How to cross-sell using Ticketsolve's Recommendations feature

Building a sales strategy to maximise revenue from every ticket sale is essential for arts and culture organisations. The good news is that Ticketsolve's Recommendations feature enables you to build an effective cross-selling strategy to help increase your overall sales revenue. We've designed this feature to make it easy for online customers to find more events or products that they are interested in and increase their spend per order. Importantly the feature also empowers Box Office staff to recommend additional items at the point of sale in person or over the phone. 

What is cross-selling?

Cross-selling is the practice of promoting and selling additional shows, events, or products to a customer who is already purchasing or interested in purchasing tickets for a specific performance. The goal of cross-selling is to increase overall sales and enhance the customer experience by offering relevant, complementary, or related events and products that might pique the customer's interest.

For example, if a customer is buying tickets to see a musical, you might suggest other musicals or plays that are similar in genre, feature the same actors or creative team, or are part of a larger series. Cross-selling can also involve recommending add-on products or experiences, such as pre-show dinners, backstage tours, or merchandise related to the performance.

As well as increasing sales revenue, effective cross-selling strategies can improve customer satisfaction, increase customer loyalty and help to build a better understanding of your audiences and their interests.

How to set up cross-selling using Recommendations

Cross-selling in Ticketsolve is fairly straightforward. When creating your shows and events, you have the option to add Recommendations to each one. There is a whole host of Recommendations you can add that include:

• Shows
• Products
• Donation Products
• Money Vouchers
• Benefit Products

To add a Recommendation into a show:

Go to Manage > Shows

1. Click the Show you want to set up with Recommendations. 

2. Click the Recommendations tab at the top of the screen.

3. Click on + Create New Recommendation.

4. In the pop-up box, click into the drop down menu Select item category under Recommendation and select the type of Recommendation you require.

5. In the Select item dropdown, select the specific item you want to recommend (e.g., show, product etc.).

6. Turn the Active recommendation? toggle on (blue). You can add Recommendations for future use, by keeping the Active recommendations? toggle off. 

7. In the Summary box you can add additional information and details, which will appear online to customers. 

8. If you have multiple Recommendations, it is a good idea to set the Priority. The Priority allows you to set the order in which your Recommendations appear to customers. The highest priority is 99, appearing first.

9. Click Add New to finish adding your recommendation. 

10. Repeat the process above to add more Recommendations.

 Ticketsolve Tip

Keep to a maximum of 3 Recommendations per show to ensure your cross-selling strategy is targeted - and most importantly - super effective!

11. To manage (Delete or Edit) any of your Recommendations (active or inactive), click the Recommendation you need from the list and select either Delete Recommendation or Edit Recommendation.

Note: Click Edit Recommendation to access the Active/Inactive toggle within a Recommendation.

Cross-selling in the Box Office

Now that you have added a Recommendation against a Show as above, your Box Office users will be able to see them and cross-sell those items to customers.

In the Box Office, any event with recommendation(s) will have a button: Has recommendations.

To view the Recommendations for an event, click on the Has recommendations button and a pop-up will show all the available recommendations. 

To close the Recommendations pop-up just click outside of the pop-up box. 

Selling a recommended show

1. Add all the tickets for the original event that the customer is purchasing into the cart.

2. Click on the Has recommendations button.

3. Click on the Show that you want to recommend to the customer.

This action will automatically filter the event search results, displaying only the selected Show and its available event dates for the chosen cross-sell opportunity.

4. Add the relevant tickets to the cart as normal to complete the cross-sell.

5. Click on the X at the end of the filter box within the search tab, to undo the filter and return to the previous Box Office screen.

Selling a recommended product 

1. Add all the tickets for the original event that the customer is purchasing into the cart.

2. Click on the Has recommendations button.

3. Click on the Product that you want to recommend to the customer.

This will move you across to the Products tab and automatically open up the pop-up box for the selected Product.

4. Select the quantity required.

5. Click the Update Cart button to add the items to the cart.

The pop-up box will now close and you will be on the Products tab, where you can either navigate back to the Events tab to add more tickets, or click the 'Payment Options' button to complete the order.

Cross-selling online

The process of selling Recommendations online is very similar to the Box Office; the customer sees all the relevant Recommendations when going through the purchase journey.

On a Show page, Recommendations are listed under the ticket prices.

Recommendations will also appear on the Cart page if relevant show tickets are added to the cart.

Clicking on the 'Book Tickets Now' button for a show recommendation will take the customer to the relevant Show page, where they can select tickets.

For product recommendations, customers can click in the dropdown box and select the quantity of products to add to the cart.

Settings for online recommendations

There are a couple of settings in your Ticketsolve account to help you control when and where Recommendations appear online to customers through their purchase journey.

• "Show recommendations on show page" determines if you want Recommendations to appear on the Show page or only on the Cart page.
• "Cart recommendation limit" allows you to set the number of Recommendations to display in the Cart page (4 is always the maximum, but you can set this lower if you wish). On the Show page, all Recommendations will display, up to a maximum of 4.

Want to know more?

• How to set up Product Prompts - this allows you to up-sell individual products that are related to a specific ticket price or show which will be added as additional step in the purchase journey during the checkout process.
• Creating and prompting Donations