Customer Snapshot
- Tickets Sold: 4,777
- Total Free Emails Sent: 104,675
- Imported Email Contacts: 14,468
About the Dungeness Crab Festival
Located in Port Angeles, Washington, the Dungeness Crab Festival is a beloved community event that attracts nearly 30,000 attendees each year. After 23 successful years, a new nonprofit entity was created to keep the festival alive, ensuring its ongoing contribution to local tourism and community spirit. While the festival is free, the nonprofit sells Crab Dinners to generate revenue.
To support this transition, the board needed to find a cost-effective ticketing platform. Board member Victoria Jones knew TicketSignup’s free platform would work for the Dungeness Crab Festival. TicketSignup’s user-friendly, self-serve tools let her quickly set up ticket sales. Victoria is a longtime RunSignup user as the race director of the North Olympic Discovery Marathon. Last year, she switched to RunSignup’s free Email Marketing and cutting expensive Mailchimp costs for the marathon. She saw the same savings potential with TicketSignup’s free Email Marketing.
Selling More Tickets with Free Email Marketing
“Our Social Media Manager took over Email Marketing. She absolutely loved the Email Builder and thinks it’s the best thing ever.”
The Dungeness Crab Festival had 14,468 email contacts from past crab dinner sales. Victoria easily imported the contacts as a custom list.
TicketSignup’s Email Marketing is completely free – there are no limits or charges per contact for emails sent. The Dungeness Crab Fest sent 16 free emails to a total of 104,675 contacts. The emails led to 723 tickets sold and over $26,000 in sales.
The Crab Fest sent 3 types of emails:
- Marketing: Create a sense of urgency to pre-purchase crab dinners, rather than waiting until the event to buy on site. Marketing emails drive ticket sales.
- Pre-Event Communications: Sent to the dynamic list of current ticket purchasers to proactively communicate logistics of picking up crab dinners and enjoying the festival.
- Post-Event Survey: After the event, a link to a survey was sent to all attendees to give feedback and gather information to improve next year’s event.
While 30,000 people attend the festival, the Crab Fest only gets emails from pre-purchased crab dinners. As demonstrated above, these emails are very valuable for driving sales and bringing in money ahead of the fest weekend. TicketSignup’s Email Capture popup helped them collect 475 additional emails. Emails are automatically added to a custom list, making it seamless and free to grow marketing lists and include them on emails.
Building a Ticketing Website for Free
While the Dungeness Crab Festival has its own website, they needed a website specific to selling crab dinners. With TicketSignup, they were able to do this quickly and for free. The Crab Fest brought over its theme colors, images, and text. Then they leveraged TicketSignup’s customizable ticket tiles to feature dinner options, a dynamic countdown clock, videos, and a slideshow with event photos. In addition to crab dinner sales, they also featured a call to action to Donate to their charity partner, the Feiro Marine Life Center. They raised over $3,600, with many small donations coming from the donation add-on on the checkout page.
A Self-Serve Platform with Support Available
Victoria appreciates TicketSignup’s self-serve platform. She was able to set up the tickets, customize the website, and easily manage ticket purchases without help. It was also easy to train other users on how to use TicketSignup. In particular, the financial reporting and ease of creating and organizing coupon codes saved significant time.
When a volunteer with access to the event accidentally deleted a few ticket types, Victoria appreciated that Senior Technical Account Manager, Elisabeth Dellarova, was able to quickly restore them so that no data was lost. TicketSignup’s 100% US-based team is available seven days a week to help events learn and use the platform, as well as respond quickly to urgent customer needs.
As the Dungeness Crab Festival looks towards its 2025 event, a website revamp is on the roadmap. They are considering TicketSignup’s free Organization Websites because they will get free domain hosting, automatic SEO and mobile optimization, and ease of use to build out and maintain content.