It’s important to get started off on the right foot with a visitor.
First impressions count and long, complicated checkout processes as part of your online ticket buying journey are a big no-no.
We’ve all experienced this in one way or another when making an online purchase, lots of boxes to fill in just to complete a purchase. It might just be us, but we’re pretty sure that all those boxes are off-putting and contribute to basket abandonment rates.
We say – only ask your visitors to fill out fields of information that actually matter. What do we mean by questions that “actually matter”, well, have you ever been asked for a child’s email address and mobile number when trying to purchase a ticket online? Did that leave you baffled as to why that info was relevant, did it also then not let you move on until you filled in the box (as it’s a required field) and you ended up manually entering the same info for every family member. That’s what we mean by just capturing relevant information.
If you have a big, long list of questions you ask your visitors to fill out when completing the ticket booking process ask yourself why? Why do you need to find out the answer to that question? What are you going to do with that information once you have? Will the user find it frustrating?
Let’s look at some examples, do you need to capture a child’s age or date of birth? Why?
Some might argue that capturing this information during the online ticketing process is absolutely essential and will help you to market towards them based on their dates of birth for things like birthday discounts or offers. Fair point, but think of this practically, if you have a CRM full of thousands of visitors, your marketing team are going to have a full-time job sending out birthday offers and emails to every child. Plus, it’s going to the parents, yes it might be a nice gesture in showing you remember their child’s birthday, but they’re unlikely to forget their child’s birthday, so in that case you’ll need to have an enticing enough offer to bring them to your attraction to celebrate their child’s birthday. So, working it back do you need a DOB capture field?
Similarly, you may have always captured a child’s age, this may be to enforce the age limit on tickets at your visitor attraction or capture information about your younger visitors. If you’re capturing a child’s age to ensure they meet the required age for the associated ticket, is this something you’re going to enforce on-site? If a parent is making a call and purchasing a child ticket or membership pass for an under 12, we (in good human faith) must also trust that child is under 12 years old. If you’re capturing for demographics, does that need to be part of the buyer journey, or could you ask about age in a follow up survey post visit. So again, do you really need to capture that information during the buyer journey?
The more questions you ask at the ticket buying journey, the further your visitor is from completing their purchase and the potential for basket abandonment will increase.
We’ve seen multiple visitor attraction customers come to us with a list of absolutely essential questions that up until now they’ve been asking during the customer ticket buying journey. When we designed their new buyer process, we asked them why they ask those questions, then what they do with the information. We found that all most all of the time nothing was done with the answers to the questions, unless they had a super proactive marketing team that able to use the info to increase engagement and add value to a visitor.
We’d recommend looking at the questions you’re asking buyers of day tickets, memberships and event and decide on what questions you feel actually matter.
Of course, you can capture as much information on your visitors as you’d like, down to demographics and age, but think, really is this something that we actually need? Is there value in the information we are asking for? We truly believe in keeping the process simple and prompting users to only provide essential information such Name, Address, Email – then once their purchase is complete, you can prompt them to choose to create an account and save their information for next time to help keep them coming back to buy more online tickets.
Plus, this is such an easy fix, you will need to talk to your online ticketing provider, but they should be able to assist you in changing your data capture options and help simplify that important step of the buying process.