Written by: David Mimeles

First impressions are important. They are the foundation upon which a customer’s experience is built. Visitors form their first impression of your museum when they buy their ticket to enter your galleries or exhibits.

Different museums choose different ticketing and entry models depending on the needs of the organization and customers. At some museums, customers purchase a ticket for immediate entry, while at other museums, customers wait in separate entry lines and enter through turnstiles.

When designing or revising your admissions strategy, be sure to consider all of the potential admission opportunities for your museum so that you can be sure to best serve your visitors.

Consider opportunities such as:

1. Opening a members-only admission line.

2. Utilizing timed ticketing.

3. Creating a dynamic pricing system.

4. Busting lines with mobile ticket sales.

5. Solving problems on the sidelines.

Your museum team already delivers unique exhibits and experiences to your visitors. Extending the same thoughtful planning to admissions as you do to exhibits ensures that your patrons will have an excellent experience starting even before they enter your museum.

Your museum members provide more than financial support for your organization—when they tell friends and family about their visits, they’re also some of your museum’s greatest advocates. Providing a members-only admission line provides VIP benefits for your greatest supporters.

A members-only entrance is separate from the general admission entrance and has a shorter line. This makes it easy for your staff to scan membership cards and admit valuable members to the museum quickly.

However, this isn’t the only purpose for a members-only entrance. It can also be a tool for your museum to:

• Draw attention to your membership program. When visitors see that your members are entering the museum so quickly, they’re more likely to consider purchasing their own membership. Make sure it’s easy for your staff to upsell memberships in the ticketing line by investing in a membership software solution that supports mobile sales and payments. These new members can then go straight to the members-only entrance.

• Shorten the regular ticketing line. When your members enter through a separate entrance, there are fewer people in the general admissions line. As a result, these lines will move faster and create a better experience for your non-members as well.

Creating positive experiences for members helps build a strong membership program with a steady revenue stream. For more information about museum memberships and how to grow your program, check out Doubleknot’s museum membership ultimate guide.

Museums use timed tickets to control guest capacity. Timed tickets ensure that your museum can serve the greatest number of visitors at a steady rate without severe overcrowding during popular times.

With timed tickets, your customers buy tickets ahead of time that are valid only during a specific time period.

Your museum may find it most useful to offer this method of ticketing for different purposes, such as:

• Your year-round admissions policy. Choose to offer timed tickets year-round if your museum often has a problem with overcrowding. If you find yourself frequently turning people away to stay at capacity, you may choose to always offer a timed ticketing option.

• When hosting a popular exhibit. Museums tend to be most crowded when hosting special traveling exhibits. Offering timed tickets for special exhibits ensures that visitors can view special exhibits while they’re available at your museum.

• During highly-visited times of the year. If your museum regularly experiences crowds at a particular time, like winter holidays and school breaks, plan ahead to use timed ticketing to reduce overcrowding.

Unless your museum is planning to shift to a year-round timed-ticketing admissions policy, look for museum ticketing software with the flexibility to support both timed ticket sales and regular ticketing. This way, you can scale up to support timed ticketing during busy seasons or exhibits and scale down during periods of lower traffic.

Every museum experiences times of higher traffic to their galleries and exhibits. To help ensure a steady number of visitors during off-peak periods, many museums rely on dynamic pricing.

Dynamic pricing helps museums serve more visitors by providing ticket options at a range of price points. Ticket prices are higher during periods of greater demand and reduced during times of lower demand.

Changing to a dynamic pricing model can be a major project. You’ll need a source of attendance projections to get started. These projections can be found by tracking your museum’s specific attendance history. Watch attendance variables such as the visitation on different days of the week (weekends may see higher attendance), during the school year, or while specific exhibits are on view.

You may consider purchasing predictive data from a specialized vendor who uses a variety of current and historic data sources to project attendance.

Once you’ve developed a predictive data source and a methodology for adjusting prices accordingly, you’ll need museum software that supports the new flexible ticket pricing solution.

If your museum chooses to implement a dynamic pricing model, take care to ensure that higher pricing on weekends and holidays doesn’t create a barrier to entry for visitors whose work schedules don’t allow them to take advantage of the lower off-peak prices.

Even with precautions like dynamic pricing and timed ticketing, your museum will still likely experience long lines on special occasions, such as holiday shows or touring exhibits. Or, like many children’s museums, you may experience steady traffic during the week and crowds on the weekends.

If these spikes in visitor traffic are just occasional, you may not need to invest in building more ticket sales stations or kiosks. Instead, deploy staff with handheld ticketing devices to sell and/or scan tickets.

Mobile sales stations allow your museum to create pop-up ticket lines from tablet devices. Your staff can approach people in line where they can purchase tickets on the spot or to scan their pre-purchased tickets for faster entry.

While online ticket sales (including customers purchasing tickets on their own smartphones) reduces the length and size of ticketing lines, many museums still rely on physically printed paper tickets for regular admission. If your museum relies on these paper tickets, some Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) printers are light enough to wear attached to a belt or lanyard and can be used to print tickets on the spot.

Before you commit to this linebusting technique, make sure you don’t lose any functionality by switching to mobile sales. Your ticketing software should support the purchase and sale of tickets along with:

• Membership upsells

• Discount packages

• Additional donations

Deployment of E-ticketing and online sales can create a dramatic impact on your museum’s attendance. Check out Swoop’s customer acquisition strategy article to learn more about using e-commerce to your museum’s advantage.

In a perfect world, everyone’s credit card would work and everyone’s barcode would scan immediately. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world, and sometimes credit card transactions fail and barcodes don’t scan. For example, sometimes tickets printed at home might be smudged or folded and unfolded so often that the scanner can’t get a clear read.

This is frustrating not only for the patron but also for visitors waiting in line behind someone with a ticketing or payment problem. When crowds get aggravated and impatient, resolving the issue becomes even more stressful for the visitor and your staff.

To reduce stress, keep lines moving. To create more goodwill on high-traffic days, designate one or more staff members to serve as “problem solvers.”

These “problem solvers” should have their own special line to provide service to people encountering problems. This speeds admission for everyone by:

• Keeping the regular admissions lines moving quickly. A fast-moving line creates a better visitor experience for everyone. When problems do not hold up the general admission line, you create a smooth entrance process for your visitors.

• Showing special attention to problems. Visitors recognize effective customer service. When you dedicate staff to make sure everyone has a good experience at your museum, visitors will take note and appreciate the extra effort you’ve exhibited.

• Giving your staff members time to effectively address the problem. If staff members know they’re holding up a line to address an issue, it adds unnecessary pressure to their job. Therefore, creating a line strictly dedicated to problem-solving takes the pressure off of your regular admission staff.

The Gist

You and your team have worked hard to make sure your museum delivers a memorable and inspirational experience for your visitors. A seamless ticketing and admissions process helps ensure that your visitors remember your exhibits and activities and not the amount of time they spent standing in lines.

In addition, streamlining admissions makes it easier for museum staff to provide high-quality customer service. When routine ticket sales and admissions operate seamlessly, staff will have more time and attention to devote to helping solve more complicated issues quickly.