Use These 5 Tools for Freshers Week Success

Autumn, and what many in the events world refer to as silly season, gets underway with the arrival of Freshers’ Week this month, typically running from mid-September through October.

Over the past several weeks, listings have sprung up across Skiddle at pace, offering students throughout the UK a wide variety of experiences. Venues and dates are confirmed, and artists have been booked – all that’s left to do now is shift as many tickets as possible and get punters through the doors.

With this in mind, we’ve put our heads together at Skiddle and picked out our top five features and services to help you achieve success during Freshers’ Week.

Keep reading for a short guide to each one and find out how to use them for your events.

Reach followers with Brand & Artist Alerts

At this stage of the year, you should have already published your Freshers’ Week listings on Skiddle, and they’re likely performing pretty well. What you might not have considered, however – especially if you have more than one Freshers’ Week event on sale – is creating your own brand page to house all your events in one convenient place.

Not only does a brand page help customers find your events, but whenever a new event is added, our system sends a notification to those who already follow your brand, ensuring they never miss out. Better still, when a customer buys a ticket to one of your events, they’ll automatically be added as a follower, provided you’ve already created an event brand (find out how to create an event brand on the Skiddle Promotion Centre).

More customers receiving alerts means more eyes on your events, and a greater chance of success.

If you’re still sitting on a special guest headliner, you should check out our Artist Alerts feature, which can help you make the most of their announcement. Once you tag the artist in your event, we’ll send mobile push and email notifications to their followers, letting them know where they’re performing.

Please note: Artist Alerts can only be sent for events and event brands with a Skiddle Account Manager. Contact the Promoter Support team for more information at promoters@skiddle.com.

Read more about Brand Alerts and Artist Alerts.

Build awareness & sell more tickets with Skiddle Reps

Question: How can you encourage sales outside your usual channels with minimal additional effort?

Answer: By using Skiddle Reps.

Here’s how it works. You invite people who aren’t already part of your team, such as close friends and family, students, or fans of your events or brand, to sell tickets on your behalf in exchange for cash or money-can’t-buy rewards that you assign.

To enable Reps for an event, simply sign in to your Promotion Centre account (Create an account for free here) and select the relevant event from the dashboard. Open Promotion > Manage Reps, then switch the Rep settings from off to on. On this page, you’ll also find trackable links to share with your fans, followers, and students which they then use to sell tickets to your events.

The main benefit is that you can tap into an audience you might otherwise struggle to reach, using one of the oldest and most powerful marketing tricks known to man: word of mouth. Build an army of student advocates to do the hard work for you this Freshers’ Week, and reap the rewards.

💡 Industry data consistently shows that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising, making referrals uniquely persuasive in a crowded and competitive landscape.

Read more about Skiddle Reps.

Compel students to buy tickets with a Discount Code

Who doesn’t feel good after snagging a great deal with a discount code? Cash-strapped students certainly fall firmly into that group.

Students attending universities across the British Isles this year have arguably got it harder than those who came before them, as the cost of living bites into the disposable income they have available.

So, to persuade students to make your events the ones they attend during Freshers’ Week, and to build trust and loyalty towards your event or brand early on, why not offer a discount on your upcoming events?

You can easily generate single-use, multi-use, or unlimited-use discount codes from the Promotion Centre dashboard, then incorporate them into your marketing to create urgency and drive sales. You could, for example, run a flash sale by dropping a limited-use discount code into a student forum or social media group. You could even attend Freshers’ fairs in nearby cities and hand out discount codes to new students.

Watch our how-to video tutorial on using Discount Codes.

Make it easier for students to buy tickets with PayPal

Here comes that buzzword again: cost of living.

What else can promoters do to make Freshers’ Week events more affordable and manageable for new students? They’ve likely just spent a large portion of their grants furnishing their new student digs and, if they’re savvy, stocking their shelves and fridges.

Ever the innovative bunch, the folks over at PayPal have introduced PayPal Pay in 30 Days, allowing eligible customers to buy tickets priced between £1 and £900 and defer payment until 30 days after the initial purchase date. This could help a student who has yet to receive their loan or is waiting for wages from their student job.

Read more about PayPal Pay in 30 Days.

We also support PayPal Pay in 3 on Skiddle. This allows customers to spread the cost of a ticket priced between £20 and £3,000 across three equal, interest-free instalments. It’s another great way to make your events more accessible. Be sure to promote these services to your audience to increase your chances of making more sales.

Read more about PayPal Pay in 3.

Get attendees into your event quickly with RapidScan

Finally, our fifth tool to increase your chance of success at your forthcoming and future Freshers’ Week events is RapidScan: our free barcode-scanning solution devised to get guests through the doors as quickly and smoothly as possible.

As with any other product purchased online, reviews play a huge role in persuading future audiences that your events are worth their time and money. The first hurdle, and the one that could prevent your event from earning five stars, is the length of the entry queue, especially when it’s cold, raining, and blowing a gale, as it often is at this time of year.

Save yourself the hassle of miffed-off customers and poor reviews. Harness the power of the free RapidScan app to get freshers through the doors and spending their maintenance grants behind the bar, without delay.

Download the RapidScan app for free on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

Watch our how-to video tutorial on RapidScan.