A lot of venues hear promo code and think discount, which they read as money left on the table. That is the wrong frame. A discount only costs anything on tickets that would have sold at full price anyway. On every other ticket it is the difference between a seat with someone in it and an empty one, and an unsold ticket is revenue gone the moment doors open.
Take a $50, 1,000-ticket show at a theatre that has stalled two weeks out with 200 tickets unsold. A $10 code aimed at the right buyers fills 150 of those seats at $40 each. That is $6,000 the show was not otherwise going to see. Those 150 guests then spend at the bar, which at $20 a head is roughly another $3,000 on the night.
The word that matters there is aimed. A code broadcast to everyone discounts tickets that would have sold anyway. A code sent to a specific list, with a specific deadline, mostly reaches people who were not going to buy at full price. Early buyers get an early-bird rate that gets sales moving the day tickets go live. Groups get a per-head rate for birthdays, offices and friends buying together. Returning guests get a thank-you rate for coming to the last show. Students, members, industry, a slow Tuesday: if a buyer is worth rewarding, they can have their own code.
Codes also answer a question most venues can only guess at, which is who sold the room. Give each promoter, partner or staff member their own code and every sale is credited to whoever drove it. After an on-sale you can see, say, 212 tickets on EARLYBIRD, 141 on PARTNER-01 and 96 on GROUP4. At a room like Yale Saloon that turns “which promoter filled the room?” from an argument into a report, and lets the venue pay a flat amount or a percentage per sale with the share tracked automatically.
Dublin Calling, a party pub and kitchen, runs codes for three jobs at once. Early-entry codes offer a lower price before 10 p.m., so the room fills while the bar is quiet instead of everyone arriving at the same time. Group booking codes let birthday and party groups buy together, so the booking and the revenue land in advance. Promoter codes pay each promoter on the tickets their code sells.
Our new whitepaper, Promo Codes Sell Tickets That Would Go Unsold, goes through who venues reach with codes, what a targeted discount pays against an empty seat, and how per-promoter codes turn attribution into a report.
Download the whitepaper below.
