Guide · Marketing

How to email the people who actually visited

Your mailing list knows who bought a ticket. That is not the same as knowing who walked through the door, and the difference is the most useful thing about it.

Updated August 2026 · About a 6 minute read

The list you already have

If you sell tickets online you are building a mailing list whether you meant to or not. Someone gives you their email to receive a booking confirmation, and if you asked them at the checkout whether they would also like to hear what is on, some of them said yes.

That list is worth more than a list you bought or collected on a clipboard, for one reason: every person on it has already paid you money. They are not prospects. They are customers who have been, and the whole job is getting them to come again.

Booked is not the same as came

Here is where most venue mailing lists quietly go wrong. They record what somebody bought. They do not record whether that person turned up.

Those are different people to write to, and treating them the same produces the two worst emails in venue marketing:

• "Great to see you at the Christmas trail, come again next year" sent to someone who bought tickets and never made it. They know they did not come. Now they know you do not either.
• Nothing at all sent to that same person, who paid you and had a bad experience or a clash, and is the easiest customer in your database to win back.

If you scan tickets on the door, you already hold the answer. Most venues never connect it to their marketing, because attendance lives in the ticketing system and the mailing list lives somewhere else.

The four groups worth separating

Once attendance and bookings are both on the record, a mailing list stops being one list and becomes four useful ones.

• Came to a specific event. "Everyone who visited the light trail last December." The single most valuable segment you have, because you are asking someone to repeat something they already enjoyed.
• Booked it and did not come. Paid customers with an unfinished experience. A short, generous email here converts better than almost anything else you will send.
• First-timers. Came once, to one thing. They do not know what else you run, and they are the group most likely to assume you are a one-event venue.
• Lapsed. Used to come, has not for a year or more. Worth a different tone entirely, and worth being honest that it has been a while.

The three emails that earn their place

You do not need a campaign calendar. Three emails, sent to the right group, do most of the work.

• "It is back." Sent to people who came to the same event last year, a few weeks before this year's tickets go on sale. The highest open rate you will get, because it is news they actually want.
• "We missed you." Sent to people who booked and did not attend, once, without guilt. A credit or a priority window works better than a discount, because it treats them as a customer rather than a lapsed lead.
• "There is more here than you think." Sent to first-timers a month after their visit, showing the other things you run. Most venues never send this and it is the cheapest cross-sell available to them.

Everything else, the newsletters and the seasonal round-ups, is optional. These three are the ones tied to something a specific person actually did.

The consent part, which is shorter than you fear

Marketing email to consumers in the UK needs consent, and the rules are less complicated than their reputation.

• Ask at the checkout, separately from the booking. An unticked box that says what they will get. Not buried in terms, not pre-ticked.
• A booking confirmation is not marketing. You can always send someone the details of a booking they made. That is service, not promotion, and it needs no marketing consent.
• Every marketing email needs a working unsubscribe, and an unsubscribe has to actually stop everything promotional, not just that one campaign.
• Honour it in both directions. If somebody unsubscribes in your email tool, your ticketing system needs to know, or it carries on sending its own marketing to a person who has opted out. This is the failure that catches venues who use two systems, and nobody notices until somebody complains.

Do not build the email tool

Venues sometimes ask whether their ticketing system should send campaigns. Generally it should not, and if you already pay for an email tool you should keep it. Designing emails, testing subject lines, managing templates and handling deliverability is a whole product, and a ticketing system that dabbles in it will do it worse than the thing you already have.

What the ticketing system should do is know things the email tool cannot: who came, what they came to, when they last visited, and how many times. That belongs on the contact record in whatever tool you send from, kept up to date without anyone exporting a spreadsheet every few weeks.

Doing it without exporting a spreadsheet

Practically: ask for marketing consent at the checkout, scan tickets on the door so attendance is recorded rather than assumed, and connect the email tool you already use so the two stay in step on their own. Contacts who opted in flow across, tagged with what they booked and what they actually attended, along with their first visit, last visit and visit count. Unsubscribes flow back, so opting out in one place stops the emails in both.

That is how Hatch works with Mailchimp, using your own Mailchimp account rather than one of ours, and there is more on the marketing side of Hatch. There are companion pieces on reducing no-shows without taking deposits, which is the other half of the attendance question, and on what events to run if you are still deciding what you are emailing people about.

Common questions

Can I email people who bought tickets from me?

You can always email them about the booking itself, because that is service rather than marketing. Sending them promotional email needs marketing consent, which in practice means an unticked box at the checkout that says plainly what they are agreeing to receive. Consent given for one venue does not cover another, and it does not expire on a fixed schedule, though a list nobody has emailed for two years is worth treating with care rather than blasting.

What is the difference between someone who booked and someone who visited?

A booking is a purchase, and attendance is what happened afterwards. The gap between the two is your no-show rate, and it is usually larger than venues expect. It matters for marketing because the two groups need opposite emails: one wants to be invited back to something they enjoyed, and the other paid for something they never got. Only a venue that scans tickets on the door can tell them apart, which is why most mailing lists treat both as the same person.

Should my ticketing system or my email tool own the mailing list?

The email tool should own the sending, and the ticketing system should own the facts. Ticketing knows who came, what they came to and when they last visited; an email tool cannot know any of that on its own. Keeping the two connected means your segments stay accurate without anyone maintaining them by hand, and it means an unsubscribe registered in either place is honoured by both, which is the part that becomes a compliance problem when it is missed.

How often should a leisure venue email its customers?

Less often than most marketing advice suggests, and tied to something the recipient actually did rather than to a calendar. A venue that emails three times a year with news that is genuinely relevant to that person will keep a healthier list than one sending monthly to everybody. Frequency complaints and unsubscribes are usually a relevance problem wearing a frequency costume.

Written for UK leisure venues. This is a practical guide rather than legal advice, and the ICO's own guidance on direct marketing is short, readable and free.