You’ve planned the event, sorted all the details…and now you’re staring at a mountain of empty seats.

You’re somehow thinking these seats are just going to fill themselves right? If you build it - they’ll come? 

But they might not — unless you tell them about it.

I know what it’s like - you’ve got a million things to do. You’re planning the event and making it awesome for your attendees. The last thing you want to do is sit in front of your computer writing emails.  

But the thing is - after working with event organisers for nearly 10 years, there’s something the ones filling seats all do. They are consistently using event email marketing.

Emails are one of the core pillars of event success. When done well, a single email can sell out your entire event. 

If you’re not sure where to start, don’t worry. By the end of this article, you’ll know how to successfully execute email marketing for your next event. I'll explain the different types of event email, tips for successful email marketing, and outline some examples and templates for you to use ahead of your next event. 

Before I break it all down, let’s clarify what event email marketing actually is.

What is event email marketing? 

Event email marketing is all about using emails to promote, manage, and keep in touch with people before and after your events.

It involves crafting targeted emails to:

• Inform potential attendees about your upcoming event
• Generate interest and boost ticket sales
• Provide key event details
• Keep participants engaged throughout the event lifecycle

There’s more to it than sending a bunch of emails to potential guests and trying to get them to buy tickets. It’s tactical. You send specific emails to subscribers at certain times.

Is event email marketing necessary for success? Yes, and here’s why

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons email marketing is a great way to boost ticket sales. 

• Reach people directly in their inbox. Emails go straight to your audience’s inbox, bypassing the noise of social media. As a result, your message is more likely to be seen, boosting your chances of getting more RSVPs. 
• Build relationships. Email marketing involves sending personalized and strategic messages to your email list. This helps you build a connection with your audience, making them more likely to attend events and engage with your brand. 
• Boost excitement and awareness. Email marketing keeps your audience informed and excited about your event. Put yourself in their shoes — how excited are you when you receive an email about an upcoming event that you can’t wait to go to? Pretty buzzed, I bet. 
• Send timely reminders. Emails serve as timely reminders for important deadlines, such as registration cutoffs or upcoming event dates. It reduces the chances of no-shows and last-minute cancellations, and encourages more people to buy tickets before it’s too late. 

5 top tips for successful event email marketing 

Okay, enough about the benefits of event email marketing. Let’s get to the good stuff — how do you actually create, send, and manage event emails successfully? 

Here are some top tips to help your emails stand out in crowded inboxes, connect with your audience, and turn interest into action without sounding like a sales pitch.

1. Build an email list with the right subscribers

To put it bluntly, your email marketing efforts go to waste if you send them to the wrong people. 

We’ve seen it firsthand. A brand sends out invites to their full mailing list, including past customers, old newsletter sign-ups, and even people from unrelated campaigns. 

The result? 

Low open rates, poor engagement, and barely any RSVPs. 

When event organizers narrow their focus and build a targeted list of subscribers who actually match their ideal audience (think recent leads, relevant partners, and engaged community members), the difference is night and day. 

The bottom line? The right audience is everything.

Here’s how to build an email list with the right people: 

• Pinpoint your ideal audience. Before you create an email list for your event, clarify who you actually want to attend. Is it new leads, loyal customers, or industry peers? Knowing your target audience helps you craft messages that speak directly to their interests and avoids wasting time on the wrong crowd.
• Leverage existing contacts. Tap into your current network of past attendees, customers, newsletter subscribers, and social followers. These people already know your brand, making them a great starting point for building buzz and driving sign-ups.
• Create irresistible sign-up incentives. To get more people to sign up to your email list, offer something of value in exchange. Early-bird access, exclusive content, or VIP perks work well — just make sure the benefit is clear and relevant to your event.
• Segment your audience to personalize communications. Group your subscribers into segments based on things like their demographics, interests, or how they found you. These segments allow you to tailor your email messaging to suit their preferences and needs, driving better engagement.

2. Send the right emails, at the right time 

Great timing can make or break your event email strategy. 

Send emails too early and your message gets forgotten. Send them too late? People already have other plans. 

The key is to guide your audience through a journey, from the first ‘what’s this about?’ to ‘I’m so glad I came!’

Here’s the typical event email timeline: 

• Awareness. Start by teasing the event before tickets are even available. This builds anticipation and lets people know something exciting is coming.
• Invite. Once the registration forms open, send your official invite with all the key details and a clear call to action to encourage subscribers to buy tickets. 
• Confirmation. After someone signs up, send a friendly confirmation email with event information, calendar links, and what to expect next.
• Follow-up. A few days before the event, remind attendees of the date, location, and any final details (like what to bring or an agenda).
• Thanks for attending. After the event, show appreciation and keep the relationship going. Include highlights, photos, or a survey to gather feedback.

Now, you might be thinking, ‘how am I supposed to find time to create and send all these emails?’

I hear you. When you’re knee-deep in event logistics, email marketing feels like another thing on your overflowing to-do list.

The good news is that automation can help. 👏

Did you know that you can send automated event emails with Event Calendar App? Well, you can — and it’s really easy. 

Simply head to the main dashboard and click ‘Workflows’:

From here, you can create an automated email campaign. Select ‘add a message’, choose the parameters, add your email copy, and add it to the automation. 

After adding all your emails, your automation workflow will look something like this: 

And voila! You’re ready to go. 

As soon as someone registers for a ticket, the automation begins. You don’t have to worry about manually sending all these communications because we do it for you.

No need to thank us, you’re welcome. 😎

How to avoid the spam trap: Even with great content, your emails won’t work if no one sees them. Here are a few quick tips to avoid landing in the spam folder:

• Space out your emails logically. Plan your email schedule with enough breathing room between messages so your audience doesn’t feel overwhelmed — and so that email platforms don’t think you’re a spammer.
• Avoid spammy subject lines. Keep your subject line clear, relevant, and friendly — stay clear of too many exclamation marks or ALL CAPS. Try using action-based language like “Save your spot for our July event” instead of something like “DON’T MISS OUT!!!”
• Use a trustworthy sender name. Spam filters look at sender credibility. Inconsistent or generic names (like ‘info@’ or ‘noreply@’) can raise red flags. Instead, use a clear, branded sender name like ‘Emma at EventWorks; or ‘The [Event Name] Team’.

3. Write email copy that sells (without being salesy)

When people feel like they’re being pushed, they tune out fast. 

Put yourself in the position of your subscribers. You head to your inbox, click and email, and this is the first thing you see: 

‘Don’t miss the biggest, most incredible, game-changing event of the year!!! Tickets are flying off the shelves! BUY NOW before it’s too late!’

It’s quite intense, right? It’s loud, pushy, and focused on hype — not on helping you understand why the event is worth your time.

If anything, it’s more likely to put you off than to pique your interest. 

Now, how would you feel about this email:

‘Join us for a day of fresh ideas, inspiring experiences, and great people. Whether you’re looking to learn something new, get inspired, or just try something different—you won’t want to miss it. Spaces are limited, so grab your spot while you can!’ 

This version is confident but calm. It highlights benefits, creates urgency (by stating tickets are limited) without pressure, and speaks directly to the guest’s interests.

The goal is to sell the value of your event by showing your audience why it matters to them, without sounding like a walking advertisement.

Here are some ways to write email copy that converts without putting people off: 

• Focus on value, not features. Instead of listing what your event has (like “five Tour De France cyclist speakers”), show why that matters (like ‘learn real-world experiences and advice from expert cyclists with years of experience’).
• Use natural, conversational language. Write like you’d talk to a friend, not like a billboard. Keep it warm, clear, and jargon-free.
• Highlight what’s in it for them. What will attendees gain from showing up? New skills? Valuable connections? A fun experience? Make that the core message.
• Let social proof do some of the talking. Mention previous attendee feedback, name-drop a popular speaker, or highlight how many people have already signed up to boost interest. 

4. Send the emails from an address they can reply to

This is a great bonus, but something I often see missed. Send your event marketing emails from an address that people can actually respond to.

For example - if you send your emails from 'hello@yourcompany.com' it feels personable and your customers can reply to the email to send you a message. This is a really nice extra as you can sign off emails with something like:

'Hit reply and say hello if you have any questions. We'd love to hear from you'.

Sending the emails from your address like this also makes it less likely the email will end up in the attendees spam folder. Always a nice little extra!

5. Make sure there's a 'call to action' in most emails

In most of the emails you send to your attendees you're going to want to make sure there's a 'call to action (CTA)'. 'Call to action' is just fancy marketing speak for something that you want the attendee to do.

Some good ideas for CTAs:

RSVP buttons

The most obvious, but give your attendee a link they can click to go and register for the event.

Add-to-calendar links

Make it easy for people to save the date by including a one-click calendar link for Google, Outlook, or Apple Calendar. If you're an Event Calendar App customer, you can use the links straight from your widget.

Clickable images or videos

If you're adding images, don't forget to make them clickable to a place where the attendee can get more context.

It's not possible to add videos to emails, but a good idea is to do something like this instead:

The different types of event emails (plus free event email templates)

Now that we’ve outlined our tips and advice for successful event email marketing, let’s break down the different types of emails and show you some examples.

Save the date

A save-the-date email is usually one of the first emails you’d send about an upcoming event. It essentially outlines all the key information about the event, like: 

• What the event is
• The date and timings
• The location of the event
• When tickets are available to buy.

You send this email before people can actually buy tickets. It’s more of a ‘here’s what’s coming and the date it’s happening — put it in your calendars!’ type of thing. 

Save-the-date template 

Official invitation emails

These emails officially invite people to your event. They typically include detailed information about the event, including speakers, an agenda, and RSVP links. 

The exact timing on when to send invite emails varies, but it’s usually a few weeks to a couple of months before the event itself. 

Invitation email template 

Confirmation emails

Confirmation emails are your chance to quickly let people know their spot is saved and share all the important details they’ll need. 

Think of it as a friendly “you’re in!” message that includes their registration confirmation, ticket or booking info, the event schedule, and any tips to help them get ready. 

These emails go out right after someone signs up, so they feel confident and excited about what’s coming.

Confirmation email template

Event reminder emails

A reminder email ensures that all attendees are up to speed with when and where the event is taking place. It also boosts attendance, making sure that everyone who has a ticket remembers when the event takes place. 

You can send multiple reminder emails if needed, such as one month, one week, and one day before the event — but don’t send too many. You probably only need a couple at most. Anymore than that can feel a little overwhelming! 

Event email reminder template

Follow-up emails

Follow-up emails are a great way to check in with your attendees after the event and hear what they thought. They usually include a quick link to a survey and a friendly message explaining how much their feedback helps make future events even better. 

These emails are best sent within a few days of the event, while the experience is still fresh in everyone’s mind.

Follow-up email template

Conclusion

Event email marketing is so important if you want to consistently fill events. If you’re not using it countless attendees could be missing out from attending your event - simply because they didn’t even know it existed.

Start simple. Email your list and ‘tease’ the event before it goes public. Combine that with a second email inviting them to the event and this alone will get you huge results.

Once you’re ready to automate emails around your event (think reminders, confirmations, thank you emails) then Event Calendar App will be a great fit for you. Event Calendar App handles not only your automated emails, but your registrations and payments too. 

Looking for a simple way to collect registrations for your upcoming event?

Feeling a bit bamboozled by all the software options available, and want something that's quick?

Google Forms is a great option. You'll love it! I'll talk you through everything from start to finish. By the end of this article you'll have a great looking form you can send out to your attendees.

Why Google Forms

Google Forms is one of the best free form builders available. It's got a clean, simple to understand user interface that even your granny could use!

It's free for unlimited responses. That's a big one! Especially if you're hosting an event with a lot of attendees. There's plenty of other form builders around, but usually they only allow a certain number of responses and then there's a credit card required.

It's also a Google product (in case that wasn't obvious). And you've probably already got a Google account, so getting started is going to be super quick.

Create a Google Form

Let's get this show on the road...

Head to the Google Forms website. It'll look something like this:

You can either create a blank form, or use one of the templates. If you've never used Google Forms before, I'd highly recommend using the 'Event Registration' template. It's simple to edit to your requirements and gives you a good starting point, rather than a blank form.

When you click the template, you'll get taken to the Google Form editor:

The four important parts of Google Forms for event registration

Now, if you've never seen this screen before, it can be a little bit intimidating as there's a whole bunch of different options. But not to worry, I'll take you through everything you need to know to make the best event registration form.

There's four main sections that we're going to focus on:

• 1. Theme settings
• 2. Questions
• 3. Responses
• 4. Settings

We'll want to change the options in all these sections to make a great form.

1. Theme settings

It's vital to remember, that after you've built your form, you'll be sending out links to access it to each your attendees. When your attendees see the form we want it to feel like part of your brand.

People are more cautious of spam than they've ever been. By styling the form to match your business, people are less likely to think it's junk and more likely to actually complete the form. It also looks a lot more professional for you and your brand.

In my example, I'm going to be collecting registrations for a 'Dinghy Regatta' at my local sailing club 'Lymington Town Sailing Club'.

Let's have a look at the club's main website, as this is what we want the form to look like.

I can see a few things here that we can take to our Google Form:

• The website uses the 'Open Sans' font (I admit I asked the site administrator for this information).
• Use blue as their main color.
• The sailing club logo would be good to get in our form.
• Maybe that header image with the dinghies might be useful too?

Let's head back to our theme settings in the Google Form.

Using the information from the above, I changed the theme settings to take my form from this:

To this:

How much better does that look! Actually looks like something you would be proud to send out to your attendees now.

2. Questions

Event name, date and contact number

The questions section let's you control everything about the form itself.

It may sound very obvious, but make sure at the top of the form you have:

• The name of the event
• The event time and date
• A contact number

(The template is great for this because you can just change the details that are already there)

Adding and editing questions

It doesn't take too long to get up to speed with adding, editing and deleting questions in Google Forms..

Click on a question to edit it and the controls on the right give you all the tools you need.

Use the 6 dots to drag with your cursor and change the order of questions:

Form validation

Be sure to check the 'Required' option for any questions that you need answers too. This will prevent the user from submitting the form unless they complete this section.

Make a event registration form people want to fill out

What do I mean by this?

Never forget that this form is a job for someone. They want to come to your event, and they're willing to put in some work to help you out by registering for the event. But don't take liberties or it might bite you in the bottom.

I'm sure you've opened a form before (I'm looking at you car and home insurance) and seen what feels like 100's of fields to fill out and thought..."forget this".

I wrote all about this here. But if you make the form too much effort to fill out then you're going to lose attendees.

Only ask the questions that you need answers too. Keep it as short and sweet as you can.

Multiple attendees per form submission

Have a think about whether you want to allow multiple attendees per form submission.

For example, if a family of 4 wants to sign up to your event, do you want each person to individually submit the form? Or are you happy for one person to submit one form on behalf of their group?

If each person needs to submit the form, it's worth stating this at the top.

If you're happy for people to submit on behalf of a group, you might want to add a question like this...

This does get a bit 'messy' as it makes it difficult to see exactly how many people have signed up for your event. But it's a balancing act between that and giving people significantly more work by having them fill it in per person.

Unfortunately there's no better solution to this in Google Forms at the moment.

3. Responses

See who's coming

There's not too much to say about this section. This is where you'll see all the details of your attendees as they come in. 🙌

Google does give you some useful form analytics which is great way to get a overview of things.

Prevent anymore attendees from registering

As your event approaches, and you're ready to turn off registrations, you can do that by clicking the 'Accepting responses' button:

This will disable any other attendees from registering.

4. Settings

There's a whole bunch of different options in here, but I'll talk you through the most important for setting up event registration:

Collect email addresses

It's highly likely you're going to want to collect your attendee's email addresses.

To do this, I'd recommend setting 'Collect email addresses' to 'Responder input'. This lets your attendees manually type their email address in.

There is an option to force people to sign into Google to respond, but I don't think this makes sense for event registration. This is going to have a negative impact on the amount of people that sign up for your event.

Send your attendees a copy of their registration

For event registration I'd recommend changing this setting to 'Always'.

It can be frustrating as an attendee if you register for an event, and then there's nothing in your inbox to prove that you registered for the event.

If you don't send a copy of the response to your attendee you're likely to get questions like:

• "I'm not sure if I registered properly or not?"
• "Can you remind me what I put on the registration form?"

...so best to leave this set to always.

Allow attendees to modify their response

This one's up to you.

What's good is that you can turn this off after the person has registered. That means that leading up to the event you can let people change their information but then a few days before the event turn self editing off.

The downside is this can be a bit of a nightmare for your administrative purposes.

Confirmation message

Add a custom confirmation message. This message appears on the registration form page after the person registers. It does not appear in any email they receive.

The main thing your attendees are looking for here is 'what happens next'. Tell them what's going to happen now that they've registered.

Limiting responses

Be very careful turning the 'Limit to 1 response' option on.

It works by forcing the attendee to sign into their Google account, so that they can only register once per google account.

This might be fine. But if you're asking people who use the same computer to submit the form once per attendee this can introduce a lot of friction. For example a family of four, might not even have a Google account each. And having to log in and out of Google accounts to complete the form can be a pain.

If in doubt, leave this off.

Share your form

Whoop! You've built your event registration form and you're ready to share it with the world...well - you're attendees.

Hit the send button in the top right to see your options:

1. Send via email

This sends your attendee an email that looks like this:

This works as a quick and easy option, but there's a few reasons I think there's better options:

• It's got Google's branding all over it. Not yours.
• It comes 'out of the blue' for the attendee. There's not much context to it and it's likely to go ignored.

There's also the option to embed the form directly in the email:

But this doesn't work in all email clients. So you need to be careful who your sending it to if you use this option. My recommendation is to leave this off.

2. Send via link

This is my favourite method by far, and how I recommend sharing your registration form.

Sending by link allows you to send out a link to your potential attendees in the same way you would usually communicate with them.

Hot tip: Choose the 'Shorten URL' option to get a much prettier URL.

Do you have an email subscriber list? You could send them the link in an email in a way that is personalised and gives context.

A very simple email will do:

Hey [attendee name],

Just a heads up that we've opened up registrations for the Lymington Dinghy Regatta. Can't wait to see you there!

Sign up by using this link

-https://forms.gle/FsG9DcNba8nH1pcp7

All the best,

The Lymington Sailing Club Team

That's way better than this thing:

(No offence Google!)

You could also very easily add this link to your website to allow attendees to sign up.

3. Embed via HTML

There's a way to embed the form directly on your website.

This can work well, but again, be careful. I tend to only recommend this method to people who are very familiar with HTML.

The way Google gives you the code to embed it is with a fixed width Iframe. This may not work properly on mobiles, so proceed with caution!

The limitations of using Google Forms for event registration

Google Forms is ultimately a form tool, not an event registration tool, so it falls down in a few places.

It's worth reviewing these before setting up your form to make sure your ok with them.

There's no way to natively embed the form on your website

As we've seen in the previous examples, the only way to add Google Form to your website is with the 'Iframe' embed. There's no way to add it to your website natively.

This isn't an issue with everyone but if you're looking for more advanced features this can be limiting.

No way to accept payments

There's no built in way to accept payments with Google Forms.

One way around this is to manually request payment from your attendees with another system after they register. But this is very labour intensive.

No way to limit the number of event registrations

What if your event only has 50 places? There's no way in Google Forms to prevent 100 people from signing up. Instead you need to be constantly watching your registrations and then manually close the form once you've hit a limit.

This is difficult to do in reality.

No way to automate event emails

There's no way to send automatic event reminder emails, or follow ups after the event.

It can be hard to see how many people are coming

If you allow groups to sign up using one form it can be very difficult to see exactly how many attendees to expect to your event.

Looking for a more powerful way to collect registrations for your event?

Google Forms is great because it's free. But with that, comes a limited set of features and software that wasn't built for event registration.

Event Calendar App let's your attendees register directly from your own website with non of the limitations that Google Forms has. Give it a try! 👍

All the event planning is done. The schedule’s in place, the venue is good to go, and you’re ready to roll. Congrats! 

But before we pop the champagne to celebrate, there’s still one thing you need to think about. 

You need to sell event tickets.

After all, your event might not be so successful if no one shows up. 

But where do you start? Figuring out the best way to promote your event and increase ticket sales is a bit of a minefield. The good news is that you’ve come to the right place to cross the minefield in one piece!

In this article, we break down five ways to sell event tickets — and fast.

1) Understand your ideal event audience 

The first step to selling more event tickets is… drumroll, please! 

Knowing your target audience. 

Sure, you can sell tickets without knowing who your ideal event audience is. 

But to really increase sales, you need to promote your event to the right audience. Otherwise, you’re spending time and money pushing your event to people who simply aren’t interested. 

Let’s use an example to demonstrate.

Imagine that you’re hosting an 80s-themed disco event at a local bar. Big surprise — your ideal audience is anyone who grew up through the 80s listening to disco music. 🕺

If you start promoting your event on TikTok, you probably won’t have much luck. Why? Because most of the users are between the ages of 18-34.

But if you promote your event on Facebook? You’ve got a much higher chance of success, given that it has a higher percentage of users born before or during the 80s.

So now the question is, how do you pinpoint the ideal demographic for your events?

Well, there are a couple of ways to tackle this: 

• Review attendees from your past events. Take a look at your ticket sales from past events to spot any trends in demographics. Are most of your audience female? Or aged 18-30? Or living in central London? These trends paint a picture of your ideal event audience and the best way to engage with them. 
• Take a look at your competitors. Do they have any events doing similar things? If so, who’s attending their events?  Looking at what your competitors are doing can help you spot your ideal event audience.

2) Use the right ticketing strategy 

We’ve got a question for you: do you think that the type of tickets you sell can help you boost ticket sales?

Spoiler alert — it can! 

If you want to increase ticket sales quickly, the type of tickets you sell can play a vital part. 

Think about early bird tickets as an example. 

If you offer a lower price for early bird tickets (or a limited number of pre-sale tickets before the big event), it can encourage people to buy tickets before the general sale. It’s all about the FOMO!

Tiered pricing is another example, where you can charge a higher price for better seats or perks. Theatre performances use this type of pricing.  Their guests pay more for seats closer to the stage or with a better view. 

Tiered tickets can create a sense of urgency around your event. The sooner people buy tickets, the better tickets they get. If they wait too long? They risk missing out on some awesome seats. 

So how do you know which type of ticketing strategy is right for your event? 

Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide which type of ticketing is right for your event. Start by thinking about the type of event you’re hosting, your audience, and your venue. This will help you pinpoint the types of tickets that suit your specific event. 

Some food for thought: You must consider the layout and structure of your venue when choosing the right type of ticket. Is tiered pricing an option if you’re hosting a cooking class in a local professional kitchen? Probably not. But could you create VIP tickets to provide one-on-one support to certain attendees? Absolutely.

3) Make it easy for people to buy tickets 

Picture this: you’re trying to book a spot on a local yoga class. You add the class pass to the basket, and head to the checkout.

Oh, wait a second — the website’s frozen. 

A few minutes later, the website loads and you’re finally ready to add your card details and confirm your place. Result! 

But hold up — another issue. Whenever you click ‘pay now’, the website throws you from the checkout and you have to start all over again.

It sounds stressful, right? Pretty much the opposite of what you want when booking a relaxing yoga class.

But we’ve all been there. Whether booking an event ticket or buying a new pair of shoes, we’ve all faced technical glitches. And how many times does this make you leave the website before completing the sale? 

22% of people abandon an online purchase because the checkout process is too long or complex. 17% leave because of website errors.

So, what’s the solution?

Make the ticket-buying experience as smooth and seamless as possible. 

When people can easily buy tickets for your event, they’re more likely to follow through! And the good news is that there are tools that streamline the ticket-buying process for both you and your guests. 

Take a look at Event Calendar App as an example. We’ll admit, we’re slightly biased towards our software — but with good reason. 

Unlike other event ticketing platforms, customers can register for your events directly from your website. 

That’s right — our system embeds straight into your existing site. This means that customers can buy tickets without being redirected. Talk about streamlining the buying process!

4) Use social media to your advantage

Social media is a big player in promoting your event and selling tickets. It helps you spread the word about your event, reach a wider audience, and engage with potential guests — all of which can boost ticket sales. 

But if you’re looking to sell tickets fast, there are certain tricks to the trade. Creating a buzz around your event when tickets go live is one of these tricks. 

This could involve: 

• Hosting a live stream to announce tickets are on sale.
• Launching a limited-time discount for early bird tickets.
• Videos from past events to show people what they miss out on if they don’t buy tickets. Again, it’s all about the FOMO! 
• Working with social media influencers to promote your event to a wider audience. 

You could also post updates ahead of the launch. For example, posting a countdown that announces when tickets are live. 

Essentially, it’s anything that encourages people to find out more and potentially buy tickets. 

Another useful tactic is using paid social ads. 

Promoting your event with ads helps you get in front of the right people, at the right time. 

You can set parameters on social channels to target people within your ideal demographic and who have similar interests to your followers. And, you can schedule ads to go live after the tickets are live. 

Two birds (and then some!) with just one stone.

5) Got an email subscriber list? Send emails! 

If you have a list of email subscribers, use it. After all, you have their emails for a reason, right? They’ve either been to one of your previous events or signed up for your emails because they’re interested in what you do. 

In other words, subscribers already have a connection to you and your event. Capitalize on this connection, and you’re in a much better position to boost ticket sales! 

One of the ways to do this is to create a nurturing email campaign - also known as a drip campaign. It involves sending emails to your subscribers at certain timeframes. 

For example, you might start by sending an email that notifies people that the event is happening. Then, an email to announce when tickets are going live. 

Finally, you send a reminder email before tickets are available to buy, and a final email on the day they’re live. Each email is carefully crafted to encourage people to buy event tickets.

How exactly do you convince people to buy tickets in your emails?

Similar to what we covered in the last section, these emails are all about creating a sense of urgency. You need to show subscribers why there’s absolutely no way they should miss your event! 

Add videos of previous events, outline all the amazing things they’ll experience, and really focus on why they won’t want to miss it

Take a look at this email as an example: 

Hey [insert name],

So, big news — 🎉 our next Samba workshop is happening on the 1st of September! 🎉

And trust us, you won’t want to miss it:

• Expert coaching from world-class professionals 💃 
• Suitable for all levels 🥳
• Devour authentic Brazilian food and drink 🤤
• Good vibes all round 👏

[Embed video from the last workshop]

Early-bird tickets go live on August 1st, and we’ve only got a limited number of spots. 

See ya there amigos! 

Think about the email subject line, too. You want to encourage people to open the email, so make it enticing. Otherwise, all your efforts in writing these emails (which, let’s face it, can be pretty boring) will be for nothing. 

Here are a few examples to get you started: 

• Don’t miss out: New Samba workshop is on the horizon! 
• Get early-bird access! Join our latest Samba workshop 💃
• Big news! Samba workshop coming this September 🕺

Get some more subject line inspo in our article about how to write event reminder emails!

6) Use scarcity to increase urgency 

People love things that are in short supply. Think about Glastonbury as an example. The hype around that event is wild! 

And yes, there are a lot of amazing acts and incredible things to do at the festival. But one of the biggest draws to the festival itself is whether you can actually get a ticket. People sign up months in advance and wait for hours on release day for the chance to get tickets. 

And why? Because there are only so many tickets. 

They’re in limited supply. 

Now, we know that it’s unlikely you’ll have the same amount of interest and Glastonbury (we can dream though!). But you can increase ticket sales by drawing attention to your limited amount of space. 

Here are some of our suggestions: 

• Let people know that your event only has a limited number of tickets available. Send them an email or post it on your social channels: “Limited tickets available! Only 50 spots 👀 Don’t miss out — sign up sooner rather than later!” 
• You can also post on social media or send email updates when you’re running low on tickets. Saying things like “Only 10 tickets left!” can ignite FOMO and encourage people to sign up. 
• Show people exactly how many tickets are available when they visit your website. That way, you might encourage an on-the-spot sale from someone who doesn’t want to miss out! 

Hot tip: You can use Event Calendar App to display how many tickets are available for your event! When people head to your website, they’ll instantly see the number of tickets available. And when the number gets low? They’ll be more inclined to secure their spot. 

Looking for a fast way to sell event tickets? Use Event Calendar App

Creating a sellout event is always the end goal. But how do you get there? That’s where tactics and strategy come into play. 

Use this article as a starting point to generate some excitement around your event and sell as many tickets as possible as soon as they go live. 

And if you need a way to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy tickets? Use Event Calendar App (that’s us —hi 👋). Sign up for a free trial to see what all the fuss is about.

Not sure if you've noticed, but Eventbrite is crazy expensive.

The kind of expensive where if you do the maths, it kind of makes you cry a little inside...

If if you sell 100 tickets at $20.00, Eventbrite is going to charge you roughly $328.

...Yep...$328.

I say roughly because trying to understand Eventbrite's pricing is a PHD required task in itself.

$328 to sell $2000 worth of tickets. That's over 16% of your revenue. Insane.

Eventbrite branding

The other issue with Eventbrite, is that it's all about them. Their branding is everywhere - smothering your own brand and leaving it gasping for air! It's all over your event page, and it's even all over the emails that get sent to your attendees.

Those attendees you worked hard to get - well Eventbrite wants to promote their other events to those attendees too.

So not only are you paying their extortionate fees, but you're also passing over attendee information for them to promote to.

Maybe this was ok in 2010...

Greener pastures

So you're here, reading this article and you're wondering...is the grass greener somewhere else? You'd be right in thinking so.

Now, if you've landed on this article from Google you've read a few of these lists already and heard about the same 5 products.

But, if I've learn't anything from the ticketing space in the last 7 years, it's that as soon as you mention the word 'ticketing platform' things seem to get mighty expensive. It's like mentioning the word 'wedding' when all you actually need is a nice big hall to host you and your friends.

So with that in mind, I've added a few unusual suggestions for you too.

10 alternatives to Eventbrite

1) Ticket Tailor

"You dream it. We'll ticket it."

The pros

The one you may have heard of before.

Ticket Tailor found it's origins in 2010 so it's been around for a while. I would describe it as the most Eventbrite like ticketing site that's not Eventbrite - if that makes sense. If you're familiar with Eventbrite, you're going to be right at home with Ticket Tailor.

It's very good at letting you build a page that people can buy your tickets from. That's their bread and butter, and they do it pretty damn well!

Ticket Tailor also gives you a nice, easy to understand 'back-end' where you can view your ticket purchases and see who's coming.

Ticket tailor seems to get very good reviews with most people being very happy with it.

The cons

The main con with Ticket Tailor is also it's strength. It's like Eventbrite. You make a page, external to your own website, and you then send traffic to that website to buy your tickets.

It still doesn't feel like part of your own website and brand.

I noticed Ticket Tailor does have some embedding options, but they still take your customer away to an external page to make the sale. Not ideal. But, if you don't already have your own website, then who cares.

The costs

$0.75 per ticket sold + payment processor fees

$0.28 per ticket sold (if pre pay) + payment processor fees

Free for free events

2) Typeform

"Make forms worth filling out"

The pros

Eh? I can almost hear you say it. "Isn't Typeform for making...forms?"

Yes, correct! But remember what I was saying about ticketing platforms and weddings? (Sorry, that is going to make no sense if you didn't read the start of the article).

Typeform enables you to make forms, we know that. But Typeform also lets you add payment options to your form (via their Stripe integration). This is great because this means you can create a form for selling tickets to your event.

What's even better, is that Typeform allows you to embed your forms on your website.

Sweet!

Turns out Typeform actually have a festival registration template here.

And the cost difference between using Eventbrite? Typeform charges $50.00 for 1000 responses.

I mean, I don't like to do back of handkerchief math but...this is a fraction the price of Eventbrite.

The cons

Typeform, of course, isn't a ticketing platform, so it's best kept to the simple use cases.

It doesn't have some of the features you might need like waitlists, ticket types, email confirmations, etc etc. BUT - if you need simple, and want cheap, then Typeform is a great alternative to Eventbrite.

The costs

Monthly subscription. Prices begin at $25 a month (+ payment processor fees) for 100 responses and scale up from there.

3) Stripe

"Financial infrastructure to grow your revenue"

The pros

Stripe is technically a payment processor. In fact, most of the ticketing platforms you know of actually use Stripe in the background, but add a bunch of fees on top.

However, over the years, Stripe has expanded it's offering and added more and more tools that can be used independently. One of these tools is Stripe Checkout.

I think Stripe Checkout is so good I actually wrote all about this here. Stripe Checkout is the absolute cheapest way of selling tickets.

I first heard about Stripe Checkout as a way to sell tickets when I was looking to attend a tech conference and noticed they were using it...

It blew my mind to see they were using Stripe directly so I had to dig in...

It's a surprisingly good way of selling tickets and has features like:

• A 'best in class' checkout experience for your customer. It's super slick!
• Add custom questions in the registration form.
• Tax options.
• Ability to brand the checkout experience.
• Send customers back to your website after checkout.
• Payment links to send to your attendees.
• Confirmation emails.
• Easily see who's coming.

The cons

Again, not technically being a ticketing platform, it lacks some of the features you might expect. It's also not the most user friendly product in the world at first and requires a bit of getting used to.

But, if you use Stripe already then it's a good option.

One of the major features I missed was a easy way to create ticket types. I couldn't find an easy solution for this.

The costs

Stripe costs vary from country to country, and vary depending on the countries of both sides of the transaction.

You can see Stripe's pricing here in your area.

In the UK it's around 2.9% + 30¢ depending on the card.

4) Paypal

The pros

Paypal - another payment processor. In fact, maybe the most famous in the world. Did you know Elon Musk was one of the original founders of Paypal? Anyway...

Paypal has something called their 'no-code' checkout.

The easiest way to access it is by going here:

https://www.paypal.com/buttons/

...and clicking on 'no-code checkout'. You need a Paypal business account for this.

I was on the fence about mentioning this because it is SUPER basic. Way more basic than Stripe checkout.

But - if you wanted to sell 100 tickets to an event, and every ticket is the exact same then Paypal could work well.

The cons

Like Stripe, because its actually a payment processor it's about a cheap as things can get. Don't expect any fancy features.

The costs

Unfortunately Paypal pricing is crazy complicated. There are so many different percentages and tiers that it is baffling.

It appears, from this very useful Shopify article that paypal charge 2.99% + a $0.49 fee when using their buy buttons (You would not believe the amount of research this took).

5) Shopify

"Making Commerce Better for Everyone"

The pros

Shopify works surprisingly well for selling tickets to events, workshops and classes.

It's not built for selling tickets, but it's perfectly usable.

Shopify has the concept of 'Products' and 'Variants'. These are, after-all, just words and if we imagine these as 'Events' and 'Ticket types' you can see how this could work.

Shopify also has a huge app store, so you can find a lot of functionality on there that you might be missing. For example our own Shopify App helps you get started selling tickets on Shopify.

The cons

The main downside of using Shopify to sell tickets is the fact that it's tricky to put together a list of people who have purchased a particular 'Product'. Which makes the task of finding out who's coming to a particularly event harder than it needs to be.

The costs

Shopify has a monthly fee starting at $29 a month and card rates that start at 2.9% + 30c. Their pricing page can be found here.

6) The Events Calendar (Wordpress plugin)

"Events made easy"

'The Events Calendar' is one of the original event calendar plugins for Wordpress. It has a HUGE feature set for selling tickets, and has every feature you could ever think off.

It's an old piece of software and has been around for a long time but it seems to be actively maintained and updated.

The pros

The Events Calendar is a one off purchase. Once you purchase their software you can use it forever (but you only get support for 1 year.).

The other nice thing about The Events Calendar is that they don't add any fees on top of the payment processors. This makes it a very cheap way to sell lots of tickets.

The cons

There's two main downsides to 'The Events Calendar'.

1. It only works with Wordpress. If you don't have Wordpress you're out of luck. And if you ever switch website platforms you'll have to change ticketing software.
2. It's 'self-hosted and requires some specialist Wordpress and server knowledge.

The main complaint I hear from customers using 'The Events Calendar' is that it makes their website slow...eugh! Not what we want.

This is because 'The Events Calendar' is software that you host on your own servers, like your Wordpress installation. Too often people install 'The Events Calendar' on servers that cannot handle the load.

The costs

'Events Calendar Pro' and 'Events Tickets Plus' costs $198 and comes with a year of support.

7) Acuity

Flexible scheduling software to help you succeed

The pros

Acuity is an interesting one!

When you visit their website, it doesn't strike you as something you would use to sell tickets to events. And I thought this too...

They aim their marketing at service businesses - hence the word 'appointments'.

But over the years I've seen more and more people selling tickets to classes, workshops and events on Acuity - so I had to have a look what the fuss was about.

Now, honestly, I think one of the main reasons for this is because it's owned by Squarespace, and Squarespace push Acuity a lot in their documentation - but...

When you dig into it Acuity does have most of the tools you would need to use it instead of Eventbrite. But, it requires a complete mindset shift when using it.

Acuity uses the term 'appointments' instead of 'events'. On the backend you use their calendar to create 'availability' for 'appointments' that your customers can then book on to. Phew...that's a lot to take in.

But if you have recurring events, like a workshop or classes this does actually make a lot of sense. It gives you an overview of all the events that you're running that you don't get if you're using Eventbrite where every event is a very separate 'thing'.

They also have a bunch of features like reminder emails, custom intake questions, client sms messages and integrations with Quickbooks and Freshbooks. Nice!

The costs

Acuity starts at $20 a month.

8) Thundertix

The best box office software for reserved seating events

Thundertix is the most 'corporate' looking ticketing product on this list. I'm not 100% sure corporate is the right word here, but Thundertix target larger businesses that might need their 'seating plan' functionality.

The pros

The main draw towards Thundertix over Eventbrite is their lack of ticketing fees. Instead of charging a percentage they charge a set amount per ticket depending on what plan you are on.

The cons

The downside of Thundertix is that it's a bit...early 2000's. The software could do with a makeover and is starting to feel very dated.

Despite that it has a HUGE number of different features, including more unusual things like being able to add advertisement slots to your event emails.

The costs

Starts at $1 per ticket sold and ramps up if you want more features.

9) Wix Events & Tickets (Wix plugin)

Event management platform for tickets & RSVPs

The pros

Wix tickets has a bunch of nice features, and integrates into your Wix website if you use Wix already.

Here's some of the features that Wix tickets provides:

• Check in guests with a dedicated app.
• Various ways to display the events on your website. The calendar view, if you've got a lot of events, is a nice one.
• The ability to create seating maps.
• Customise what the event tickets look like.

The cons

Maybe it's me. But I find Wix agonizingly slow to build a website. I'm using a top of the range Macbook Pro, a good internet connection and Wix. Is. So. Slow. Argh!

Switching between pages to set up tickets felt borderline painful. Hopefully this is something Wix will fix in the future.

I also didn't find Wix Events & Tickets to be very intuitive. When you're adding events, it automatically adds these to your website, and trying to figure out what was going on while dealing with Wix being so slow led to me having to stop and take some deep breaths...phew.

Seems I'm not the only one struggling as the app seems to have less than ideal reviews at the moment.

10) Event Calendar App

Your event calendar ticketing & registration platform

Ok, yes, you got me (in case it wasn't obvious). This is our own product so we're biased. But, I'll give you a genuine take on if we might be a good fit for you.

The pros

Event Calendar App is the only Eventbrite alternative built for your website.

But what do I mean by that?

It was literally built to be embedded on your website.

We wanted to build something that looked like it belongs on your website. As if you had a developer custom code you your own ticketing platform.

This means there's no linking back to our website with 'Eventbrite' written all over it. And emails that get sent to your attendees look like they come from...well...you!

Event Calendar App is specifically built for companies that run regular classes, workshops, courses or events.

If this is you, then Event Calendar App will be a great fit.

The cons

Event Calendar App probably isn't a great fit if you're running a one off event. Although you could still use it for this, you'll miss out on a lot of the benefits of the product.

It's also not a great fit if you don't already have your own website. Lots of the benefits of Event Calendar App are focussed around the fact that it adds the events to your website. Of course, without a website, you'll be missing out on this.

You've launched your event and the ticket sales are rolling in. The numbers on the screen are spinning as you sell ticket after ticket after ticket.

Life's good.

Grab that margarita, sit back and enjoy the good life. You've made it...

But then the day rolls around and attendance isn't quite what you expected. Hmm...

You notice there was a bunch of cancellations the day before...

And the attendees that have turned up don't seem very prepared. They're not wearing the right clothes and haven't brought the correct equipment with them.

What did you do wrong?

Here's what you think happens in your customers head:

1. They buy a ticket to your event.
2. All they do is think about your event until the day.
3. They turn up, ready and prepared.

Here's what actually happens:

1. They buy a ticket to your event.
2. Their phone/partner/dog/child/collegue/you-name-it calls for their attention and they're distracted with something else.
3. Life's busy. Your event slips towards the bottom of their priority list.
4. The day before the event, they remember in a state of panic that they said they'd come.
5. They turn up but they're unprepared and haven't thought about the event much. Or. Worse. They realise the day before they've double booked and cancel the event on you.

Yes, you could have a no-refund policy. And who cares if they turn up unprepared - that's their fault. But that sucks if you want to build a great events business. There's a good chance these customers wont book another event, and wont rave about you to their friends.

Let's make sure the attendees turn up, and not only turn up, but turn up prepared, ready to go and excited for your event.

The reminder email to the rescue

You've guessed where I'm heading from the title of this article, but a great reminder email works. It's that simple.

So many business owners feel bad about emailing their customers. This is something I've struggled with over the past 7 years. But don't. It's silly, and in this situation makes no sense what so ever.

I am telling you now, that 99% of your customers will have no issue with you sending them a couple of reminders. Yes, sure, they're going to get annoyed if you send 20, but 3-5 is not going to be a problem.

In fact - I would go as far to say that most people expect you to remind them.

What makes a great email reminder

Let's not make this complicated, because it's not.

The 'from' email address

Please, please, please do not send your reminder from noreply@yourcompanyname.com. If you do, it makes me a bit sad.

For top marks send it from yourname@yourcompanyname.com, or events@yourcompanyname.com.

If you're Sarah who runs 'London Yoga' - having the email come from sarah@londonyoga.com feels personal (which is great). If I have any queries I can hit the reply button on the email and you'll get my question.

Otherwise, here's what happens if you send it from a noreply address. I have to go hunting for your email address either on the email itself or back on your website. When I finally find it I then have to open a new email and copy in your details. All that when I could have just replied to the email.

The other advantage of allowing someone to reply to the reminder is that when they email you, you can see the exact event they are talking about.

The 'from' name

Obvious, maybe. But make sure the email has it's name set to you.

Sometimes if you're using a events or ticketing platform the reminder email will look like it's coming from the platform rather than you. Not good.

The subject

I'd recommend including the word 'reminder' right at the start of the subject.

The word reminder grabs your customers attention. It shows that they've signed up for something and this isn't a spam email.

The other important reason is a lot of email clients only show the first few words from the email subject. Here's my email client right now:

Notice how subjects more than 7 words long start to get cut off?

Everyone's email client will be different, but get that word 'reminder' right at the start.

The other thing you can do is add the time of the event in the subject too.

Here's a great example:

I'm looking through my emails for the day and I don't even need to open this reminder. I remember that I've got a course I've booked at 'Chieftain Training' on the 9th May.

6 reminder email subject ideas:

• "Reminder: {date of your event}"
• "Hey {customername}. Reminder for {event name} on {date of your event}"
• "See you soon - {date of event} "
• "Reminder: It's nearly time for {event name}"
• "Reminder: We can't wait to see you at {event name}"
• "Reminder: {event name} on {date}

You can tell I'm a big fan of putting 'Reminder' at the start right?

Fancy HTML vs plain text emails

This is where things get interesting.

So what do I mean by HTML vs plain text emails. Well here's a 'HTML' reminder email full of images, logos, custom styling and a bunch of other 'jazz'.

Looks nice and pretty right?

Whereas a plain text email is just that. Literally plain text - as if someone had manually typed it out.

Here's an example of a plain text reminder email:

Your instant reaction might be that the pretty email is better. We're humans, we like a shiny object. And you'd think your customers would prefer the pretty email too. But...

A fascinating study by Hubspot found that people prefer HTML emails but are more likely to open a plain text email.

...people prefer HTML emails but are more likely to open a plain text email.

It's worth re-reading that sentence because it doesn't appear to make sense. But it's true.

HTML emails had a 25% decreased open rate and adding gifs decreased open rates by a massive 37%.

Hubspot's best guess is this is because HTML emails are more likely to get flagged as spam or filtered out of the main inbox.

This is crazy important as it means if we want the best chance of someone seeing our reminder email - then we should send it as plain text.

If you're a marketer this is painful to read and I know you want to slap your branding everywhere. But. For the absolute best chance of the reminder getting seen, send it plain text.

The two things that the contents of a great email reminder should contain:

1) The details of the event

The most important two items to include are:

• The name of the event your reminding them of
• The time they need to attend

Sounds obvious right? Here's an email I got recently for a reminder to get my car MOT'd (a car check we have to do in the UK):

Any idea what this email is trying to tell me? Because I haven't got a clue.

Combine those two essential items with some friendly text, and you're half way there.

"Hey {customer name},

Just a friendly reminder that your London Yoga class begins on the 2nd September 2024 at 5:00pm.

We can't wait to see you there.

The London Yoga Team"

If that's the only thing you send for your reminder then that's a 6/10 from me. It's super simple and gets the point across perfectly.

2) Anything they need to know to prepare for the event

There's nothing worse than turning up to an event unprepared.

I have a memory etched into my brain where I turned up to my first dinghy sailing lesson without a wetsuit. Imagine gloomy England, cold, in the rain, out on a reservoir in a tiny sailing boat. It was freezing and we were all soaked to the skin from the rain. After performing a 'accidental gybe' (a sailing manoeuvre you're not supposed to do ) I managed to fall out of the boat into the water. Without a wetsuit.

You can imagine that this was not a pleasant experience. I could have easily never got back into a dinghy after that.

Don't let your attendee turn up without a wetsuit (so to speak).

One of the best ways we can do this is to remind them how to prepare for the event in every single email we send them.

This reminder that I referenced earlier is a great example:

This is for a sailing course, and so there's a lot of things to remember, lots of equipment you need to bring and lots of potential questions the attendee probably has. Putting these things into a checklist is a really nice idea.

Software for sending reminder emails for your events

So you could always send these emails manually, but you can imagine this is going to get tiring pretty fast. So maybe don't do that.

Most event software will have some sort of way to send reminders to events that you set up. Here's some important features you should look out for (all based on what I've said before):

• Can you choose how often and how many reminders get sent?
• Can you customise the reminder email to also include information around being prepared for the event?
• Can you set the reminder email to be plain text?
• Can you set the reminder email to get sent from you?
• Can you set the name of the reminder email to be your business?

In this example we'll use Event Calendar App to automate a reminder email.

Yes, hands up 🙌 this is our own software (if that wasn't already obvious), but it works pretty well and it satisfies all the criteria mentioned above.

Event Calendar App has a feature called 'Workflows'. This lets you schedule all sorts of emails, not just reminders, but we'll do reminders for now.

Head to the workflows page:

Click create a workflow.

Click the plus icon above 'Event starts'. This lets you schedule an email to send before the event starts.

When writing the reminder email, remember all our previous things that make a reminder email great.

All event reminders in Event Calendar App are plain text, helping you get the best open rate possible.

5 example email event reminders from real businesses

1. A reminder of a booking for a stay at a treehouse

Subject:  Check in details - Poppy Treehouse Stay

Ok, I agree, not technically an event, but all the same rules still apply. This is a nice example because it lists everything we need to have a great stay, while also reminding us of the booking.

It's also all the plain text, which I love.

There is potentially a bit of information overkill going on. Try not to overload your customer with information.

2. A reminder about a Lululemon yoga class

Subject: Message to attendees of lululemon Manchester - Sweat, Grow and Connect.

This is a mixed bag. It shows one of the biggest downsides of using a platform like Eventbrite. Their branding is all over this. Eugh.

However, I love that the first thing your eye sees is bring your own matt. This is great as it's an essential part of the attendee having a good experience at the event.

3. Chieftain training (electronics training course)

Subject: Reminder: Thursday, 9 May 2024 9:15

This one is also a mixed bag. They've basically just re-sent the entire confirmation email which isn't really necessary. It kind of feels a bit lazy on that front.

I only care about the first 10% of the email.

4. Solent Boat Training (Sailing course reminder)

Subject: Booking Reminder for Southampton RYA Training Courses

This is the third time you've seen this email now. It's honestly one of my favourites.

• It's plain text
• Tells you the course is 7 days away. (Although an actual event date would be nice here).
• A check list. This is such a nice way of breaking things up when the attendee needs to do a lot of things before they turn up to the course

5. Fallen Willow Sauna

Subject: Upcoming event reminder

A good example. Tells me when the event is, and a bunch of information relevant to making the most of my experience.

The perfect event reminder email

So based on everything above, here's how I'd template the perfect event reminder email:

From name: Your business

From email: name@yourbusiness.com

Subject: Reminder - {event name} is happening on {date}

Content:

Hi {customer name},

Just a friendly reminder that {event name} starts at {event time}. We can't wait to see you there.

Here's some information to make sure you get the most out of your experience:

{Everything the attendee needs to know to get the most out of your event. Don't overwhelm them, only what's most important}

Thanks,

{Your company name}

How many times to send a reminder email

If you're not a marketer a good rule that works well is however many times you think, plus one. That accounts for your bias to send it less than you actually should (because you think your bothering people).

Aim to send at least 2 reminders for your events. Or three if the person is booking way ahead. Something like this:

• 1 week before
• 3 days before
• 24 hours before

Online events particularly benefit from a reminder much closer - even 10 minutes before! How many times have you remembered a zoom meeting because you got the 10 minute reminder!

Registration forms - not always the most exciting topic is it?

Probably not something you should bring up at a party if you're trying to impress someone anyway...but...

Hear me out. Sit down while I tell you this...

Picture your ideal attendee to your event...imagine him or her in your head. Let's call this person 'Jordan'.

Jordan is not coming to your event if the registration form looks like someone made it in 1999 and it requires Jordan to free up an entire evening to fill it out.

This is the start of your attendee's experience at your event.

Registrations forms are like that quiet guy at the party that no one really knows about, but he organised everything and he's the whole reason you're there! Without him, all this would have been impossible.

Creating a registration form isn't a chore. This isn't doing the washing up. You're about the create the digital red Ferrari that's going to chauffeur your guests to your event.

Ready to learn how to create that beautiful red Ferrari? Let's go...

What makes a event registration form suck

So what makes a good registration form?

Sometimes it's easier to turn things on their head and ask the opposite. What makes them suck?

Lean in. I'm about to tell you the number one thing that makes it a thousand times less likely that a person will complete a registration form.

Too many fields. Too many questions. This is the cardinal sin of event registration forms, do not do it.

Ask only what you absolutely need. And then, re-check the form and double check it's exactly the minimum you need to ask.

Do you really need their home address?

Do you really need their phone number?

Do you really need to know if they want your bacon flavoured snacks?

Every. Single. Field. Creates. Friction.

If you want someone to register, give them as little friction as possible.

There's a good chance that someone will fill out a form that looks like a Blobfish (Google 'Blobfish' if you're on your lunch break) as long as they can do it quickly.

Information that they don't care about

Another thing that makes registration forms suck is adding information that your customer doesn't care about at this point in the journey.

I've seen forms that contain information like:

"Once you get here, take the second door to the right"

Or pre-class instructions:

"Don't forget to bring your wet weather gear and a packed lunch"

Your attendee does not give a monkeys (pardon my British slang) about this sort of thing yet. They haven't even said they're coming yet.

Give them this sort of information after they have signed up for the event.

The one bit of information they might care about

The one thing they might care about, is what is going to happen after they register. You might choose to add something like:

"After you register, we will send you a confirmation email to confirm".

That's it. That's all you need.

What makes a event registration form drive like a Ferrari?

Ok, now we've got that out of the way, what actually makes an event registration form great?

• It looks great. And doesn't look like a Blobfish (last chance to Google).
• It's simple, and easy to use. You're Grandma should be able to use it, all while she's shouting at your Grandad for having the TV too loud.
• It works on mobile. 60.67% of internet traffic comes from a mobile phone. Let's make sure it works for these people.
• It should inspire trust.

This last point is very important. It's only second to:

Every. Single. Field. Creates. Friction.

(last time I mention that).

It should inspire trust.

Inspire trust? What does that even mean - the form isn't a person...

Yes, true...but...

Everyone is super careful with their personal data these days. Remember - there's still people who wont even buy from Amazon because they think they're going to be scammed. You should make sure your form is friendly to even these people.

So how do we do that?

One of the best things you can do, if people are finding your event registration form on your website, is make sure they can actually fill out the form on your website.

Do not send them to website-they-have-never-heard-of.com and hope that 1. they're going to fill out the form and 2. they're ever going to come back to your website.

Most good tools for building event registration forms allow you to embed the form on your own website. Do that.

If you really must send them to a third party website to fill in your form, make sure it's branded as much as possible. Make sure your logo, any images, and any other branding is all there. This helps to create trust.

If someone trusts your form, they're going to feel comfortable sharing personal information and your more likely to get a registration. Bingo!

Ok, now we know what makes an event registration form great, let's get our hands dirty...

(Actually) Creating an event registration form

I'm going to be using our tool for this, Event Calendar App.

We make it easy for you to add your events to your website, and build simple, beautiful, event registration forms that satisfy everything I've spoken about in this article.

Hands up, I'm plugging my own tool here. But we've spent a lot of time getting this right. If you want a free alternative, I'd go for something like Google Forms. But that's not going to have a lot of the fancy features I'm about to speak about.

Once you've signed up to Event Calendar App, you should see a dashboard that looks like this:

Click 'Create a widget'. The widget is the 'thing' that you'll embed on your website which will allow your customers to register.

Remember what we were saying earlier about the importance of the registration form being on your own website? I built Event Calendar App from the ground up to do this.

The next thing to do is to create an event. You can edit this later, but let's add in some basic information about the event. Let's give the attendee all the information they need to know what they're signing up to.

Once you've done that click 'Add event'.

Once you've done that you should see your event on the right hand side.

Sweet!

Now, remember what I was saying earlier about branding, and the importance of images?

Let's add some images to the event.

On the left, click the appearance tab.

Scroll down a little, and you'll see you can add a thumbnail and primary image. Let's add an image for each of these.

The other thing I did was head to the theme settings and chose a theme that I preferred.

I ended up with something that looks like this:

Nice!

Ok we've created the event, but now let's create the event registration form.

Creating the event registration form in Event Calendar App.

Click on the event. Then click 'RSVP/Tickets' and then 'Allow RSVP/Tickets' for this event.

Once you've done that you should see a button appear next to your event.

Clicking this button will then open up a form.

This is the exact form your customers will see when they register for you event.

That's it. Simple.

• Name
• Email
• How many people are coming?

Sometimes that's all you need, and that's ok. Someone can complete this form in about 10 seconds flat.

Asking more questions

If you do need to ask further questions as part of the registration you can use the 'RSVP form fields' functionality.

Remember, keep things simple, and only click 'Required' if it is absolutely essential.

Embed your event registration form

The final thing to do - embed the 'widget' on your website.

Click 'Embed Instructions'...

...and then copy code.

You can then paste this code onto your website. The rest is magic, and you'll have an embedded even ready for people to register to.

Your setup.

That's it. You've created a registration form for your event and your attendees can now register.

After registration (the making of the Ferrari)

Remember me talking about your registration form being a Ferrari?

Well at the moment you've made an Audi a3. It's nice. It's respectable. People see you drive past and they approve. But - we can do better...

We now know this person wants to come to your event. This is a big change compared to the person we thought they were 5 minutes ago.

We now know there's a bunch more information that they want.

Those pre-class instructions that we spoke about earlier, they care about those now.

They probably also care about a bunch of other stuff:

• Pre-class instructions.

What do they need to know about the event to have the best experience? What should they expect? Do they need to bring anything?

• Reminders

Your attendee is very busy. They signed up to your event and then went to watch a Youtube video about mowing their grass (just me?) straight after. Reminding them about your upcoming event is so important.

Don't feel bad about reminding them. Remember they signed up, they probably don't want to miss the event, so remind them.

• Post event messages

This is a great time to schedule a 'thanks for coming' message for after the event. These are great for gathering feedback so you can improve your event for the future.

But how do we actually give them this information?

Event Calendar App Workflows

Event Calendar App allows you to create 'Workflows'. These are a set of messages scheduled to send around the lifecycle of the event.

What do I mean by lifecycle?

Let's take a look at an empty 'Workflow' in Event Calendar App:

You've got three 'triggers' as part of the event lifecycle:

1. The customer purchases a ticket or registers.
2. The event begins.
3. The event ends.

Event Calendar App allows you to send scheduled emails before or after any of these points in time.

You can simply click the 'plus' icons at the point in time you want to send the message.

When we add the messages mentioned above it might look something like this:

You built the Ferrari of event registration forms

You smashed it.

A quick recap of what you've just achieved:

• You built a clean, easy to use event registration form.
• It's embedded on your website, and looks trustworthy.
• You've automated messages to be sent after the attendee registers, to give them more information at the time they need it.

There's a secret that the big ticketing platforms don't want you to know...

Would you like to avoid the huge fees ticket platforms charge?

Does the idea of paying 'big corp' (Eventbrite) huge sums keep you awake at night?

Well it turns out that it's actually possible to sell tickets to your events directly with Stripe - cutting out the middleman. It's probably the cheapest method available today to sell your event tickets online. I'm serious - I challenge you to find a way of selling tickets cheaper than this.

I'll show you a quick example so you can see how stark this difference is. I'll pretend you're selling 100 tickets at £20.00 each.

In the UK, Eventbrite would charge you a £19 per month service fee plus 6.95% + £0.59 per sold ticket. Based on some quick math on the back of my notepad, Eventbrite is going to charge you £217 to sell these tickets.

Let me repeat that. £217 to sell £2,000 worth of tickets. Over 10% of your revenue. Insanity.

An Eventbrite (and the other ticketing platforms) alternative.

Stripe, our knight in shining armour, rides in from the distance and only charges only 1.5% + 20p. This works out to about £50.

£50. That's it. Would you rather pay £50 or over four times more to Eventbrite?

Ok, I'll stop picking on Eventbrite now, as they are one of the worst offenders, but you get my point.

Stripe is a dirt-cheap way of selling tickets. But why is this? There's rarely a free lunch when it comes to selling things on the internet.

Why is Stripe the cheapest way to sell event tickets?

Stripe is a 'payment platform'. Their main job is to enable payments on the internet and most ticketing platforms actually use something like Stripe in the background.

So in a way the 'ticketing platforms' add on fees and act like a middleman between you and the payment provider. This is necessary because they give you all the features that you need to actually sell tickets. And having access to a payment provider on its own isn't usually much use.

Introducing Stripe Checkout

What's interesting about Stripe is that they provide some basic tools called Stripe Checkout. And Stripe Checkout allows you to sell tickets using their platform directly. No 'middleman' at all. Sweet!

So what's the catch? Yes, there's always a catch...

Stripe Checkout is somewhat basic. It's doesn't provide you with all the bells and whistles that a specialised ticketing platform does. But. If you're willing to deal with this, or your needs are in-fact, basic, then you can save a bag of cash.

How to sell event tickets with Stripe Checkout.

Head to Stripe and setup an account, if you don't have one already.

Stripe has a fairly vigorous onboarding process. But when you're in you should see a dashboard that looks something like this:

The next thing to do is create a 'product'. This will be the tickets that we sell. Click on 'More' on the left and then 'Product catalogue'.

This will take us to the Product catalogue page. Once you're on this page click 'Add product'.

You should then see the 'Add a product' modal.

There's a bunch of different options here. Here's the main things we care about for tickets:

• The name of the product should be the name of the event plus the ticket type. Something like this works well 'Your Business Conf - General Admission'. That makes it super clear for the customer what they'll be buying.
• Add an image. It's a simple way of making the checkout page look 10x better for your customer. It makes the checkout page look more 'trustworthy' and increases conversion.
• Change the type from recurring -> one-off. This is super important. Otherwise you're going to be accidentally creating monthly subscriptions which you don't want.

I know what you might be thinking here. What to do if I want to sell different tickets types? There's not a solution for this directly in Stripe, but more on this later...

Once you've created the product, click on it on the dashboard. This will take you to the product page.

Once you're on the product page, look for the 'Create payment link'. This is going to create the magic we're looking for!

You should now be on the 'Create a payment link' page, which is where things start to get exciting!

The preview on the right is an exact replica of what your customers will see when they try to buy one of your tickets. Your customers will temporarily leave your website and go to this page. So, it's best to brand it as much as possible to make them feel comfortable.

Notice how on the checkout page we're currently missing the company logo. Let's fix this.

Head to the 'branding' page within Stripe. This enables you to add icons, logos and brand colours to all your payment pages.

Again, this is really important to do because it helps to create trust. Unfortunately Stripe Checkout is a link that takes the user away from your website. Anything we can do to maintain that 'link' between your website and Stripe Checkout is good. It's going to help increase trust and the conversion rate.

After doing this, head back to the product catalogue page. Click your product and click back to 'Create payment link'.

Here's what mine now looks like:

Much better. You've now got your brand colours and logo. Perfect.

Adding custom fields to Stripe Checkout

A nice feature when selling event tickets with Stripe is the ability to add custom fields. This is super useful if you need to collect extra information like dietary requirements, where they heard about you, that kind of thing.

Custom fields is an option hidden under 'Advanced options'.

There's a important point here though. The more questions you ask of your user, the less likely they are to convert. It's proven that customers are more likely to complete smaller and simpler forms. You need to balance this out against the effort of chasing information after they have signed up.

After purchase options

The final thing to set up is what happens once your customer has purchased a ticket. Click the 'After payment' option to configure:

There's two options here:

1. Show a confirmation page

This is the most basic option and is easy to setup. After payment, Stripe will show a success page.

2. Redirect them back to your website

This method is much better, and ideally what you want to do. Just showing a confirmation page is bad as there's a very high chance your customer wont go back to your website. These are your paying customers - don't throw them away at this stage. You could be leaving money on the table here as it's likely they would be willing to buy more from you.

Redirecting them back to your website also allows you to do conversion tracking. If you're using something like Google Analytics this is pretty easy to do.

When redirecting customers back to your website, don't direct them back to your homepage. Create a page, even if very basic, that explains that you have received their payment and will be expecting them at the event.

Finishing up...

Once you're done with the different options, hit the 'Create link' button:

Your payment link has been created and you should now see a page that looks like this:

There's two main methods to let your customers buy tickets:

1. Embed Stripe Checkout on your website

This method uses the 'Buy button' option. Unfortunately Stripe Checkout is never truly embedded on your website. In reality it's just a link that links your customers to the Stripe Checkout page. Ideally, as I mentioned before, you'll direct them back to your website once they have completed the purchase.

2. Use the link to allow your customers to buy tickets

This is great if you're just sending out a email blast, or if you want to code your own website button that links to the checkout page.

Turn on Stripe confirmation emails

The last thing you're going to want to do when selling tickets with Stripe is turning on confirmation emails. Otherwise, when your customer buys a ticket they're going to have no payment record which is going to cause Mr Customer to be Mr Confused Customer. And no one likes an angry customer!

Head to your customer email settings in Stripe and ensure 'Successful payments' is turned on.

You're all setup.

All that's left to do now, is let your customers know about your event. Using the two methods above, you should be able to add a button to your website (if you have one) and email a link out to potential attendees.

The attendee purchasing experience

So what happens once someone purchases a ticket I hear you say? Great question!

Do customers receive a confirmation email?

Yep. It's basic but at least your customers have a record of the purchase. It looks something like this:

How can I see who's coming to my event?

This is a little convoluted, but bare with me. Head to your 'Product catalogue' page, click on the 'product'. Then click 'View payment link'.

The click 'Payments and analytics'. It looks like this:

Under 'Recent payments', this will give you a list of all the payments in relation to this product. Or in other words, all the attendees to your event! You can click into each one to see more details and answers to any 'custom fields' that may have been asked.

What about if I want to sell multiple ticket types?

Good question...

What about if I want to send event email reminders?

Also a good question...

What if I don't want to send people away from my website?

...

Ok, this Stripe Checkout solution is basic I agree. It's not really made for selling tickets to events, but it does work if your needs are pretty basic.

If you're looking for something a bit next level, you might be interested in a tool I made called Event Calendar App. It fills in all the gaps that using just Stripe is missing out on here - and more. Cool stuff like:

• A embedded Event Calendar on your website to display all your events. It's pretty sweet, and looks like this. It goes straight on your website:

• No sending your precious customers off somewhere else. Registration happens on your website.

• A beautiful, easy to use interface for seeing all your attendees:

• And a 'workflow' builder, so you can send automatic email reminders, pre-event instructions, post event surveys, that kind of thing.

Oh, and it all uses Stripe in the background still. So we're able to pass on those delicious low fees.

So maybe your business or community has got its events in an Outlook calendar?

And you're looking to get these events into the world?

Let's make it happen.

What does it mean to publish your Outlook calendar?

Microsoft uses this term 'publish' and what it effectively means is 'make public'. When you add an event into your outlook calendar, it's protected so that only you can see the details. Makes a lot of sense when it's private.

When you publish your calendar you are consenting to make the calendar readable to people who don't have your outlook login details.

Publishing your calendar exposes it to the wider internet. And this is exactly what we want to do so we can share it.

How to publish your Outlook calendar?

Head to your outlook calendar. This could be either a Live.com calendar or an Office 365 calendar. It should look something like this:

On the left you'll see your different calendars. All of your events belong to one of these. When we publish, we publish each calendar individually.

It would be really nice here if we could simply right click the calendar name and click publish! But never mind.

Head to the top right of the screen and click the cog icon.

It will open a menu and at the bottom is the option to 'view all outlook settings'. Click this.

In the menu that now opens, click 'Calendar' and then 'Shared calendars'.

Towards the bottom of this page are the options to publish a calendar.

Select your calendar -> select 'Can view all details' and then select publish.

That's it, your calendar is published!

How to share your Outlook Calendar

Underneath you'll see that Outlook gives you two ways to share the calendar.

1. Via HTML
2. Via ICS

The HTML option gives you a link to a webpage with the calendar on. You could then share this link to people in your community or business.

The ICS link can be used to allow people to subscribe to your calendar. This means they can plug that URL into their own calendar application (such as Apple calendar) and it will show your events inside that.

For example, in the Apple Calendar app you can add a 'new calendar subscription'. You could then add the ICS url to subscribe to a live feed of your published calendar.

Is that it? I'm feeling a little underwhelmed with these sharing options.

I don't blame you.

Sending your organisation a HTML or ICS link to share your events doesn't exactly strike inspiration into our souls does it.

One of the best things you can do to make this whole thing much smoother is to embed your Outlook calendar into your website.

How to embed outlook calendar onto your website

Unfortunately Outlook doesn't offer any official way to embed your calendar into your website.

If you have some HTML knowledge, you could add an iframe to your website that loads the HTML version of the published calendar. The code would look something like this:

'<iframe src="[your html calendar url here]"></iframe>'

However, you don't get any options to customise the design of the calendar.

My guess is that if your embedding your Outlook calendar on your website, you want something that's going to be an asset to your image, not go against it.

This is why we built Event Calendar App.

Using Event Calendar App you can embed your Outlook calendar on your website in a way that looks great. Let's take a look how that works.

Event Calendar App allows you to create a beautiful calendar for your website. Crucially, it allows you to import events from your Outlook calendar.

Once you've created an account head to the calendar sync section.

Here you can connect your ICS URL. (Remember that URL that we got earlier from the publish section of the Outlook calendar?)

Once you've done this, you can use the power of Event Calendar App editor to make your events look great.

You can do things like add images to your events, allow your customers to subscribe to the calendar, and there's even a full RSVP/Ticketing system you can take advantage of.

Once you've created your Event Calendar, click 'Embed Instructions' on the left. This will give you a snippet of code you can copy and paste on your website.

Job done! Now grab yourself a cup of tea and congratulate yourself.

Your number 1 aim is to deliver a great experience for your attendee.

If you deliver a great experience the odds of them returning increase 10 fold.

If you deliver a great experience, they'll tell their friends, family, and you'll be the talk of the town (maybe that last one's a push, but you never know!).

The emails you send to your attendee are a huge part of their experience. They should butter them up, get them excited, prepared and ready for what's to come.

Let's dive in.

The confirmation email

When you think of a confirmation email, do you feel excited inside? Probably not. Confirmation emails can serve as just that if you want them to - confirmation.

A boring acknowledgement that they didn't click the wrong button on your website, and have in fact booked the event.

Or - they could be something full of excitement, and useful information about the event. Something that's going to ensure they get the most out of your experience.

Let's have a look at the absolute minimum that a confirmation email should contain:

• Their name
• The date and time of the event
• The location of the event

That's it. If you want, that could be your email.

But my guess is, you're reading this and looking for some ideas to make it more useful and exciting.

Ok, I've got something to tell you. One of the most important things about confirmation emails.

There's a good chance your attendee hasn't read all the event details before booking.

Can you believe it. You spent all that time writing about the event on your website, and they can't even be bothered to read it? Humans eh!

There's a good chance your dear attendee read to the point where they realised they wanted to come. Stopped. And then booked.

The confirmation email is the place to drive home all the essential information they need to know. The information that they need to get the best experience from your event.

There's a good chance that this could involve a lot of content. But remember, you're not selling the event any more. You're not telling them why they should come. You're telling them what to do before they come.

For example. I love sailing, and over the past few years I've booked a couple of sailing courses with my local school.

In the school's emails they emphasise how important it is to have the correct clothing. This is because sailing in the rain is utter misery when you don't have the correct equipment. Without the gear the attendee (me) is going to have a miserable experience.

If there's many things your attendee needs to know and do, break it down for them. Explain step by step in the most simple way you can, even if some things sound obvious. For example the confirmation for a sailing course could include something like this:

Your checklist:

1. Ensure you have the correct all weather gear (we promise it's miserable without this).
2. Book your car parking with the marina.
3. Check you have adequate health insurance.
4. Read all the course information, to ensure you have the pre-requisite experience.

Doing just this will make your confirmation email in the top 95% and help ensure your attendee has a great time.

So what else can we put in the confirmation that's going to be useful?

Details of tickets and what they have paid for

If there's anything that I hate, it's having to log back into the organiser's website to see exactly what i've paid for. Include it in the email, so your attendee can check things quicker.

Add to calendar links

These are great, because guess what. In about 10 minutes your attendee is going to shift focus onto something else. The car insurance spam arrives and buries your email.

There's one way to ensure your attendee doesn't forget about your event. And that's to get it inside their calendar.

You might need the help of some software here, Event Calendar App for example.

A way for them to get back in touch with you

This is important.

Do not send your confirmation email from a noreply email address.

I repeat, do not send your confirmation email from a noreply email address.

If your attendee has an issue, or a question, allow them to reply directly to the confirmation address.

At the very least, include your contact email in the body of the confirmation message. Although ideally, please, send your confirmation email from an address they can reply to.

Ok, so after all is said and done, here's what all the best confirmation emails should include:

• Their name
• The date and time of the event
• The location of the event
• Any essential details that they need to know before the event. Even if this means you have to borderline repeat your entire event description again, do it.
• Details of the tickets they purchased and any cost.
• Add to calendar link
• Your contact information.

The reminder email

Reminder emails are essential. Particularly for events that allow bookings more than a week into the future.

I don't know about you, but sometimes I struggle to remember what I did yesterday - never mind remember about an event that I booked 3 months ago.

You might be someone who's super organised. Maybe you have a calendar that you update ruthlessly, but you're in the minority.

There has been so many times where I've booked things, particularly those more than 30 days into the future (dentist appointments I am looking at you) and relinquished them to my future-self brain. AKA, to be forgotten.

What's great about a reminder email is it says "Hey you, this event you booked a while ago is happening soon, get ready for it".

It's so easy to forget that none of your attendees will be thinking about your event any where near as much as you are.

Reminder emails have saved my ass so many times, and they'll save you too. Save you from your customers forgetting about your event.

So what should you include in a reminder email?

Keep it simple and repeat the confirmation email minus the payment details. Change the introduction to something like:

"Hey Dave, are you ready for Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling? It starts in 7 days."

Side track. Did you know Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling is this crazy event we have in the UK where people chase cheese down a steep hill? Yep, it usually involves a lot of broken arms and legs.

Create urgency and give them a clear deadline for when they need to be at your event.

The format will look something like this:

• Their name including days/hours until the event. Create urgency.
• The date and time of the event
• The location of the event
• Any essential details that they need to know before the event. Even if this means you have to borderline repeat your entire event description again, do it.
• Add to calendar link
• Your contact information.

When and how often to send the reminder email

Sending more than 2 reminder emails starts to feel like spam, so max it out at that.

As an attendee, I like to receive reminder emails 7 days before and then 48 hours before. This depends on your event, and how much preparation the attendee needs to do. If they need to do more prep, remind them further in advanced.

The thank you email

Thank you emails serve two very important purposes:

1. We're human, and acknowledgment is always nice. Thank them for coming.
2. A way to collect feedback.

But at the same time, it's the event email that you're the most unmotivated to send. The event is over, you've collected the money, everyone's happy (as far as you're aware), so all good. But you'll be missing out on those two huge benefits.

A way to say thanks

A good, thank you email only needs to include:

• Their name
• Thanks for coming message

That's it. It's so simple but it's such a nice touch.

If you want to blow your attendee's mind, and go the extra mile, send them a personalised thank you email:

Hey Dave,

Thanks so much for coming to Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling.

We heard about your broken arm and leg. So sorry about that. Those guys at the bottom of the hill really need to get better at catching people. We'll train them up for next time.

Thanks Dave,

Cooper and the Cheese Rolling Team

A way to collect feedback.

The second advantage of a thank you email is that it's the best place to ask for feedback.

Remember what I mentioned earlier? It's so important that a reply is possible to your sending email address. That has such a big effect here. You can say something like:

"Please feel free to hit reply, and let us know about how you found the event. We would love to hear from you"

You can also use a third party app to create a survey, and ask your attendees to complete it.

Here's the format of an ideal thank you email:

• Their name
• Tell them they're the best for attending ❤️
• Ask for some feedback

Don't overthink it

That's it. Smash the above and you'll be better than 99% of the event organisers out there.

Don't get bogged down thinking that you need to create some fancy html email template either.

Fancy email templates create headaches. It's horrendous to create email templates that look correct on the 1000 different email apps out there.

Most people prefer to receive simple, plain text emails. Start today and keep it simple.

Looking for a tool to help you market your events? Give Event Calendar App a try.

Does your business have events? Do you have a calendar your customer can subscribe to? If not then you're crazy. 🙈

Ok, I'm being abrupt. But what you're missing out on is one of the easiest ways to ensure your customers know when your events are.

If your customers know when your events are, they are way more likely to attend! Who knew!

What is a subscription calendar?

A subscription calendar is a list of events that someone can 'subscribe to' on their own device.

The important word here is 'subscribe'. You may have seen 'add to calendar' buttons on various websites and apps before, but this is different.

An add to calendar button, adds an event to their calendar. Once it's there, it's static, never to change - even if the event changes.

A subscription calendar is dynamic. When you update one of the events, let's say the start time of the event, it will update on all the subscribed devices.

So what are these 'devices' that people use to subscribe? Well it's usually their own calendar application. They can see your events right there in their own calendar. Updating every time you update the event in the list. Mind blown.

Compare this to if your events are currently on your website. To see your events currently your customer has to, open their browser -> browse to your website -> click through your navigation and find your events.

Once they've found your events they'll apply your event times to memory and hope they remember. This just doesn't work.

How to I make a subscription calendar?

There's lots of ways you can make one.

First of all, your events need to be inside some sort of application.

People subscribe to the list of events created by the application.. You'll manage and update your events inside the application. The application then tells it's subscribers about any updates.

Google Calendar

Google calendar is one way to do this. It's not the easiest but it's free.

Head to Google Calendar and start adding in your events. Once you've done that, look for your calendar name on the left. Click the three little dots, and click 'settings and sharing'

A little down the page, you will see the option to make the calendar public. Check this.

Scroll down again and you will see a URL called 'Public address in iCal format'. This is the URL that you can send to your customers so they can subscribe to your events.

The exact way that your customer uses this URL depends on which application they are using to subscribe. In my Apple Calendar, for example, I click File -> New Calendar Subscription.

Fantastic, we have made a subscription calendar!

One issue though. How do your customers see your events on your website? It's great they can subscribe, but you'll still need a way to display your events on your website.

That's why we built Event Calendar App.

Yep, I'll be honest. I love Event Calendar App for building a subscription calendar, but I'm biased as I built it. But I know you'll love it too.

Event Calendar App lets you build a beautiful Event Calendar for your website that your customers can subscribe to. It helps you create this great flow:

1. Customer sees your events on your website.
2. They love what you do and want to stay updated.
3. So they click subscribe, and get all your events straight in their calendar. And of course, everything magically updates for them, when you update your events.

The great thing with this solution is there's no need to send out a URL and ask your customer to subscribe. They browse through your events, and click subscribe if they're interested.

Oh, and Event Calendar App gives you analytics, so you can see how many people have subscribed.

That's it folks. I hope that gave you the absolute down-lo on what a subscription calendar is. If not, send us a message and we'll see if we can help.

So you're looking for a new embeddable calendar for your website? You know we've got the goods. 👍

What do we mean by embeddable?

We all know that coding is so 2021.

An embeddable calendar means you don't need to know how to code to use it. You can configure it in an easy to use 'dashboard' and copy and paste it onto your website.

There's a whole bunch of 'javascript' based calendars that are available. But, these are more complicated to install and require you to have a basic understanding of code.

The other benefit, of an embeddable calendar, is that you can add them to website builders. Most of the solutions below will work with Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and Wordpress.

The 8 best embeddable calendars

Ok, I put my hands up, you may have noticed but we actually created a product just like this ourselves. Let me tell you why you might want to use it, and then I'll tell you about all the other options available. I like to be fair like that.

I'm not sure it's entirely wise to tell you about all our competitors (note to myself, it's probably not). But I hope it'll help you decide which product works best for you. And if you still choose us then it'll be a match made in heaven. ❤️

1) Event Calendar App (ECA)

At Event Calendar App our mission is to make promoting and selling your events, on your own website, easy. There's two parts to this:

1. The visual editor

We give you a visual editor to make a beautiful, embeddable Event Calendar for your website. You can craft an event calendar with no coding knowledge at all. The calendar is easily embeddable using just a few lines of code you can copy and paste onto your website.

Easy, peasy. 🍋

2. RSVPs and ticket sales

In addition to this, we give you a suite of tools to collect RSVPS and sell tickets to your events, all from your event calendar.

Customers can browse your calendar and use it to directly purchase your events. You can then manage everything from your dashboard.

Oh, and there's no ticketing fees. You know that massive 6.5% fee you pay Eventbrite to sell tickets - yeh we don't have that.

Our plans start from $19.99 a month.

I'll be honest, it's pretty strange 'bigging up' your own product sometimes. But I think we've made something special (particularly if you're selling tickets), so if you've got a few seconds, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Ok, that's us. Now let me tell you about what other options you have available (we have some pretty good competition!).

2) Tockify

Tockify has been around for a long time, even longer than us! Their headline is 'Modern Attractive Website Calendars'.

Similar to Event Calendar App they offer a wysiwyg editor for building an Event Calendar and adding it to your website. They have RSVP functionality but there's no mention of the ability to sell tickets.

One of the benefits of Tockify is its price. It's one of the cheapest options available with plans starting at $8 a month.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like their product has changed much in 6 years. When I started Event Calendar App in 2016 their product still looked very much like it does now. I'm not sure if it is still being actively worked on.

3) The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar is a beast of a product! And I say that with full compliments. I'm a big fan of what they have done, and particularly love their design.

The Events Calendar is unfortunately only for Wordpress, but if you're using Wordpress then a lot of people love it.

'The Events Calendar' is an Events Calendar for your Wordpress website, but like ECA does a whole bunch of other stuff too. Add-ons like ticketing, email marketing, the event aggregator, and community submissions make this a very powerful tool.

The Events Calendar is actively updated, and has a sizeable team behind it.

One of the nice things about The Events Calendar is that it all works from inside your Wordpress admin dashboard. So it's great if you like to keep everything in one place.

One of the downsides (in my opinion) of the app is that it is self hosted. This means, that you pay for the code, download it all yourself and then host it on your servers.

Self hosting is great for full control, but you need to ensure your servers are adequate enough to power it. We've had some customers move over to our service because they found 'The Events Calendar' to be too slow.

The Events Calendar has a core version which is free, but all of their add-ons cost varying amounts. Their free plans are generous though, and I'd imagine they have a lot of people who use the free versions alone just fine.

4) Loxi

Loxi is made by the team behind 'The Events Calendar'. It's a separate product, but unlike The Events Calendar can be embedded on any website builder or platform.

As I mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the design team behind 'The Events Calendar' and they have delivered again here. Loxi looks beautiful and is easy to use.

Loxi is basic in it's functionality and features - great if that's what you want. It comes with a price tag to match at only $8 a month.

Unfortunately, over the last few years it hasn't been updated much, and I expect development on it may have stopped. But, it still appears to be maintained and I'd recommend it if you want a cheap, simple hosted calendar.

5) Elfsight

Elfsight calendar is similar to the loxi app in a lot of ways. It looks nice, it's cheap, but has limited functionality.

Elfsight's aim with their calendar is to give you a great looking Event Calendar to embed on your website. Similar to Loxi, I really like their design. They also have a lot of different ways to display the calendar as different layouts which is really nice.

Elfsight's secret weapon is that their subscription comes with access to a whole bunch of other apps too. Each subscription level comes with a certain amount of 'views' of the embed - and you can split this views across the other apps they have.

Elfsight also have a 'instagram feed' widget, so if you'd like to show off your influencer photos on your website this could be a great deal!

The downside of Elfsight calendar is it really is just a embeddable calendar to display your events. Nothing more, nothing less. But if that's what you want then ideal.

6) Addevent

Add event are generally well known for their 'Add to calendar' buttons. But in the past few years they have released what they call their 'Embeddable calendar'. Their main headline is "Display your events and keep your users up to date".

I've not used their service before, but it looks great if you're looking for a step up from the Loxi and Elfsight embeddable calendars. It has a really nice design, and comes with a subscribe feature, so people can add your events into their calendar.

Addevent's pricing plans all include access to their other products such as 'add-to-calendar buttons' and 'rsvp buttons', so if you're going to use these too then their offering is much more attractive.

Their plans start at $20/mo for limited access, with the next step up being $99/mo

7) Time.ly

Time.ly is another app that I'm going to call a 'beast' product. It looks huge, with seemingly thousands of features. You really could spend a few days looking through their website at all the things it can do.

If you need an Event Calendar that can do a 1000 different things, then time.ly might just be for you.

Unfortunately I think what really lets time.ly down is their design. As you can probably tell by all my references to design, I think it's so important.

You spent lots of time, and probably money, making your site look awesome. So why would you want to embed something on it that doesn't look just as awesome?

Time.ly has a free and premium version, but don't advertise on their site how much their premium version is. Hmmm....

8) Google Calendar

Google Calendar Embed. This tool actually has a special place in my heart because it was one of the reasons that I started ECA. It's so ugly - but it works. If you're looking for something that's free then 'this'll do'.

We actually have another post all about how to add the Google Calendar embed to Wordpress. Check it out for a quick guide on how the embed works.

So which one should I use?

Well isn't that the golden question. If you've had a read through and you're still not sure, let me see if I can help.

If you're looking for free then really your only option is Google Calendar. It's probably not going to compliment your website, in fact quite the opposite, but it's free, and you wanted free right?

If you're literally just looking for a way to display your events, and you don't want to pay for an ounce of extra functionality then I'd probably go with Loxi, Elfsight or Tockify. They're all cheap options, well supported and will probably do you just fine. If I had to choose one, I'd probably go with Elfsight.

If you're a business and looking for more professional options then I would go for either 'The Events Calendar' or 'Event Calendar App'. They both give you a ton of advanced features, and professional grade support.

'Event Calendar App' has a focus on selling tickets and collecting RSVPS, so if you're looking for this functionality then I would go with that.

Looking to create an events calendar for your community? Whether that be, the area you live, a sports group, a local festival, your online community...or really anything?

Let's talk about why you would want a community events calendar in the first place.

Events are fundamental to any sort of community. But trying to keep everyone up to date with when those events are and to promote them to the community can frankly be a pain in the neck.

Take my local sailing club for example. Some events are sent out in emails, some events are on the website, and some events are simply passed around via word of mouth. It's a mess, and it feels like if you're not hanging around at the club every day you don't know what's going on.

What you need is a single source of truth. A single place, where the community can see all of its events. That way, everyone's on the same page, knows what's happening and when.

What you need, is an Event Calendar containing all of your events that your entire community can view whenever they want.

If all this sounds familiar then I think you're going to love Event Calendar App. Now let's be absolutely honest, I'm a little biased as it's software that I built myself but I think you're going to love it.

In this article I'll talk about how you can use Event Calendar App to set up a calendar for your community.

What is Event Calendar App?

Event Calendar App makes it crazy easy for you to create and share an online Events Calendar for your community.

I mean, it is technically an Events Calendar, but think of it more as an Events Calendar on steroids. It not only displays your communities events, but you can add images, search, filters and there is even the ability to sell tickets and collect RSVPs. But more on that later...

You need somewhere for the calendar to live

What I mean by this, is where are the members of your community going to go to see the Event Calendar?

There's a good chance that you might have a website already. If so, perfect. Maybe you have a Facebook group, that can also work. If you have neither, i'd highly recommend building even a very basic website for your community. It's beyond the scope of this article, but website builders have come on leaps and bounds over the past few years and they really are so simple now. Here's two that I would recommend:

Squarespace

Carrd (good for very simple single page websites)

You don't need a website to use Event Calendar App but it certainly makes for a better experience for your community.

Setting up Event Calendar App for a community calendar

Let me show you exactly how to set up a community calendar with Event Calendar App.

Head to our website and create an account.

You can import your events from existing sources (such as a Google, Apple or Outlook account) but for this guide I'm going to choose to add events manually.

You'll then be taken to the editor. This the tool you will use to create your Events Calendar. There's absolutely no coding knowledge required and you can see exactly what's going on as you build it.

Add some events to get started. I'll be creating some events for my sailing club.

As you create some events you should start to see them appear on the right hand side. Your Event Calendar is taking shape!

As you may have realised by now, the left hand side of the screen is your toolset for creating the Event Calendar. The right hand side is a live preview of what the Event Calendar will look like once it is on your website.

Event Calendar App has a ton of features, and we try to make everything as self explanatory as possible, but I'll talk about some of the features that are particularly important for community Event Calendars.

Make it look awesome.

Add images to your events. It takes a little more time, but makes your events way more attractive to members of your community.

If you don't have images already, you can get fantastic (and free) stock images from https://unsplash.com.

Here's what my Event Calendar looks like now I've added some images:

Calendar subscriptions.

This is an absolute game changer for communities.

Members can use the button at the bottom of the Event Calendar to 'subscribe' to the events.

What does this mean?

By subscribing to the calendar, members will see the events inside of their own calendar application on their computer, phone or whatever it might be. And the events will automatically update when you add new events or change the dates/times of them.

For example, let's say one of your members (let's call him Dave) uses an iPhone. Let's also say that he's very keen to keep up with when the community is running events. All he has to do is subscribe to the calendar (using the button at the bottom) and the events will automatically appear inside of his Apple Calendar application.

This is huge because it means Dave doesn't have to log onto a website, or trawl through the latest community newsletter to quickly see when the next event is. He simply checks his phone.

Use filters.

If you've got a large community with lots of events, then it can be a good idea to split the events using filters. This enables members to find the events they're looking for quicker.

For example, in my sailing club some members mainly care about the social events rather than the sailing events, and vice-vera. So let's use the filter functionality to tag each event.

To do this, simply, click on the event, click appearance (on the left), and manage filters.

The filters pop up will tell you everything you need to get started.

But basically, create a few filters and assign them to the events. I created two filters, 'sailing' and 'social' and tagged each event.

Once you've added some filters, your Event Calendar will now have a filters drop down.

Members can use this to quickly switch between the events they care about.

RSVP & payment collection functionality

Here's another game changer for communities. Using Event Calendar App you can allow your community to RSVP to your events using the Event Calendar.

To do this, click on an event, and use the RSVP/Tickets tab on the left hand side.

Click the 'Allow RSVP/Tickets' for this event option.

You'll see that the event now has a 'RSVP' button.

By default this opens a form to collect a name and email address:

However, using the options in the control panel you can configure this to your hearts content.

You can even collect payment and sell tickets.

We have tons of information about our ticket functionality here.

Adding Event Calendar App to your website

The last step is to add the Event Calendar you've just created to your website.

If you don't have a website, not to worry. Each Event Calendar Widget has its own URL, and you could simply email out this link to all your members or post it on your Facebook group.

To add the Event Calendar to your website you need to get an 'embed code'. This is the snippet of code that adds the calendar to your website.

Your embed can be found in the editor. Look for the 'Embed Instructions' option in the editor.

We also have instructions here on how to add the Event Calendar to different website builders.

That's it, you're good to go, and your community finally has a single source of truth where everyone can go to see what events are happening in your group. 🎉

Looking for a way to embed your Google Calendar into your Wordpress site?

There's two ways you can go about doing this:

1. Use the Google Calendar embeddable widget.

This embeds a very basic (and I'll be honest, ugly) grid style calendar onto your website. It's easy, takes just a few minutes but offers little functionality.

It looks something like this:

2. Use a more advanced tool like Event Calendar App to get your Google Calendar onto your Wordpress website.

Let's be honest, this is our tool so of course we're going to promote it. But hey, we think it's great, and I think you're going to love it.

ECA looks something like this:

But let's show you how to do both options.

How to add the Google Calendar embeddable widget to your Wordpress page or post.

Step 1 - Find your Google Calendar embed code

Head to Google Calendar. Ensure you're logged into the correct account and you should see your calendars on the left hand side:

Hover over the calendar you wish to embed. Three dots will appear on the right.

Click the dots and click 'settings and sharing'.

Scroll down until you find the section titled 'Integrate calendar'.

See the line labelled 'embed code'? Fantastic, copy and paste that somewhere safe and we'll use that later.

Step 2 - Add the embed code to your Wordpress page or post.

Head to your Wordpress site, log into the admin section, and navigate to the page or post you want to add your Google calendar to.

How you add the embed code will differ depending on whether you are using the Classic or Gutenberg editor

Gutenberg Editor

If you're using the new Gutenberg editor your page will look something like this:

Navigate your cursor to where you want the embed and click the + icon.

Type 'HTML' into the search box and click 'Custom HTML'.

You can now paste your embed code (the one we got earlier) in the input that appears.

Click the preview tab and it will even give you a live preview of the embed.

Nice.

Classic Editor

If you're using the classic editor, it will look something like this.

All we need to do here, is paste in the embed code. However, be sure you are in text mode when you do this:

If you paste the embed code in visual mode, then your visitors will just see the embed code itself and not the actual embed.

Let's have a look at the end result (I just added it to a sample page):

Not bad!

Back in the Google Calendar settings page, just underneath where you got your embed code from, there is a customise button.

Extra tip: Clicking this takes you to a page where you have a limited set of options to edit the appearance of the embed code. However, this will change the embed code itself so you will need to re-embed.

Want something a bit more...next level?

If like me, you're left feeling like the Google Calendar embed lacks a little 'flair', then I think you're going to love Event Calendar App.

Think of Event Calendar App like the Google Calendar widget on steroids.

Event Calendar App does everything the Google Calendar widget does and more:

• Actually looks like something you'll be proud to have on your website.
• Imports your events straight from Google so you don't have to add them twice.
• Add images, filters and search functionality.
• Ticketing & RSVP functionality. Sell tickets to your events, collect RSVPs and find out who's attending.

You've got a site built on Wordpress and you want to sell tickets? Seems a reasonable request. What are your options?

Third party ticket websites

Let's first address the billion dollar gorilla in the room whenever it comes to ticket sales. Eventbrite. The option you've heard of a million times before. Using Eventbrite you can create an event and get a URL you can send your customers to make a sale.

Eventbrite

The great thing about Eventbrite is it's super easy to use, has a great interface, and you can be setup and selling tickets fast. It also has a whole host of advanced features such as 'seating plans' which not all services offer.

But, this comes with huge downsides. You're stuck on the Eventbrite platform. This means to sell tickets you need to send your customers to the Eventbrite website. While they're there, they'll have other events promoted to them and you completely loose any sense of 'brand'. It's the equivalent of sending your customers to Youtube. There's a good chance they'll get distracted and never return back to your site.

Eventbrite also has huge fees if you are selling tickets in any sort of quantity. For example selling 100 tickets at $10.00 costs a mind blowing $137. A massive 13.7%!

So what are your other options?

Using Wordpress plugins is where things become much more exciting. These plugins allow you to sell tickets directly from your own Wordpress website.

This means that there's no need to send your customer to another website. You maintain control over everything. It's a much more fluid experience for the customer and doesn't have the jarring effect of sending them to a completely different platform.

Luckily Wordpress has a huge eco system of plugins that can help you to sell tickets.

There's two types of Wordpress plugins for selling tickets:

Self hosted plugins

Self hosted plugins form the majority of what's available. 'Self hosted' means that the plugin and its code lives on your server.

The benefits to this are that you maintain control over everything. If you're so inclined you could go in and edit the plugin code so it does exactly what you want. You're also not reliant on any other third party services.

Because the code lives on your server you need to make sure you're on top of all the maintenance that comes with that. Updating Wordpress plugins is essential for security reasons. But this can be an absolute nightmare. It's often a big job that involves backing everything up, installing the update and hoping nothing breaks.

Another huge issue is security. When you host all the code, you also host all the user data. Every time someone enters their email, name, and payment information this is all stored on your servers. If you were ever hacked and this information leaked it would be your responsibility.

The Events Calendar is one of the most popular calendar plugins available for Wordpress and has a massive 800,000 installs. It has a huge team of developers behind it and a whole host of plugins to extend its functionality. One of which is Event Tickets and Registration.

The Event Tickets and Registration plugin allows the Event Calendar to sell tickets. This is great because you can use 'The Event Calendar' to display all your events, and then the 'Event Tickets and Registration' plugin to sell them.

The biggest downside with 'The Events Calendar' is that it is an intensive application. It can cause your site to slow down if you don't have a powerful enough server and you don't keep an eye on things. Remember me saying that plugins run all their code on your own hardware? This means it can sometimes be a bad fit if you're using as cheap shared server.

Believe me when I say that if your website is slow, your customers will have little patience.

Tickera is another Wordpress plugin that seems to be well recommended. Something of note is the huge amount of payment gateways they support.

Hosted Solutions

Another option is a hosted solution. But what does this mean exactly?

A hosted solution means the service provider hosts all the code and data. This means you never need to worry about updates, or whether your server can handle the load.

Think Youtube for example. If you embed a Youtube video on your website, it's Youtube that is hosting all the code. You never need to worry about updates. It just works. That's the beauty of a hosted solution.

Event Calendar App (Yep that's our product. Apologies if we're biased.) is a complete solution for displaying your events and selling tickets to them on Wordpress. We host everything on our servers, meaning that you don't need to worry about anything. We handle updates, security, and making sure your website stays fast.

Importantly, we host everything but your customer never leaves your website (unlike Eventbrite). They can see your events, and complete the sale without ever leaving.

How does it work?

You can sign up for an account and use our editor to create an Event Calendar.

Events can then be set up to take payment. This includes everything you would expect from a ticketing app like ticket types, custom forms, coupons, confirmation emails etc.

Event Calendar App uses Stripe as a payment processor. You get paid straight into your Stripe account. There's no fees (on our side) and we don't act as a middleman.

Adding it to your website, if we go back to our Youtube example, is as simple as embedding a Youtube video on your website. Event Calendar App generates an embed code that you can add anywhere on your Wordpress website.

Which option to choose?

If you want the absolute simplest way to sell some tickets, particularly if it's a single event, then I would go with Eventbrite. As long as you're ok swallowing the fees, or passing them along to your customer.

If you want a solution that is completely self hosted, and you're confident handling servers, security and updates then The Events Calendar or Tickera are both very good solutions.

If you want a solution where all the hard work of IT infrastructure is done for you, then Event Calendar App is the solution for you.

So you're looking to sell tickets on Shopify?

You're looking to sell tickets to courses, classes or events that you run?

Let's have a look at how this is possible with Shopify alone.

It's important to remember that Shopify is built to sell 'products' not events. Sometimes this doesn't matter, and you can use it to sell events anyway. But, as we will find, sometimes it does matter.

Shopify apps always make life better. But let's take a look at how we could sell tickets to an event without any sort of external application.

Even though in Shopify we create 'products' we can still work around this to sell events.

A pretend Wednesday swimming class

Let's take a very simple example. Let's say you run a swimming class every Wednesday. And you want your customers to be able to buy tickets for this event from your Shopify store.

You could create a 'product' in Shopify, and label it as an event. Something like this:

This then gets added to your store like any other product. You could then keep track of who purchases this 'product' so you know that they have or have not paid when they turn up to your event.

You can also use the product options functionality to create ticket types. For example if you need to sell Adult and Child tickets and each has a separate price.

Pretty simple. But it works.

But, this all starts to break down as soon as your requirements become beyond basic, and you're running a handful of events. It quickly becomes very clear that Shopify was not meant for selling events.

You'll soon find there's a lot of features you want that are not a part of the Shopify system. Ticketing specific features will, of course, never be a part of the core Shopify system because it's not made for ticketing.

For example there's no way to:

• Display events on your store in a way that makes sense for events. This is a huge issue if you're hosting regular events rather than a one off.
• Collect extra information about attendees. For example their swimming level, or any food allergies they might have.
• Customise the confirmation email dependant on what event the customer purchased. For example, to give them any access codes for the pool, or a reminder to bring their hat and goggles.

Shopify's dashboard doesn't really make sense when selling events either.

For example, in the swimming class example, try finding all the people who have purchased 'tickets' to your swimming class. There's no way to do it. You have to trail through all your orders and find out who purchased that specific item. Pain.

Apps to the rescue

At Event Calendar App we noticed this problem and decided to do something about it. And we created a Shopify app to solve the issue.

Event Calendar App provides a complete solution to promote your events, and sell tickets to them. All while still using Shopify as the payment system in the background.

This means you get all the benefits of a system designed to sell 'events', rather than 'products',  and still use Shopify as your payment processor. There's no need to set up another payment system.

How the swimming class example would work with Event Calendar App

Using Event Calendar App, we create an Event Calendar to display our events and sell tickets to them. We can then add this Event Calendar to our Shopify store. This solves the issue of displaying our events in a sensible way.

Let's take a look at this in action.

You sign up to Event Calendar App and use the editor to start adding your events. In this case, we'll add the Wednesday swimming class:

You'll see already we've got a whole host of features that we don't get if we used Shopify. Customers can subscribe to your events for example. Meaning they'll see your events in their own personal calendar.

Head to the RSVP/Tickets tab and you'll see all the options for selling tickets to the event.

As you configure all the options for the paid event, you can see all the changes happen in realtime on the right hand side of the screen.

There's a lot of notable features here that you don't get from just using Shopify.

- Customise the form that customers will use when they are selecting their tickets.

- Create multiple ticket types. Each with their own availability.

- Customise the confirmation email to include any additional information that might be needed after purchase.

You  can then add the Event Calendar to your Shopify store (I've included a bunch of other events a swim studio might be hosting).

Your customers can then use this to purchase different events.

Purchases are added to the normal Shopify basket. Just like anything else your customer might be purchasing from your store.

The Event Calendar App dashboard will show you exactly who's made purchases against which events. That means on the day of the event, you're always a click away from finding out exactly who has paid and is coming to each event. Not something that Shopify would show clearly for you.

I hope that provides a detailed summary of your options when selling ticket with Shopify. You can manage without any third party applications. But the difference between using Shopify and an app designed to help you sell events is huge.

Give Event Calendar App a try.