How Automated Event Invitations Can Help You Sell More Tickets
You’ve published the event. The tickets are live. Now comes the familiar question: where will the next group of attendees come from?
Most organisers immediately turn to social media, paid ads or local community groups. Those channels matter, but there’s another audience sitting much closer to home—people who have already bought a ticket from you.
They know your organisation. They’ve trusted your booking process. More importantly, they’ve previously decided that one of your events was worth attending.
That makes them worth contacting again.
With an automated event invitation email, Sticky Tickets organisers can let eligible purchasers from previous events know when a new event is available. There’s no separate mailing list to prepare and no promotional email to write from scratch.
It’s one less job on the event checklist—and possibly the reminder a previous attendee needs to come back.
Why Past Ticket Purchasers Deserve Another Look
There’s a real difference between someone who has briefly seen your Facebook post and someone who has paid to attend one of your events.
A past purchaser has already crossed several hurdles. They noticed the event, considered whether it was worth their time, checked the details and completed the purchase.
That doesn’t mean they’ll automatically buy again. Perhaps the date won’t suit them. Perhaps the next event isn’t their cup of tea. Still, you’re speaking to someone who already knows your name rather than introducing yourself to a complete stranger.
Previous purchasers may remember:
- The atmosphere of your last event
- A performer, speaker or activity they enjoyed
- The friends or family members who attended with them
- The cause their ticket helped support
- How straightforward it was to book
- The type of experience your organisation provides
Sometimes people don’t return because they’ve lost interest.
Quite often, though, they simply didn’t hear about the next event.
General customer-retention research supports the value of maintaining existing relationships. According to Harvard Business Review’s research on customer retention, acquiring a new customer may cost between five and 25 times more than retaining an existing one, depending on the business and industry.
That figure isn’t a direct forecast for ticket sales, of course. Events work differently from subscriptions or retail purchases. The broader point still stands: someone who already knows you usually needs less convincing than someone encountering your organisation for the first time.
Rebuilding an Audience for Every Event Is Hard Work
Every event comes with its own collection of small, surprisingly time-consuming jobs.
The venue needs final numbers. A sponsor wants its logo moved. Someone asks about parking even though it’s mentioned twice on the event page. Then a presenter sends a new headshot the night before your announcement is due to go live.
Promotion lands on top of all that.
When you manually invite previous purchasers, the process can involve:
- Exporting customer records
- Checking organiser contact permissions
- Removing duplicate email addresses
- Separating purchasers by event
- Uploading contacts into another email system
- Writing and formatting the email
- Testing links and images
- Scheduling the message
- Handling unsubscribe requirements
None of these tasks is enormous by itself. Put them together, however, and there goes half the afternoon.
An automated invitation cuts out much of that fiddling. It doesn’t replace your wider marketing work, but it does give you a simpler way to invite past ticket purchasers who may be interested in attending again.
Why Email Still Matters for Event Promotion
Social media can introduce your event to new audiences, but there’s no guarantee that every follower will see what you post.
You might spend an hour preparing a Reel, choosing the right clips and writing the caption, only for it to reach a small portion of your audience. That’s the nature of algorithm-led feeds.
Email is more direct. It gives your message a place in the recipient’s inbox rather than waiting for them to come across it while scrolling.
The 2025 Litmus email marketing research collected responses from nearly 500 marketing professionals and found that:
- 35% reported earning between $10 and $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing
- 30% reported earning between $36 and $50 for every $1 spent
- Promotional emails produced the highest reported returns for business-to-consumer organisations
Those are broad email marketing figures, not guaranteed outcomes for an individual event invitation. They do, however, help explain why email continues to hold its place alongside social media and paid advertising.
For an event organiser, the purpose can be quite simple: put the next event in front of someone who has attended before and give them an easy path back to the booking page.
How Automated Event Invitations Work
Sticky Tickets allows you to choose one or more previous events and schedule an invitation for eligible purchasers who attended them.
The process takes place within the same Australian ticketing platform used to create your event, manage ticket types and monitor bookings.
You don’t have to copy contacts between different systems. Sticky Tickets uses eligible purchaser information connected to the previous events you select.
No separate mailing list is needed
For smaller teams, volunteer committees and community groups, this is particularly handy.
Not every organisation has a dedicated marketing employee or a paid email platform. Often, the person setting up the tickets is also answering attendee questions, speaking with suppliers and posting on social media.
The automated invitation gives that person one less list to manage.
You don’t need to write another email
The invitation content is created automatically.
The wording itself can’t be changed, but you can update the event image through the Image Gallery in the Event Description section. That image will then appear in the invitation email.
It’s worth checking the image before scheduling the invitation. A strong photograph can quickly remind someone why the event looks appealing. A blurry poster with tiny writing… perhaps not so much.
You choose the send date
The invitation can be arranged in advance, giving you control over when previous purchasers first hear about the event.
You might schedule it:
- Shortly after tickets go on sale
- While early-bird pricing is available
- Alongside your first social media announcement
- Before ticket availability becomes limited
- When you announce a major speaker, performer or activity
There’s no universal best day. What matters is that the event page is complete, tickets are available and the recipient has enough time to make a decision.
Who Can Receive the Event Invitation Email?
The feature doesn’t send a message to every person who has ever purchased one of your tickets.
A purchaser can receive the invitation only when they:
- Attended one or more of the previous events you selected
- Opted to be contacted by the organiser through the default organiser-contact question
- Haven’t exceeded the promotional email frequency limits applied to the account
If the same purchaser attended several of the selected events, they will still receive only one invitation.
The feature also has a cap of 500 recipients per organiser, per event.
These conditions help keep the invitation relevant while respecting the communication choices purchasers made during the booking process.
Choose Relevant Previous Events
Sending the invitation to more people won’t necessarily produce better results.
Relevance matters.
Suppose you’re promoting a second photography workshop. Inviting people from your previous beginner photography session makes sense. Inviting purchasers from an unrelated trivia night might be a stretch—even if both events happened at the same venue.
Look for a natural connection between the previous event and the new one, such as:
- A similar topic or activity
- The same performer, speaker or facilitator
- Another event in the same series
- An annual fundraiser or community celebration
- A shared audience or age group
- A similar venue or location
- A follow-on workshop or advanced session
When the connection is obvious, the invitation feels useful rather than random.
Your Event Page Still Needs to Convince People
The invitation can bring a previous purchaser back to your page. It can’t make the decision for them.
Before sending anything, check the page as though you know nothing about the event.
Can you immediately tell what’s happening? Is the date easy to find? Does the description explain why the event is worth attending, or does it open with three paragraphs of background information before mentioning what people will actually experience?
A clear event page should answer:
- What is the event?
- Who is it for?
- When and where will it happen?
- What is included in the ticket?
- What will attendees see, learn or experience?
- Is capacity limited?
- Is there a booking deadline?
- What should the visitor do next?
The event description is one of your main sales tools. Sticky Tickets’ guide on how to create and publish an event page explains how to add event details, images, tickets and optional features.
For more practical writing and design advice, see how to create a great event page.
Keep the description easy to scan. Short sections and clear headings usually work better than a giant wall of text.
Give the Event Image Some Attention
The first image in your Event Description gallery is used in the automated invitation, so it shouldn’t be an afterthought.
Choose something that gives recipients an immediate sense of what they’re being invited to.
A good event image should:
- Look clear on a mobile screen
- Show the event, venue or experience
- Match the mood of the occasion
- Avoid large amounts of tiny text
- Feel consistent with your organisation
- Make sense without a long explanation
A lively photograph from last year’s event may work better than a graphic packed with dates, sponsor logos and several font sizes.
People should understand the general idea at a glance.
Combine Invitations With Other Event Promotion Tools
Automated invitations work best as one part of a broader campaign.
Past purchasers are valuable, but they aren’t your entire audience. You’ll probably still want to reach new people through social media, community organisations, partner pages, your own website or paid advertising.
Sticky Tickets includes several event promotion tools, including shareable event URLs, social sharing options, QR codes and ticket widgets for your website.
A simple promotion schedule might look like this:
- Publish the completed event page.
- Announce the event through your main social channels.
- Ask speakers, performers or sponsors to share the booking link.
- Send an invitation to relevant previous purchasers.
- Post useful reminders as the event approaches.
- Share practical details such as parking, transport, session times or what attendees should bring.
- Highlight limited availability when it genuinely applies.
You can also read Sticky Tickets’ advice on using social media to promote an event when planning the rest of your campaign.
The invitation covers a gap that’s easily missed: reconnecting with people who have already shown that they’re willing to attend.
How to Set Up an Automated Invitation
Setting up the invitation takes place within your new event.
- Open the Promote/Marketing tab.
- Select Set Invitation.
- Choose the date you want the invitation sent.
- Select the previous events you want to invite purchasers from.
- Select Save Invitation.
Before the scheduled send date, you can return to the same screen and adjust the date or selected events.
After the invitation has been sent, the settings are locked. The screen will show the send date and the number of recipients who received it.
There isn’t currently one page showing the invitation status for every event. To check whether an invitation is still scheduled or has already been sent, open the relevant event, return to Promote/Marketing and select Set Invitation.
See the complete guide on how to send an automated invitation email to past ticket purchasers for screenshots, common questions and troubleshooting.
What If You Want to Write Your Own Email?
The automated invitation is designed for speed and simplicity. There will be times when you need more control over the wording.
You may want to:
- Include a personal message from the organiser
- Offer a private presale
- Share a discount code
- Contact different groups with different information
- Include more background about the event
- Add several links or calls to action
In that case, you can export a mailing list from previous events. Sticky Tickets allows organisers to filter the results by contact permission, including purchasers who opted to receive organiser communications.
You can then prepare your own email using your preferred mailing software.
It takes more time, but it gives you greater control. Use the automated invitation when you need a straightforward event announcement. Use an exported list when the message requires more detail or separate audience groups.
Turn a Previous Purchase Into Another Visit
Organisers naturally spend a great deal of time looking for new attendees. That work matters.
Still, the people who have attended before shouldn’t quietly disappear from the plan.
They already know your organisation. They have previously trusted you with a booking, and some of them may be more than happy to attend again. They simply need to know that another event is happening.
An automated event invitation email gives them that reminder without asking you to rebuild a list or write another promotional email.
To reconnect with previous purchasers, open your new event, head to the Promote/Marketing tab and set up an automated invitation.
This ebook has seven of our favourite tried and tested methods for increasing ticket sales, and most of them don’t require a lot of work or expense on your part.
