The Complete Guide to Ticket Pricing (+ Case Studies)

Even for the most exciting event, success boils down to your pricing strategy and your bottom line.

While your passion drives your dedication to developing and putting on your event, you also need to break even. And, you want surplus so you can make your event a tradition and improve it every year.

Pricing is tricky because it puts a monetary value on your event. If tickets are too cheap, the experience may not be worth it. If tickets are too expensive, you’ll miss out on attendees. You need to find the “Goldilocks” price for your event.

Specific rates and implementation best practices can vary based on your event. We’ll discuss some specific differences between ticketing and registration to help you apply these ideas in the best way for your event.

We’ll cover pricing strategies that increase ticket sales and how to know when to raise prices. Once you’ve settled on your pricing strategy, communication is key to successful implementation.

Top three pricing strategies for events

If it’s your first year running an event, it makes sense to start with a competitive or cost-plus pricing strategy. 

Competitive pricing strategy

With a competitive pricing strategy, you’ll look at similar events in your region and list their prices. Once you’ve compiled these prices, you’ll know the target price ranges for your event.

Cost-plus pricing strategy

With a cost-plus strategy, you’ll focus on identifying the cost to produce your event. Next, you’ll calculate your ticket prices based on how many you expect to sell. Be conservative in your estimate because you don’t want to lose money if you don’t hit your sales goal. Once you know how much the base cost of each ticket is, add a profit margin.

Value-based pricing

Eventually, you’ll want to move into value-based pricing. Value-based pricing is centered on the perceived value your event offers attendees and participants. The greater the perceived value, the more people are willing to pay to attend or participate in your event.

To move into a value-based pricing strategy, you’ll need to understand what your target audience cares about and deliver. Maybe it’s networking with prominent community members or a renowned coach. Or, maybe it’s seeing a really cool performance. Or, maybe it’s really great food. Whatever is the biggest draw for your event, capitalize on it to draw more people. Once you have a crowd and have built demand, you can increase prices.

Increase ticket sales

You need to develop a pricing strategy that makes it easy to sell tickets and generate revenue.

Open sales early

Open ticket sales at least four months before your event. It’s even better to have a ticketing page created long before you open. Even if sales are closed, people can sign up to be notified when sales open.

For events with registration, consider how much lead time people like to prepare to participate. For example, consider how long a team practices before competing in a competition. Open your registration in time so coaches can register their teams and orient their team goals toward your competition.

If your event offers vendor booths, give businesses enough lead time to figure out travel and supplying their booth. It’s rarely a last-minute decision for vendors to come to your event.

The sooner your open registration or ticketing, the easier it is to sell more. Opening sales earlier also means that you’ll start getting revenue sooner which makes it easier to pay for expenses as you’re getting ready.

Communication tips

Send an email the day sales open to past attendees. Include registration categories or ticket types and the pricing information. If you’re doing a small promotion to help encourage sales, include the deal and the expiration date.

Create an enhanced experience option

In your ticket or registration options, include a VIP or specialty option. The cost for these enhanced experiences will be higher than your normal ticket or registration. Even if the enhanced experience doesn’t sell out, it boosts the sales of your lower value tickets.

As you think about what to include in your enhanced experience, consider common pain points for your participants or attendees. Maybe people with these tickets can skip the lines. 

Of course, also think of other meaningful perks you can offer. For example, you could host a meet and greet with performers, offer backstage access, or include a meal.

Communication tips

Get people excited about the VIP experience. Advertise the perks included in the VIP package on your ticketing page and in email communications with your email list. Include details in your other marketing efforts, like social media, print posters, digital ads, etc.

Raise rates for most popular times and best seats

If you’re a ticketed event or selling vendor booths, you can charge more for prime locations or seats. Some people are willing to pay more for the best view or the most foot traffic. People who are more price-sensitive will opt for the cheaper options, which makes it easier to sell those seats.

If you have multiple showtimes for your event, you can offer cheaper tickets for the matinee or earlier times than for evening times on Friday and Saturday. You’ll see a similar effect on ticket sales as with adjusting prices based on location.

In addition to raising rates for popular times, seats, and categories, discontinue tickets or registrations that aren’t selling.

The Eastern North Carolina Renaissance Faire used these two strategies to increase its dinner sales and overall revenue between 2023 and 2024.

In 2023, they held the fair for only one day. General admission was $10-$20. They also offered a dinner ($35/person) and a concert ($20). Admission to all three was $75.

In 2024, they expanded to two days and raised prices for general admission ($15-$25) and dinner ($50/person). A weekend pass was also available for $40. There was no concert in 2024 since ticket sales didn’t do well in 2023.

The Eastern North Carolina Renaissance Faire also added paid vendor opportunities for $150.

With increased prices, new revenue sources, a second day, and cutting low-selling items, the Eastern North Carolina Renaissance Faire sold seven times more dinner tickets and had a 270 percent increase in year over year revenue.

Communication tips

Display pricing differences on your purchase page. For assigned seating, it can be easy to use a dynamic seat map where people can see the pricing when they click on each seat. For general admission, you can offer a different ticket type. With registration, display each category option with its pricing.

Offer season passes, bundles, or group discounts

Offering season passes, bundles and even group discounts can help drive sales. Even though you’re offering a deal, you’re capturing more revenue if you were strategic.

Sometimes all people need is a little incentive to get one more ticket or registration. For example, you could offer 10 percent off on orders with at least 4 tickets. If tickets are $20 each, a cart with three tickets generates $60, a cart with 4 tickets at 10 percent off generates $72. So, you’re capturing $12 more dollars, or 20 percent more revenue, than you might have without the group discount.

While group discounts are effective for both ticketing and registration, bundles and season passes generally make the most sense for ticketing.

Like group discounts, bundles can make sales easier, too. For example,  families with multiple children tend to be pretty cost-sensitive. If adult tickets are $20 and kids tickets are $10, it costs $60 for a family of four to come to your event. Offering a bundle of tickets for $45 or $50 can make it easier for families to attend, which makes it easier for you to sell tickets. Alternatively, you can host a family night with discounted tickets or let kids attend for free.

Season passes are a great way to reward your most loyal fans. Buying a season pass is generally cheaper than buying a single ticket for every game or show. It’s advantageous for you because it means you don’t have to find as many new attendees for each show and it helps you get revenue faster.

Communication tips

Display information about group discounts, bundles, and season passes on your ticketing page. Email past attendees with details about these offers – depending on your approach, you could break these offers into separate emails or include them together in one email. It can even be helpful to communicate about specific offers in your digital ads and other paid marketing.

Increase ticket prices as your event nears

As you develop your strategy for price increases, think about the timing of buying decisions for your participants and attendees. For example, people going to fairs or festivals probably don’t start buying tickets a year in advance. Those sales may start 6-4 months before the event. 

In contrast, people participating in a contest take time to prepare. Since the preparation time is longer, you’ll find people are willing to make a commitment much further in advance.

Reward early buyers with lower prices, and raise prices strategically as your event gets closer. Again, consider the lead time people take when making a decision as you set your price increases and price increase amounts. An email about an upcoming price increase can encourage people on the fence to make a decision.

Your attendees will quickly learn that buying tickets sooner gets them the best prices. They’ll start buying tickets earlier, which makes it more likely you’ll sell out before your event starts.

An alternative strategy is to set rates by number of participants. For example, maybe you can sell 50 registrations at $85, so you offer the lowest price to the first 50 people who register. Then, you raise the price to $115 for the next 100 registrations, and so on. You’re still increasing prices as your event nears, but the price can change in a day if you’re selling fast. 

Communication tips

Send an email out a day or two before your next price increase. Getting the word out helps you get a boost in sales right before the price increases. It’s also smart to display a countdown to the next price increase on your purchase page.

Leverage marketing and growth tools

Include margin for marketing campaigns and promotions to help increase sales. For example, you could work with a local business to create a mutually beneficial promotion. Offering a deal for a holiday like Black Friday can also help you boost sales.

Identify strategies that get your attendees to market for you. For example, offer rebates for attendees who get their friends and family to buy tickets or registrations. Stride Event’s software makes this strategy simple to set up and track.

Offer a few dollars off when buyers share a link to your ticketing page on Facebook. This strategy promotes your event on social media and increases visits to your ticketing or registration page.

The Ames Iowa Renaissance Faire generated 19 times their referral rebates in revenue and two and a half times their spend on social media discounts.

And, when ticket or registration buyers get interrupted before they pay, automate reminder emails with a link that sends them right where they left off. It’s easy to get more sales completed with these reminders.

For example, The Sandbox Theatre Company converted 14.1 percent of abandoned ticket sales with abandoned cart email reminders.

The Box Elder Bash Demolition Derby had similar success with Stride Events’ growth tools: they generated fifteen times more revenue on rebates offered for referrals. They also converted 9.8 percent of abandoned ticket sales with email reminders.

Communication tips

With Stride Events’ software, the communication is automated for you. When you turn on the Facebook share and save feature, a button with a link and social media message is added to your online purchase pathway. 

When you turn on your referral program, details about the rebate opportunity are included in the confirmation email.

When you turn on abandoned cart reminder emails, they are sent automatically after 30 minutes if an order isn’t completed. 

When to raise prices

While some price increases are designed to drive sales, larger, overall price increases focus on generating more revenue per ticket or registration. 

But, before you can do that, you need to know that people are willing to pay more to participate or attend your event.

Selling Out

When you start to sell out regularly, you’ll know you can raise ticket prices. If you’re selling out, you’re probably turning people away because you only have so many tickets. So, you’ll still be able to sell tickets even if the prices are higher.

When you generate more revenue, you can invest more in your event and deliver a better experience.

Scalpers

If you’ve got people buying tickets or registrations and then reselling them at a higher price, people are willing to pay more money than you’re charging.

Raising prices also helps deter scalpers because it increases the risk of scalping tickets and can lower the value of a scalped ticket. People are only willing to pay so much for a ticket or registration whether they’re buying from a scalper or not.

Stride Event’s software offers additional tools to help you fight scalping. With tickets, you can place order limits by cart or event time. For any transaction, you can also block known chargeback offenders from buying tickets or registrations from you in the future.