Zicket Reports 49x Return on Ad Spend With Eventbrite

At Hong Kong’s historical Western Market the crowds file in. Dressed in Hawaiian shirts, Barbie-and-Ken outfits or glittery wigs—depending on the night’s theme—they’re ready for some serious organised fun.

Got Balls is Hong Kong’s regular rowdy bingo night. And while nothing beats the thrill of shouting “BINGO” at the top of your lungs (or winning the occasional George Foreman grill bonus prize), it’s the immersive party atmosphere that draws people to these sell-out events.

“It’s dress ups, 500 people in a hall, free-flowing beers, everybody playing bingo, interactive stage games—the whole shebang,” says Aidan Pawson. “It’s like being back at university.”

As Managing Director of Zicket, an events service offering management, marketing and more, Aidan has a front-row seat to Hong Kong’s insatiable appetite for unique events.

Zicket started using Eventbrite’s integrated ticketing and event marketing solution in 2022 and has seen exponential growth for their clients’ events ever since. It relaunched its website and ticketing service, leveraging Eventbrite’s API, and began using Eventbrite’s full suite of built-in marketing tools across paid social and email. The results have been remarkable.

Zicket’s local industry expertise coupled with the power of the Eventbrite platform has generated eye-popping figures such as 62% email open rates, 94% increase in Instagram followers and a 49x return on ad spend. Here’s how they’re doing it.

Mastering email with Got Balls

Got Balls started as an informal bingo night run by a group of mates, but word quickly spread. Now, it’s more of a wild night out with bingo, vintage game show elements and fancy dress—no wonder it’s always a full house.

Zicket was behind the rapid expansion and growth. “It was porting a community from a WhatsApp chat into our system. Looking after regular attendees a lot better, having an on-sale plan,” says Aidan, who asked himself: “‘How do we hit these people at the right time to make them hit that button and actually purchase those tickets?’”

When Got Balls returned with its Glastoballs event, Zicket decided to launch with an email—and it paid off. The standard email open rate, according to Mailchimp data, isn’t much more than 20% for any industry. Zicket’s campaign for Got Balls hit 62%. 

For Aidan, it comes down to Eventbrite’s easy-to-use email marketing tools, like templates and intelligent audience targeting, as well that intangible quality—trust.

“We actually find that all the emails sent through Eventbrite do perform pretty well,” he says. “I think part of it is Eventbrite as a platform, as a domain, being trusted, rather than being a random promotor starting their own mailing list.”

“The Eventbrite system has kind of trimmed all the fat.”

Aidan feels particularly strongly about the power of Eventbrite’s email assistance, with templates specifically designed with conversion in mind, and the advantage of intelligent audience targeting, which uses insights and data from previous Eventbrite campaigns to increase the response of email recipients.

“The Eventbrite system has kind of trimmed all the fat,” Aidan says. “You can edit the bits that you need to but you’re always hitting the mark on, what’s the purpose of this email? And how do we actually get people to open the email, click on the event and purchase the ticket?”

Growing The Grounds’ social presence

Under the technicolour glow of the Hong Kong observation wheel, crowds relax in candy-striped beach chairs, sip Champagne and settle in for the latest blockbuster.

Premium outdoor cinema, The Grounds at AIA Vitality Park, offers a self-contained night out, with fenced-off private viewing spaces, contactless food and drink delivery, and a few extra comforts (such as two-person sofas) all in front of the giant LED screen.

Hong Kong is a unique environment, and Zicket is clued-in enough to know that the success of The Grounds has been as much about the film choice (think noughties classics such as Zoolander) as the presentation.

“The interesting thing about The Grounds was, it was a product born out of Covid but because [Hong Kong] is such a busy and populated place, everybody went, ‘do you know what? I really like this—I like my own space,’” says Aidan.

Its privacy and premium catering courtesy of nearby BaseHall gives The Grounds an enviable offering, but its popularity has been pushed further by Eventbrite’s Instagram Growth tool.

It’s a suite specifically designed to grow your Instagram audience, and Zicket’s campaign brought the Grounds’ account an additional 8,384 new followers—a 94% increase overall. For Aidan, it’s an easy step that Eventbrite users ought to be taking advantage of. 

Before turning to Eventbrite, Pawson says they had “reached a plateau”. “The page got to 10,000 and didn’t really move much,” he says. “Then as we went into the last season we kicked in Instagram Growth campaigns as well as our regular marketing activity and we kind of aligned these things correctly.”

Perfecting Ads for HKFC Citi Soccer Sevens

Hong Kong Football Club’s annual seven-a-side football tournament welcomes some of the biggest Premier League clubs, including Aston Villa and Newcastle United. “They’ll invite some of the older legends of the game to come out of retirement and play,” adds Aidan. 

You could say Zicket’s digital ad campaign for Soccer Sevens was the ultimate event planner goals. Using Eventbrite’s paid social ads, Zicket’s campaign hit 27,376 potential attendees for a total of 1,282 link clicks and a 49x return on ad spend. 

“We definitely see a bigger return on ad spend with Eventbrite.”

For this campaign, Zicket took a very deliberate approach to its digital spend, utilising the power of Eventbrite’s marketing tools to hit those big numbers. It’s something Aidan recommends to other creators, rather than running ads through Facebook’s native tools.

“You have to go in there every day and prune them, pause that one, up that, find lookalike audiences etc,” he says. “All of that work automatically happens inside the tool.”

For Aidan, the real inside trick is the A/B test function, which lets users compare images and video across a campaign, using real-time results to sharpen the content and audience for those ads.

“Say you have two images for one campaign, two videos for one campaign, it’ll run it to all of the different places, so Instagram feed, Facebook, stories etc,” he says. “Then it’ll A/B test. And day by day it’ll say, this audience is outperforming this audience and it’ll move some of your money into that bucket.”

The results have not only been big in pure numbers, but from a comparative point of view. “We definitely see a bigger return on ad spend with Eventbrite,” says Aidan. “Normally you’re in that 5-10x range. We will see 20, 30, 40, 50x on our spend [with Eventbrite] which is pretty impressive.”

The power of partnership

Zicket’s events range from intimate evenings to carnivals with audiences into the millions. When choosing to partner with Eventbrite, having a system that can swing seamlessly between sizes was vital.

“This system and these tools are applicable to all of those, and that’s one of the strongest points,” says Aidan. 

Now, a year into the partnership, Aidan is confident that Zicket has made a wise choice in harnessing the Eventbrite platform.

“It just made sense to us to have an off-the-shelf or developed platform with all the extra stuff that comes with an industry-leading platform,” he says. “Bringing all the marketing into one platform was one of the best things for us.”