Patron Comunication

This feature allows you to send an email to all the patrons of an event, or of a run. You have the option of resending the receipt, or just a message.

  1. Log into your Seat Yourself dashboard.
  2. Click on the blue +rsvns button or the green +sales button in the Reports panel of the dashboard.
  3. Make sure the date range and matching field are set so that all the desired events are in the list.
  4. Click the blue +emails button near the top.
  5. Add whatever message you want to send to the patrons.
  6. Click the Preview message in new tab button to check your message.
  7. Click the Send emails button.

In addition to the message you set, recipients will receive instructions for how to use their email addresses to get a link to their orders.

For a single event, you can just use the blue emails button near the right end of the dashboard’s line for the event.

Tailoring the recipient list

In some situations, there is no need to send the message to all the patrons. Three dropdown menus at the top of the page allow you to specify that the message will be sent only to patrons holding a specific ticket type, or sitting in a specific section. When the email blast is being used to send status updates about a canceled or postponed event, you can limit the blast to patrons who have requested a refund, offered to donate their proceeds, or to use the tickets on a rescheduled date. In those situations, you should probably be reading the cancellation documentation instead of this page.

Note: When sending individual links to a lot of email addresses, the system can take a long time, and it’s possible for it to appear to time out. This does not mean that the email blast has failed; it’s still going on in background. You’ll receive a summary email at the end to let you know that it succeeded.

This section reviews all the ways you can post information about your events for your patrons. (And it stresses something that took us a while to learn: Shoppers on the web read sketchily, and the best way to cope with this is through redundancy.) The upshot is that we recommend using more than one of the options listed below for getting information out to your patron community.

  • Your own web pages: The web pages we have in mind are the ones on which you have posted the link to the webstore. You probably have the most room and flexibility in these locations. Please make sure that the contents of the Website field on the Webstore settings tab of your Seat Yourself account are the web address (URL) of one of these.
  • The webstore landing message: See our note on Landing page settings for how to set this message. Shoppers see this page before they begin shopping if you have a landing message, access code, price code, social distancing buffers, or graphic image set in your account.
  • The Purchaser messages section of both the Webstore settings and Per-show settings tabs: There are four of these messages:
    1. Pre-sale: Displayed to shoppers when the cursor is over a performance when sales are not enabled.
    2. On sale: Displayed when sales are enabled and the event is not sold out.
    3. Sales closed: Displayed after online sales have closed automatically.
    4. Sold out: Displayed if sales are enabled, but there are no vacant seats allocated to the webstore (i.e. not allocated to the box office and not sold or held).
  • The Custom receipt messages section of both the Webstore settings and Per-show settings tabs: These messages, of course, are not seen by shoppers before they buy.
  • The Event page: This feature is described in detail here.

Shoppers regularly mistype their own email addresses, and box office sales have that problem with higher frequency. Faulty email addresses keep patrons from receiving the notifications described in the previous section, and can also prevent receipt of links to streamed events. Here is how to fix an email typo:

  1. Click on the blue rsvns button or the green sales button on the dashboard’s line for an event containing the order.
  2. Click on the blue order button on the line for that order to get to the Order page.
  3. Check the box near the bottom to enable email addressing editing, edit the address, and submit the update.

It is sometimes desirable to let shoppers credit a performer for their purchase. You can add an extra field to the checkout page and customize its label and hint so that shoppers can add that bit of extra information. The field is normally optional in the checkout process, but you have the option of making it mandatory.

To add the field:

  • click the Webstore settings link in the Management panel of the dashboard
  • open the Custom order field section
  • add the label you want (e.g. Student to credit) to the  Custom field label field
  • add the hint you want (e.g. Enter the name of the student to credit for this order) to the  Custom field description field
  • submit the update

To make the field mandatory:

  • click the Custom field settings link in the Admin panel of the dashboard
  • check the Custom field required box
  • submit the update

The contents of the field can be seen in the +credit Orders by credited name report in the  Reports panel of the dashboard.