How to use the waitlist feature

Introducing IWannaTicket Waitlists

Waitlists are a versatile feature to maintain a list of people waiting for tickets to an event. How they are used will depend on the client's level of interaction with the ticket buyers.

To be able to use waitlists, IWannaTicket must turn them on for your account, or for each event individually. If they are turned on for the account, they may be turned off for each event individually.

A customer may want to join the waitlist for a particular event date ("we're gonna do a cooking class for Mum's birthday!") or for the whole event ("I don't care when I go, I want to see the school band play!"). If the event just has one event date, these cases are the same. There is no option to join a waitlist for a particular type of ticket.

Front End

When a session is sold out (either due to actual sales, or due to the tickets being changed to sold out), the Join Waitlist button will appear in the list of event dates:

When the event is completely sold out, the Join Waitlist button will appear on the sold out page:

Clicking on the button will give the client a dialogue to fill in:

Once the client has added themselves to the waitlist, the button won't appear for them again.

Back End

In the back end, there will be a Waitlist button on the event date summary. If there's someone on the waitlist, the button will be coloured blue.

IMPORTANT: If there are multiple event dates, and the customer added themselves to the waitlist when the event was sold out, then we don't know which event date they wanted and they do not appear in the waitlist for any date. You'll need to use the report described below.

When you click on the waitlist button, you get a list of all the people on the waitlist for that event date. It includes information provided by the customer when they added themselves, but you have the option to edit that, or add your own notes.

Enter the details into the "Add to the waitlist" fields, and click Create.

The "Save" button is to save changes after you edit the row.

The "Done" button marks the entry as handled, and makes it go away.

The "Email" button sends an email to the email address, and marks the entry as done. For this to work, you need to configure an email as described below.

The "Show Handled" option shows you the handled entries as well, in case you clicked the Done button by mistake, or you wanted to get back to someone who had previously been notified.

The message about "tickets that the customer can buy now" is for your information, and is how many tickets the customer can get from the web site for the current event date. It may not be relevant to your particular method of handling the waitlist.

Note that if tickets are publically available, they are available to anyone on the waitlist and anyone else at all, so if you are informing several clients that tickets are available then whoever buys them first will have them.

Report

There is an event-level report to show all entries on the waitlist for the event. If you have multiple event dates and the event was marked as sold out, customers will appear in this report but not any event-date waitlist.

There is no facility to send email to people from the report. The easiest solution would be to copy email addresses from the report and add an entry to an event-date waitlist, then use the Email button.

Email

Email to customers about being on the waitlist works through the newish Template / Campaign system which is under Account / Email.

Main Article: Creating email templates and campaigns.

You need to create a Template of type Event (or use an existing one).

Your content could say to check the website again, or "sorry please try again next year", or that you've created a new event date.

Once you have the template, you need to create a Campaign of type WAITLIST. The WAITLIST type means rather than sending email now, or at a time, or on the day of the event, to send it when you say to send email about the waitlist.

You choose the template you just created and "From the waitlist" in the When setting. The time is ignored. For the audience, you select the event(s) that this template applies to - you can create an Event Group or an Event Group Group in the Festival area. The Audience checkboxes are ignored for this type of campaign.

This is what creating the event group looked like:

You can then go back to the waitlist, and start clicking on the Email button. The system looks in your running email campaigns for a campaign that is (a) a waitlist campaign and (b) for this event. It then sends that email to the given email address. The waitlist entry is marked as handled and disappears.

If you check Show Handled, you can see those entries again, with annotations about what happened to them.

Entering the Waitlist Again

The waitlist is designed so that if a customer adds themselves to the waitlist, they will get one or zero emails.

Once you have sent them an email, you can't email that entry again. However:

• The customer can add themselves to the waitlist again
• You can manually create a new waitlist entry for them.

If you require any further assistance, please get in touch via support@iwannaticket.com.au and your Account Manager will be able to provide additional information.