3 ways FIXR helped Illuminate increase revenue

New for 2023, Illuminate is a winter light trail held at Tonbridge Castle in Kent which is built around the idea of offering an easily accessible, urban, family-friendly and high-intensity immersive experience.

Since launching the event earlier in the year, Illuminate has proved to be very popular, with nearly 25,000 ticket sales before the gates opened for the very first time on 26th November, and many more forecast before the final show on 30th December.

James Ward, co-founder of Illuminate, told us how using FIXR has helped them achieve success in their first year; optimising their paid advertising, increasing ticket sales, and improving the purchasing experience for their customers.


1. Streamlining event set-up

FIXR offered a system that allowed me to set up the tickets, the categories, and the bracketing that Illuminate needed.

Our specific requirements meant quite a timely set-up process, but the FIXR team were very helpful in terms of helping to set up the nitty-gritty bits, taking it away to the dev team to find solutions.

If there's something that I can't do, or that would take our team loads of time, FIXR's account management team will always be forthcoming and say "Let's speak to tech" to see if they can do something to make this easier.

It’s a very innovative team - they're always looking for solutions.

Instead of just saying “Sorry that’s something we can't do”, they are very responsive and proactive in getting things sorted and finding solutions to help us ultimately sell tickets.

Photo credit: Illuminate

2. Using audience insights to optimise ad spend

The FIXR Organiser dashboard is great for us; being able to view things like analytics, customer information and conversions.

I can see the average age of our attendees, and see that the 25 to 44-year-old demographic makes up 70% of our client base. That’s useful information in terms of our ad targeting.

As a completely new concept, through the early stages of testing we were blanketing 18 to 65-year-olds because we didn't know exactly what our audience was.

Knowing our core demographic of ticket buyers meant we could really hone in on the ages to specifically target.

That helps massively in terms of conversions, ad spend, and making sure that the return on ad spend (ROAS) is the best it can possibly be; helping us save money and also generate custom.

Photo credit: FIXR

3. Boosting ticket sales via seamless access control

The FIXR Entry Manager works an absolute treat, it's very simple to use, and when you've got groups or families coming in on one QR code it’s beautiful.

We had 21 people come through on one ticket the other night. You just scan it once and you’re done. With some other platforms, you have to scan every single barcode, which is extremely lengthy.

On the first night, we got nearly 800 people through the door within 35 minutes.

We were shocked, we thought it would be a much longer process.

Having that quick entry process means that we can add more tickets per hour. We know that we can deal with the volume, which helps us make more money overall.


If you'd like to find out more about how FIXR can help make your events a success, please get in touch below - we'd love to hear from you!