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How to Send Virtual Event Ticket Links via Emma/MailChimp: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1353549
When you patrons purchase tickets to Virtual Events, they receive a link in their confirmation email. This link gives them access to the event, and acts as their ticket. As a best practice, we recommend you resend them this link a few hours or a day before the show (for livestream events) or when the video becomes available (for Video On Demand).
Automated Communications is usually a great solution for resending the link (either as an automated pre-show email for livestreams, or using a version of the cancellation email process for VOD), but there are a few reasons you might need to use your email marketing provider instead:
- You've got a lot tickets sold for this event, and are worried you'll hit your Salesforce Single Email Limit of 5,000
- It's a big day for ticket sales or online donations in general, and you might hit that Single Email Limit if you send any Automated Communications
- You imported tickets via the Ticket Order Import Tool (which means those patrons never got a confirmation email), but you also sold tickets normally (so those patrons did receive a confirmation email). You want to send out the ticket link right away, but only for the imported orders
No matter what, you'll need to:
- Get the link to the virtual event
- Build an email-capable report of your ticket buyers and their tickets
- Send the email
1. Get the link to the virtual event
First things first: we need to get a link we can send to your patrons that will bring them to your virtual event, and this link needs to ask them for the ticket code generated when they bought the ticket.
1.1. Via the PatronTicket Hub, find your Event Instance
1.2. Scroll down to the Virtual Event Information section, then click on the Control Panel button
1.3. Below the preview section, click View Stream Link
1.4. Copy the URL from this page - this is the link you'll send to your patrons via your email template
You'll need this link later, so put it in your virtual notepad.
You can move on to the next step!
1.1. First, sell yourself a ticket in your system
Make sure the email on the ticket order is your email address - you need the confirmation email!
1.2. Find the confirmation email and click the ticket link
1.3. On the screen you get to, copy most of the link - but leave out the ticket code at the end
You'll want to copy everything up to the last backslash - the last bit of the URL is your ticket's unique ticket code, so you don't want to send that to your patrons.
In the below example, you can see the ticket code at the end of the URL and also in the box in the middle of the screen (starting with "D").
You'll need this link later, so put it in your virtual notepad.
You can move on to the next step!
2. Build an email-capable report of your ticket buyers and their tickets
Now we need to get that ticket code in a report we can use to email all your ticket buyers.
To be more specific, the report we build needs to contain:
- The patron's Contact ID
- The Contact's email address
- The Barcode field from the ticket
Don't worry, we'll show you exactly how to build it below:
2.1. Go the Reports tab
2.2. Click New Report
2.3. Search for and use the "Ticket Orders with Ticket Order Item and Contact" report type
2.4. On the Outline tab, make sure these four columns are listed, at minimum
- Ticket Order: Name
- Contact: Contact ID
- Contact: Email
- Note: there are many Email fields to choose from; make sure you get the one under "Contact: Ph/Fax/URL" section!
- Barcode
The Barcode field is the actual ticket - it's what your patrons need to get access to the virtual event.
2.5. On the Filters tab, set your filters as follows, then click Save & Run:
- Show Me: All ticket orders
- Cart Expiration: All Time
- Ticketable Event: equals [the exact name of the Ticketable Event]
- Event Instance Name: equals [the exact name of the Event Instance]
-
Status: equals Active
- Note: You're looking for Ticket Order Item Status (not Ticket Order Status)
If you're sending the ticket links only to folks whose Ticket Orders were imported, you'll want to add another filter for "Order Origin equals Imported"
2.6. Fill out the pop-up and save your report
- Report Name: Resend Virtual Event Ticket Links
- Report Unique Name: autofills
- Report Description: describe this so you and your colleagues recognize it
- Folder: put this somewhere you and the colleauges who use it will be able to find and access it
- Click Save
Now that you've saved this report, you can use it as a template! Next time you need to do this, find this report and "Save As", then adjust filters as necessary.
2.7. Look at the results - specifically to see if you need to manually resend any
In the next step, we'll resend most of these tickets in one fell swoop.
However!
Note that each email on this report will only get one of their barcodes - that is, only one of the virtual ticket links.
For households who purchased two tickets as part of a subscription, this shouldn't be an issue, as they're probably watching the livestream/VOD together.
But if you notice a Ticket Order with many tickets, it's probably a Group Sale. In this case, they probably need every ticket link on the order. You'll need to resend these manually from the Ticket Order.
3. Send the email!
No matter which email provider you're using, you need to include two pieces information:
- A merge field bringing in the Barcode field from your report: this is the access code they'll need to enter once they click on...
- ...the link to your virtual event you got in step 1
How you'll actually create the email is a little different depending on which email provider you use:
Good news - using Emma makes this process pretty simple. Follow along with this article about sending emails with Emma - and you've already built the report, so start with Step 2 (syncing the report with an Emma Segment).
Be sure to include the Barcode field in your sync with the Emma Segment!
Since MailChimp can't sync fields other than Email, you'll need to get the Barcode field over to your MailChimp account with an import. Refer to MailChimp's help documentation for step-by-step instructions, but generally, you'll need to:
- Export the report from step 2 (above) as a CSV file
- Create a custom field in MailChimp to house the Barcode data
- Update your contacts in MailChimp with the Barcode from the spreadsheet, making sure to only update the Barcode custom field
- Note: be sure there's only one row per email address before you perform this update
- Create and use a custom merge tag to pull the new Barcode field into your email.
- Make sure to also include the link to the event from step 1 (above)!