Saturday and Sunday not great for ticket sales. Sunday is horrible. Looking at this data it looks like I’ll get the most return on my time sending out email marketing on Thursdays.

I’m going to have to try that next time. It’s actually really easy. You can signup for MailChimp for free. Then enable it in BuyPlayTix under Settings->Plugin Settings->MailChimp Provider. Once you do that your contacts will start being automatically exported.

When I’m ready to create a marketing email on a Sunday I can do so, and then schedule it to go out on a Thursday.

Now I just need to remember to do that.

* In our Terms of Service BuyPlayTix reserves the right to aggregate your data for useful statistical purposes that we’ll share with you. But that’s just because we think it’ll be cool. If for any reason you don’t think it’s cool just let me know and I’ll omit your data.

Infrastructure Release

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:50:46 -0600

Quickly on the heels of 4.4 is release 4.5. This one is mostly filled with uninteresting things that make the back end hum better and fix bugs.

Donation Emails

You can now customize the email sent to donors under Settings-Global Settings. Then click on the Donation tab.

Tunes to Add Production
The add production wizard was not as robust as it needed to be. Now you can no longer delete shows if there are already reservations for it. It also validates that you’ve entered the data more rigorously.

Ticket Locks
I added this feature for discount codes, but now your shopping cart is good for 15 minutes. As long as your patron keeps clicking around their tickets will be good, but if they go off to cook dinner and come back their cart will be empty.
Previously if people were fast enough the last few tickets for a show could be sold to multiple people. That won’t happen anymore.
Patrons will get a message that the show is almost sold out if there are still unbought tickets in others carts. They can refresh the page to see if those tickets revert to un-bought or if the show sells out completely.
If this is greek to you, don’t worry. This is more than likely how you expect things to work.

As always you can see all the bug fixes in the Release Notes. And please don’t hesitate to contact me if there’s anything you need help with.

New Release!

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:54:30 -0600

Version 4.4 of BuyPlayTix was released Monday night. It brings with it a few cool new features and many bug fixes:

Default Ticket Prices

Currently ticket prices are sorted from highest to lowest, with the most expensive option selected. Now in the Add/Edit Production wizard you can choose a default price that will be selected instead of the most expensive price.

QR Codes

By default a QR Code will be generated for your production on your production’s Link page. Click on it and print it out or put it on all your promotional materials. This is especially great if you’re doing printed posters. A QR Code at the bottom makes it trivial for users with phones to go directly to your ticket site and buy tickets. If you’d like to discuss QR Code strategies further please contact me.

Better Mobile

Getting BuyPlayTix to work well on mobile has been an ongoing process. With this release it truly becomes easy to buy tickets using a cell phone. You can watch a video below of the mobile site for The Hidden Room Theater’s Mystery Show. Please excuse the speed. I had to capture the movie on a simulated cellphone which is quite a bit slower than a real one.

So what would you like to see next? Please let me know with a quick email to support@buyplaytix.com!

Discount Codes

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 13:54:00 -0500

In the latest release of BuyPlayTix I added discount codes! You can find them under the Productions menu. So what can you do with discount codes?

Generate simple discounts (Buy 0 tickets get up to 100 for $3.00 using code CHEAPTIX).
Generate complex discounts (Buy 3 tickets for the Sunday Matinee and get 2 free using code BRING_A_FRIEND)!
Generate a unique code to send out to cast members for complimentary tickets. Each cast member gets ‘x’ comps per code and they just enter the code at checkout. No more comp management! Directors can breath a huge sigh of relief.

This feature is very much still in flux. So play with it. Let me know what you think and how it can be improved.

A Question of Contact

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:53:00 -0500

Current Contact Screen

I’m currently reworking a lot of the user interface behind BuyPlayTix. Much of how it was designed was based on just copying “that’s how it’s done”. I’m currently working on making the site accessible through Facebook and from mobile devices and so I’m trying to think about what people need rather than what most web applications provide.

Right now I’m looking at the Contact Page. It’s already gone through one redesign. But currently it’s just a simple table with a pager. Loaded Gun Theory has 102 pages of Contacts. And that’s not the largest number in the database. Is anyone really going to page through 102 pages looking for a specific Contact?

New Contact Screen Mockup

We have Dynamic Mailing Lists that let you narrow down to a list of contacts by criteria. And we have search. I think both of those methods are better way of finding specific contacts.

So do you think there’s any value to still having a table with 1020 rows that you can browse through?

Taking the Work out of Art

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 14:58:28 -0500

So, one of the promises of BuyPlayTix is taking the work out of art. I’ve added two new features this week that hopefully do a little more of that.

Email Raplet

Rapportive is a cool browser extension for Gmail. You can download it here:

http://rapportive.com/

Once you’ve got it installed you can click on the ‘Rapportive’ at the top middle of your screen in Gmail and choose ‘Add or Remore Raplets’. Click ‘Add This’ next to custom raplet, and enter the URL:

https://secure.buyplaytix.com/raplet.html

Now you’ll get a box that will show you contact information from BuyPlayTix when you pull up an email in Gmail. It also includes information about what shows the user has seen and how they’ve been tagged.

I used it just today when one of our Stage Managers sent me her updated cell number. I was instantly able to tell within Gmail that the number we had on file was incorrect, and clicked the edit button to change it almost instantly.

You also could use it to subtly remind people about your shows. When you get an email you’ll instantly be able to see the contacts ticket buying history so you can subtly remind Joe when he asks to borrow your lawnmower that tickets for your latest opus are now on sale. Hint. hint.

Email Tracking

The first is email tracking. You’ll find a report under the Reports menu called ‘Email Report’. This will have details for each email you send out to your mailing list detailing how many people opened the email, how many viewed it online, and how many unsubscribed.

Hopefully these will make things a tiny bit easier for you.

Invite Friends!

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:25:00 -0500

When you buy tickets on BuyPlayTix you’ll now see a link on your receipt page to “Invite Friends!” This will share the fact that you bought tickets on Facebook and let your friends buy them too. It should ensure your patrons don’t have to sit alone and that you take more tickets. There’s also a new Link Share Report that reports on how many times each link has been shared, commented, liked, etc.

But in the process I beat my head against the wall quite a lot, so I’d like to share in case you would like to share a link on Facebook. These are quick and dirty instructions, there are a lot more options you can read about here.

So let’s say I want to share a link like http://www.hydeparktheatre.org (they have a great show going on right now called “Body Awareness”).

I’d put the link in my page using the following HTML:

<a name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">

Invite Friends!

</a>

<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

That does a fine job of creating a button and popping up a link, but if you want to share more than just a link you’ll need to adjust the meta tags in the page you’re linking to (in this case http://www.hydeparktheatre.org). Inside of the <head> tags you need to add something like this:

<meta name="title" content="Come see 'Body Awareness' with me!" />
<meta name="description" content="I just bought tickets to see 'Body Awareness'. Join me!" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.hydeparktheatre.org/site/images/hydeparkLogo2sm.gif" />

And that’s it! When they share it on facebook they’ll see something like this:

Come see ‘Body Awareness’ with me!www.hydeparktheatre.orgI just bought tickets to go see ‘Body Awareness’. Join me!

2 hours ago · Comment · LikeUnlike · Share

If you want to find out how many people are sharing your link you can get stats by going to:

http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.hydeparktheatre.org

BuyPlayTix goes one step further and adds the correct date so your friend and you end up at the same show. But that significantly increases the complexity of the exercise.

Have fun sharing!