--- title: "When festivals sell 80% of tickets to strangers, your launch has to be predictable." date: 2026-09-22T13:48:00+01:00 author: Alice Green canonical_url: "https://hellomustard.com/news/when-festivals-sell-80-to-strangers" section: News --- [Work ](https://hellomustard.com/case-studies) [Services ](https://hellomustard.com/services) [About ](https://hellomustard.com/who-we-are) [Press ](https://hellomustard.com/press) [Latest ](https://hellomustard.com/news) [Events ](https://hellomustard.com/events-webinars) [Contact us](https://hellomustard.com/contact) # When festivals sell 80% of tickets to strangers, your launch has to be predictable. *By Rory Palmer-Rowe, Head of Strategy, mustard, September 2026* ![Screenshot 2026 09 23 at 14 43 09](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/Screenshot-2026-09-23-at-14.43.09.png?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790171004&s=b779497de191de3fa9fbe7453c72c78a) Festivals Thoughts When festivals sell 80% of tickets to strangers, your launch has to be predictable. Date 22nd Sept 2026 read time 5 minutes Author Rory Tags Festivals Thoughts [Get in touch](https://hellomustard.com/contact)[About us](https://hellomustard.com/who-we-are) Last year I ran the numbers on a festival that had been going long enough to feel established. Good brand, loyal following, the sort of event where the team talks about their audience like they know them personally. Fewer than 20% of their customers came back each year. Which means every single edition, that festival has to find more than 80% of its total ticket sales from people who have never bought from them. That’s an expensive task, and it’s the reason why making your launch as predictable as possible is critical for festivals. ![Forbidden forest 11](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/forbidden-forest-11.avif?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1786027679&s=4994aaef4bc6e49c34333353c79f4982) ## One launch, one event, one year. A festival gets one shot a year at driving revenue, and one launch to get it right. You’re also operating from a new foundation every campaign, from a new lineup to new production, plus 4 out of 5 of your ticket buyers have never bought from you before. That is a lot of unknowns riding on your one shot of the year, and the stakes are already high. Whilst you can’t lower those stakes, what you can lower is the number of variables you are guessing. What’s in your control is to make your launch predictable enough to understand the growth metrics you need to hit, the split of where they are coming from, the audiences driving ticket sales, why they book, and why they do not. ## Audit your growth metrics Before anyone talks about creative, lineup reveal, or launch dates, we need to understand the baseline metrics of last year’s campaign; and we don’t just mean total sales, sign-ups, and conversion rate. ![Comedy at the castle 4](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/comedy-at-the-castle-4.jpg?w=1600&h=2844&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1786100830&s=e91684da1d4dfc02c0b8f643ef862731) ![Hideout 4](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/Hideout-4.webp?w=1600&h=2844&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790171612&s=7f17139523963203700ee55886f06bcc) Whilst I’ve never come across a festival that didn’t know these numbers; there’s a question that almost nobody can ever answer cleanly and that is your sales mix, meaning where the sales actually *came* from. For example, a blended pre-sale conversion rate of 12% describes nobody if your returning customers convert at 25% and your paid social signups convert at 6%. I’d go as far as saying a conversion rate doesn’t actually tell you anything if you can’t break it down at the source. What channels and audiences made that up? A marketing budget built off the back of paid CPAs alone totally ignores the conversion revenue and ROI from email marketing, for example (and that’s if it’s being tracked 😬). Once you can see that split, you know exactly where the signup and launch budget should go, and you stop forecasting off averages that don’t actually tell you anything. Either the maths will be mathing, or it will not. And if it does not, this is where we change the plan rather than the hope. Do you need more budget? A longer signup window? A different channel mix? What audiences are you missing? We want to find out in week 1 with a spreadsheet rather than in week 4 with less days to fix it. Because your launch window is so short, launch forecasting and scenario modelling become a critical practice. Sian Bennett, landed this in ‘[*The experience economy is booming. So why is growth getting harder?*](https://hellomustard.com/news/growth-made-predictable)*’* “Predictable growth is knowing which levers move which numbers, by how much, at what cost, and how early you would see it in the data.” ![MUSTARD HEADSHOTS31756](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/MUSTARD_HEADSHOTS31756.jpg?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.4912&fp-y=0.2406&dm=1790161544&s=60aa6bbba023f8cdacff46d00f5383f6) Sian Bennett Managing Director, mustard ## Selling to 80% of strangers on launch Now back to the 80%. If the majority of tickets you sell are from people who have never bought from you, then finding new audiences is not one line in the plan. It is the plan! We know every festival targets new audiences, *that* isn’t new. Yet almost none can tell you how many new bookers they found last year, what each one cost, or which message brought them in. That is the gap we need to close. ![TRIIP Festival 111](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/TRIIP-Festival_111.jpg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1785920722&s=fa880188297e4c72738d9a947d38c058) So we need to know who those people actually are, at a level of detail that can inform future budget, creative and channels. To predict new audiences you need a system; personas, booker journey, psychological triggers, funnel & booking journey, creative territories, landing pages, share of budget and targets. In your launch, could you say what share of your bookers were new? What share of your budget went on finding them? How many tickets each audience actually drove, and what each of those tickets cost you? Is your paid activity built around your audiences, or around your channels? Because if your campaign structure is Meta, Google, and TikTok rather than the 4 groups of people you are trying to reach, you cannot report by audience at the end of it. You will finish your campaign knowing exactly what every platform did and almost nothing about who bought. Get that structure right and new audience stops being an intention. It becomes a number with a target against it, measured the same way every year, and the first thing you look at when you plan the next one. ![Truck 7](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/truck-7_2026-08-11-102635_fuie.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1786443995&s=72db5d3738f90547075041d6737c3722) ## Email is a festival’s biggest lever As organic reach becomes more of a myth each year, and paid acquisition keeps getting more expensive, a festival’s owned data is the only channel you can compound for free, yet almost nobody tracks the return on it. Festivals will report return on ad spend to 2 decimal places every week and have no idea what their email list earned them. We’ve helped a large-scale attraction be on track for 20% growth in its second year (that’s an extra 15,000 tickets) by understanding revenue per email and setting targets and trackable campaigns designed to drive an uplift in both emails collected and trackable revenue from email conversion campaigns. That’s nearly a quarter of a million pounds in revenue. Have I convinced you that email *is* sexy yet? 😂 An international festival recently spent £12,000 on its signup campaign and generated 5,000 signups. That list went on to generate £160,000 in ticket revenue. Sounds great, but… when asked whether that was good, nobody could answer, because nobody had measured it the year before. There was no baseline, no margin based on the cost per lead, so there was no way to know whether that list had been worked hard or left half-used. By tracking revenue per email, benchmarked against last year, with a target you are trying to beat, you know if the signup campaign is genuinely performed vs the cost. ## Treat your launch as the biggest research opportunity of your year. Your signup campaign is the only moment per year when thousands of people who want to come to your festival put their hand up and tell you. Most events count them, we want to learn from them. When those people sign up, design the capture so we learn something about them, not just collect an email address. Which persona they belong to. What brought them in. Get that right and your pre-sale sequence can be written to 4 different groups of people instead of 1 generic list, and next January starts with an audience picture instead of a blank page. Surveys, focus groups, and conversion audits post-launch is a fortnight of work that will tell you more about your conversion problem than a whole campaign of reporting will. That is the difference between knowing your launch was down 8% and knowing it was down 8% because your signup list was the same size but converted worse, which is a completely different problem with a completely different fix. ![Balance 4](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/balance-4_2026-09-23-111431_pktq.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790162071&s=5e4c4c62d7c78b8d0237c8b85ff0f55f) ## Work out what makes them move. And finally, time for the fun stuff! Everything above tells you how many people you need, where to find them and what they should cost. However, no amount of modelling has ever made somebody take a Friday off work, book a Travelodge with 5 mates, and stand in a field in the rain because the headliner is worth it. We call that brand gravity, it’s the job that actually sells the ticket. Alongside the numbers and new fan strategies, we stress test the festival’s proposition and its amplification. What is genuinely new this year? What is the proposition for someone who’s never heard of it before? Which creators, media partners and PR angles generate desire? How will a teaser and reveal cut through? This work doesn’t become measurable, nor predictable, however it should now have targets and audiences attached to who it was designed for. We judge them on whether demand moves, not on whether the video was good. None of this sucks the fun out of your launch, instead it’s the thing that buys you room for it. When you know your numbers hold, you can spend your energy on the lineup reveal, the film, the idea that makes people screenshot it and send it to 4 mates. When you don't, you spend the whole campaign refreshing the ticket count and making decisions out of fear. We’ve all been there! ![MUSTARD HEADSHOTS31613](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/MUSTARD_HEADSHOTS31613.jpg?w=1600&h=2133&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.4923&fp-y=0.2221&dm=1788963183&s=cf60c5015b422375c3a84c574237e0cb) Written by ## Rory ## Palmer-Rowe you might also like [more news & thoughts](https://hellomustard.com/news) [![AO Arena bowl](https://mustard-media.transforms.svdcdn.com/production/images/AO-Arena-bowl.jpeg?w=1600&h=900&q=80&fm=webp&fit=crop&crop=focalpoint&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&dm=1790155839&s=07ed48d24427d9a164cc678b767b00cb) Thoughts Strategy Growth The experience economy is booming. 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