An event page is the one surface in your business where every single visitor has already raised their hand. They clicked a date. Most of them will leave without buying, and almost every event page is built so that you never find out who they were or what they were interested in.
Key takeaways
- The buyers are recorded by ticketing. The people who looked and left are recorded by nobody.
- The fix is one low-commitment action for people who are interested but not ready today.
- Measure contacts per hundred visits, not conversion rate, or the change looks like nothing.
What the page is built for, and what it therefore misses
An event page has one job in most builders: convert to a purchase. Hero image, date, line-up, price, buy button. It is a good page and it does that job.
The consequence is that it treats every non-purchase as a failure to be discarded. Somebody who arrives three weeks before payday, or who is waiting for a friend to confirm, or who was checking whether the support act is worth it, all leave the same way: as a number in an analytics chart.
| What the page produces today | What it could also produce |
|---|---|
| A ticket sale, recorded by ticketing | A contact, recorded by you |
| A bounce, recorded by analytics | A named person, tagged with this event |
| A traffic figure | A segment for the next event |
| Nothing about the undecided | The reason they hesitated |
| One outcome, on the day | Two outcomes, one of which lasts years |
The second column is not a redesign. It is one more action on the same page.
The visitor you never meet
Follow the person who does not buy.
Chart data
| 1 | Arrives (From a post, a friend, a search) |
|---|---|
| 2 | Reads the line-up (Interest is now at its highest point) |
| 3 | Buys, or does not (One path leads to a ticket record) |
| 4 | Leaves (The other path leads to nothing at all) |
| 5 | Next event (You start again from zero with this person) |
Step four is where the money leaks. That person is not a bad prospect. They are the best prospect you will ever have who has not bought yet, and the page let them go without leaving a name.
The second action, and how to phrase it
The mistake is offering a newsletter. Nobody wants a newsletter. They want a specific favour at a specific moment.
Three that work, in order of how well they convert:
"Tell me when the line-up is complete." Highest intent, because it presumes they are coming and are waiting on information.
"Tell me when tickets are nearly gone." Works on the exact hesitation that made them leave, which is that they think they have time.
"Tell me about the next one at this venue." For people who cannot make this date. Weakest of the three, and still worth more than a bounce.
One field. One sentence saying what will happen and roughly how often. No checkbox pre-ticked, and the consent wording stored with the record, for the reasons set out in a guest list is not a contact list.
Where to put it, physically
Below the buy button, never beside it. The purchase must stay the loudest thing on the page or you have traded a sale for an email address, which is a bad trade.
Then a second placement most people miss: on the page after the purchase. Someone who has just bought is in the best mood they will ever be in about your event, and that page is usually a receipt and nothing else. Ask there for the thing ticketing does not give you, which is permission to talk to them directly rather than through the operator's transactional email.
And keep the page fast. An event page is opened on a phone, on mobile data, often in a venue with bad signal, and the loading metrics that matter are the difference between a capture and a back button.
The sold out page
If the event sells out, most pages become a dead end with the word SOLD OUT on them. That is the single highest intent page you will ever publish, and it produces nothing.
A waiting list on it gives you a segment where every member has demonstrated, with no ambiguity, that they wanted to come and could not. That list fills the next date faster than any advertising you could buy, and it costs a text field.
Where the mechanism lives
None of this needs a rebuild. What HIIPE calls a capture link is any link that is live in ninety seconds and returns a name, a channel and an inbox tagged with the source it came from, so the reminder button on an event page becomes a segment called by that event's name without anyone configuring one. The capture surfaces are that, and nothing more complicated.
The anatomy of a page that produces two things
Six blocks, in this order. The order matters more than the design, because a visitor decides in the first screen whether to keep reading.
| Block | What it has to do | The common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Date, place, price | Answer the three questions before any scrolling | Hiding the price to increase enquiries |
| The line-up, with names | Give the actual reason to come | A poster image with the names inside it, unreadable and unsearchable |
| The buy button | Be unmissable, and above the fold on a phone | Competing with a second call to action |
| Practical detail | Doors, transport, end time, age policy | Leaving it out, which produces the same four emails every week |
| The second action | Return a contact from people not buying today | Absent, on almost every page in the industry |
| Structured event data | Let search surfaces read the date and place | Present but wrong, which is worse than absent |
Only the fifth row is unusual, and it is the one this whole article is about.
The wording that works, and the wording that does not
The second action fails or succeeds on one sentence. These are the patterns we see convert, and the ones that do not.
Works: a promise with a date attached. Tell me when the full line-up is announced. The reader knows exactly what arrives and roughly when, and can picture the message.
Works: a promise tied to scarcity that is real. Tell me when we are down to the last hundred. It only works if it is true, and if it is true it is the strongest of the three.
Works, weakly: the venue promise. Tell me about the next one here. Lower intent, but it catches everyone for whom this date is simply wrong, which is otherwise a total loss.
Does not work: anything with the word newsletter. It describes a format rather than a benefit, and the reader has to imagine the value themselves.
Does not work: a discount for signing up. It converts, and it teaches the person that the list is where prices drop, which changes what they do next time they see a full-price ticket.
One field, one sentence, one consent line, and the wording stored with the record so it can be produced later. That is the whole build.
How to measure it, so you do not conclude it failed
Not conversion rate. That number will barely move, because the people you are now capturing were never going to buy today.
Measure contacts per hundred visits, and then, three months later, measure how many of the tickets for your next event were bought by someone who first appeared in that column. That second number is the whole return, and it does not exist until the second event, which is also the argument in turning followers into a list you own.
Read next : A guest list app fills the room. It does not build a contact list · What an event CRM should do between two events