What Are Custom Purchase Flows?
Performing arts organizations like yours are always looking for new ways to increase your sales, reward patrons, and save time. When it comes to selling tickets, every patron is unique – some may be first-time buyers, while others may be loyal subscribers or previous patrons who haven’t bought a ticket in years. To provide a first-rate ticket buying experience, performing arts organizations can leverage custom purchase flows that meet patrons where they are.
Custom purchase flows are unique checkout experiences that are tailored to your patrons based on their known preferences and behaviors. This is accomplished by pre-populating promo codes to automatically reflect discounts and promotions, auto-filling known patron data, and showcasing add-ons and upsells that are most relevant to patrons.
Benefits of Custom Purchase Flows
Providing a uniquely optimized ticket-buying flow to patrons does more than simply improve their purchasing experience – it also has the power to boost sales, increase loyalty, and capture more granular data to inform your future marketing efforts. Custom purchase flows achieve this by auto-filling information to save time and speed up the checkout process. Multiple studies across a variety of industries show that faster checkouts aided by auto-fill consistently yield higher conversion rates, thus boosting sales. While a study by Google found that auto-fill increases conversion rates by an average of 30%.
Higher conversion rates don’t just mean more sales for you – it also means that your patrons have an easier time buying tickets to your productions, which enhances their experience and fosters loyalty.
Use Cases For The Performing Arts
Custom purchase flows enable performing arts organizations to build unique checkout flows that are tailored to groups of patrons based on their past purchase and attendance behavior, how they entered into the checkout process, and more. Especially when paired with audience segments, it’s easy to see how you might build promotions and flows that resonate with your patrons, such as:
Subscribers Flow
- Promotion: Send an email to everyone who bought a subscription to last season offering early access to purchase a subscription package for your upcoming season
- Flow: Set the purchase flow to be active before you start selling subscription packages to the general public on your website
Patron Loyalty Flow
- Promotion: Send an email to any patron who purchased tickets to two or more productions within the last 12 months, offering them two free drink tickets the next time they purchase tickets
- Flow: Provide a checkout flow URL that automatically contains two-free drink vouchers, that the patron can redeem via a QR code at the bar when they attend their next show
Social Promotion Flow
- Promotion: Offer a 10% discount to your upcoming show to your social media followers
- Flow: Have your social post link to a custom purchase flow that pre-populates a promo code that automatically applies the 10% discount
With a few simple tools and a little imagination, the sky is truly the limit.
How They Work
At the heart of a custom purchase flow is a unique URL that sends patrons into the tailored checkout experience you’ve created for them. The process is simple:
- Define your flow – Determine the information you want to automatically be included in the flow. This could be a specific promotion such as early access, discounted tickets, free or discounted merch or add-ons, or access to specific blocks of seats.
- Define your audience – Specify which patrons should receive the flow. It could be anyone who clicks on a social media post, your entire mailing list, or a specific subset of your patron base such as subscribers, donors, or lapsed former patrons.
- Build your custom URL – On The Stage makes it easy for customers to do this right within our platform using our native custom purchase flow builder (more on that below).
- Distribute your URL – Build targeted marketing campaigns to showcase your promotion and to captivate patrons, and drive traffic to the custom URL.
- Analyze results – Assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaign by comparing sales and engagement data with previous campaigns
Building Custom Purchase Flows with On The Stage
Let’s say you want to build a flow to attach to a social media campaign offering $10 off to your followers. It’s easy to create custom purchase flows with On The Stage using our native builder. Start by navigating to “Custom Purchase Flows” in the left nav bar, and then click the red “+” icon in the top right corner. Then give your flow a name and description.
The next step is to choose productions to which the promotion/flow applies. You can choose every production, a single production, or any combination.
Next, you can specify specific performances, times, and dates for the promotion. This is useful if you create a promo code for a discount to a particular production, performance date, day of the week, matinees vs. evenings, or time of year. Or, you can apply the promotion to all of your performances with a single click.
You also have the ability to set price filters for the promotion. Using our $10 off example, perhaps you only want it to be valid for tickets that are $20 or greater in value.
Tip: Always make sure that your marketing accurately reflects whatever parameters you set.
Next, you can select a promo code to be automatically included in your flow. In this case, we’ll select the “10off” promo code we already created.
Finally, you can limit the number of tickets for the promotion.
That’s it! Simply click “create,” and now your flow is ready to use.
You’ll instantly be able to copy the custom purchase flow’s unique URL that reflects what you’ve just created, and share it with your patrons. Simply paste it into Mailchimp, Meta, Google, or any other third-party marketing platform to drive patrons into the custom purchase flow.
Get Started with Custom Purchase Flows
By using OTS custom purchase flows, it’s easier than ever for your performing arts organizations to capture new revenue while leveling-up the ticket buying process for your patrons. OTS platinum customers can get started today by logging in to the platform and navigating to “filtered flows” in the navigation bar.
To learn more about custom purchase flows and how they can help you increase sales and delight patrons, talk to your OTS account manager or schedule a demo today.