We just had a Decade in a Day and someone asked me a question that’s actually on my mind a lot right now - “How do you sell tickets for an event?” So let’s get into the strategy of when to announce, how to sell tickets and what drives customers to buy tickets and when they traditionally move. Plus get a sneak peak into a campaign we’re about to launch! And don’t forget to grab your tickets for Funnel Hacking LIVE at https://www.funnelhackinglive.com

So anyway, there's some strategies, some ideas for our event peeps, and hopefully it gives you guys, first off, if you're running events, some ideas. Second off, if you're thinking about coming to Funnel Hacking Live, you realize, "Oh my gosh, this is Russell's 5,000th time warning us." Prices are about to go up. We're about to sell out. The event's happening in less than three weeks, and make sure you get your tickets and get there, because it's going to be so much fun. This year's going to be insane. I can't even wait.

What's up? Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. We are officially, as of this moment, 21 days away from Funnel Hacking Live. We are preparing, we're working, we're getting everything done and having a ton of fun. Man, I'm not going to lie. It's a lot of work. Every year I forget until we get here, and I'm like, oh yeah, there's a lot that goes into it.

And it's funny, too, because if it was just Funnel Hacking Live, it would actually be pretty easy, but it's Funnel Hacking Live, plus we're working on all new ClickFunnels 2.0 updates. We should call it ClickFunnels 3.0 now. New updates are amazing. Plus I've been rebuilding the whole dashboard, which has taken me, it's like 70 videos I've had to record for that. I'm trying to get that done before Funnel Hacking Live, new onboarding process I'm trying to get done before Funnel Hacking Live. Plus, on top of that, my wife went to Portugal for 10 days, so she's gone, so I'm playing full time dad as well.

I'm not going to lie. It's chaotic. It's amazing, all the things. So I'm pumped to be able to hang out with everybody here soon. So if you don't have your tickets yet, now is the time. Go to FunnelHackingLive.com. But I actually wanted to talk today about just a thought, because a lot of you guys are running events or thinking about running events.

And last week I had a new program I have called Decade A Day. It's something I'm doing with all my Inner Circle members where they come in for a day, and I do... About 20 of them come in at a time, and then we just spend a day, and I consult everyone for 15 minutes, and it's really fun. And it was funny, because the last one, we had three or four people who were doing events or had questions about events. And so I just want to share some of those insights with you, because I thought they were interesting.

The question was just like, how do you... One person is like, "I have an event in three months. I'm trying to get 1,000 tickets sold." "How many you have sold so far?" "None." I'm like, "Oh, step one, plan further out." But, anyway, so I was trying to give ideas, and obviously there's the core things, which is announce that you're having an event. That gets people to go sign up. Announce speakers gets some people to sign up.

But the one thing you'll find about events... I always tell people of all the things we sell, events are the hardest, because everything else people will buy. It's like an impulse. Like, "Oh, I want that thing," and they go buy it. With an event, they may want it, but they go like, "Oh, do the dates work? Can I get time off? Can I get flights, hotels? Who's going to watch my kids?" There's like 800 other mini-decisions that go into making a decision going to an event.

And so there's a lot more you're combating when you're doing stuff. So of all the things we sell, by far selling tickets to a live event are the hardest. And we've done a pretty good job of it. I mean, we get 5,000 plus people every year at Funnel Hacking Live, which is this insurmountable task that I always feel it's like not physically possible, and every year somehow we do it.

So like I said, we're down to 21 days. So one thing to note is that a third of your tickets will be sold during the last two weeks, which is the worst, because I don't know about you, but the whole year you're stressing out, because no one's buying tickets, no one's buying tickets, and then a third of them come in the last two or three weeks, and you're like, "Gosh, dang it. Why didn't you guys buy them earlier?" So that means for all of you guys who are sitting on the fence waiting, you're almost out of time. It's time to go get these tickets. Make Russell sleep better tonight by getting your tickets now. Quit waiting.

Anyway, but the other thing I was telling them was the only way to get big pops of sales, because, again, with Funnel Hacking Live, it's like every day we get 10, 20 sales, and it's just this consistent stream of tickets coming in. There's never, like, "We sold 500 tickets tonight." And so the only way to get big increases in sales are either to raise the price or to take something away. And this is the big secret, okay? Raise the price or take something away.
So raising the price, obviously you raise the price, but once you do that, you raise it once or twice and people stop buying tickets. So that's usually the last thing in the campaign is raising the prices, which for us will probably happen next week, which means if you don't have your ticket yet, hurry, we're raising prices. FunnelHackingLive.com.

And then the second side is taking something away. So if you notice over the campaign of a year selling Funnel Hacking Live tickets, we're always taking things away. So, for example, at the beginning of the year, as soon as the last year's event's over, I'm like, "Hey, if you want the replays, you got to get your tickets to Funnel Hacking Live."

And that gets our first surge of sales right after the last event. It's like, "If you want the replays, you got to buy the tickets for next year," and then we have a countdown. "These go away if you don't buy it by this day." So we take it away, and that gets people to buy.

And then throughout the year when we introduce speakers, we have the speakers bring on speaker bonuses. And the only reason we bring on speaker bonuses, because speaker bonuses don't in and of themselves sell a lot of tickets, but the taking away of speaker bonuses does.

So I get to a point where we have a campaign, we're like, "Oh, speaker bonuses are expiring," and we take those away, and then we see a huge increase in sales. We'll see 3, 400 sales in the weekend when we're taking the speaker bonuses away. So we're always introducing something in the campaign and then taking it away, introducing something and taking it away. And that's how we drive sales. So there's two of the biggest things we do for selling tickets to live events.

And then one other thing that I just think is really kind of fun is just figuring out different hooks and different ways, different funny things like playing off of the questions people have in their head, like why they're not coming. And so we just created an ad. It actually just got done today. I think we're going to be promoting it today, so some of you guys may have seen this depending on when this podcast goes live.

But one of the guys on our team had this idea, and they're genius writers and ideas and stuff. So it's actually a video. I'm going to play the audio for you, but it's actually a video. So I wish you could see it, because it's even more funny if you can see it. But the question's like, what are the concerns? Why are people not buying tickets yet? So we're always trying to figure out what's the concern and how can we address it.

And so this one, the idea was like, well, people have a lot of concerns. We're like, well, what if we made a video and a promotion about our excuse department and told people like, "Hey, no matter what excuse you have, we'll take care of it. Russell will literally send a video to somebody to get you out of a wedding, or out of a funeral, or out of a whatever you have."
And so we put together this campaign, and I'm literally going to be doing this. I don't know, I'll probably end up making 20, 30, 40 videos, I'm not sure yet, for people who take us up on a ticket offer during this campaign, but we're going to run this for a week right now. And, again, it's a week until our ticket prices are going up anyway. So it's kind of like this little window, and it's just trying to resolve concerns.

So it'd be a fun playful thing. You'll have a chance to hear the ad here in a second, but the goal is to address the fact they have excuse. It gives us another reason to message them, to remind them of the event. And it's kind of a fun idea just to get people talking and then hopefully get rid of some of their excuses. So right now I'm going to actually play the audio of this ad so you can hear it, and I'll come back afterwards, and we can discuss it a little bit more.

-Ad Audio-

You want to go to Funnel Hacking Live to get inspired by some of the world's greatest marketers and meet thousands of like-minded people, but you're not sure what's going to come up during the days between September 27th and the 30th, or maybe you already committed to something really stupid, like camping.

But don't fear, because here at ClickFunnels we came up with our greatest hack yet. Introducing the ClickFunnel Official Get out of Obligation service. So here's how it works. All you got to do is buy ticket to Funnel Hacking Live anywhere between these dates, then email your conflict to fhlexcuses@gmail.com, and then me and my team of excuse experts here, we'll make you a custom video recording to get you out of even your most inflexible commitments. So here's a small sample of our work.

"Hey, what's up Todd?" "I'm sorry, Gina's not going to be able to make it to your date, because she's got a date with Destiny at this year's funnel Hacking Live." "I'm so sorry. Don't give up. Maybe next year." "Hey, Steph, just want to let you know that Mike's aunt's second cousin's mom's brother-in-law's favorite software company's having their birthday on September 27th, the same day as yours, so I'm not going to be able to make it, but I want to wish you happy birthday. I hope you enjoy the bounce house." "Hey, sorry, Mike. Susan's got diarrhea."
So, remember, there's no excuse for missing Funnel Hacking Live, because here at ClickFunnels we already have an excuse for you.

-End of Ad-

All right, so that's the end of the ad. Again, it's just kind of a funny thing to play off of the reasons why people are thinking about coming or not coming. What's the excuse? And so instead of just trying to dance around it, we just dove right into it. So just ideas for hooks, and so we're always looking for those kind of things.

So there's a campaign for all excuses, but if I was doing events, we're looking for other excuses, like, "Oh, I can't come because it costs too much." "Oh, I can't come because of this, because of this." And we find those things, identify them, and then we create ads, videos, webinars to address those concerns and hopefully knock down those dominoes so that people get to Funnel Hacking Live.

So anyway, there's some strategies, some ideas for our event peeps, and hopefully it gives you guys, first off, if you're running events, some ideas. Second off, if you're thinking about coming to Funnel Hacking Live, you realize, "Oh my gosh, this is Russell's 5,000th time warning us." Prices are about to go up. We're about to sell out. The event's happening in less than three weeks, and make sure you get your tickets and get there, because it's going to be so much fun. This year's going to be insane. I can't even wait.

I got a really big announcement this year, which is going to freak some people out, but you have to be there to even find out, so that's all I can say. I'm going to get in trouble. All right, I appreciate you guys all for listening. Thanks so much, and I'll see you guys at Funnel Hacking Live. If you don't have a ticket yet, go to www.funnelhackinglive.com. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk soon.