How to use Eventbrite [beginner’s guide]

A haven for event managers and promoters, Eventbrite is a platform for selling tickets online. You can sell tickets for anything from Sesame Street Live to events that certainly aren’t for children. If you’re running an event but aren’t sure how to fill seats or issue tickets, Eventbrite could be the tool you need.

Here, I’ll explain how Eventbrite works, including how to sell tickets and manage your event. Click into the section you’re looking for, or read on for a full Eventbrite tutorial.

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Eventbrite pricing: Selling tickets on Eventbrite has no upfront cost to the organizer, but attendees are charged a ticketing fee when they purchase paid tickets (unless you choose to absorb these fees). You can learn more about Eventbrite’s ticketing fees here. If you need more advanced event marketing features—like the ability to send a high volume of event-related emails every day—Eventbrite offers three paid Pro subscription tiers. You can find these under the Plan Management tab in your Organization Settings.

How to create an event on Eventbrite

To sell tickets on Eventbrite, you’ll need to first register for an account. Once you’ve done that, you can start creating an event.

Click Create an event in the top menu.

If it’s your first time using Eventbrite, the tool will offer you a choice between creating your event from scratch or using AI to speed up the process. Here, we’ll walk you through the from-scratch process, which you can access by clicking Start from scratch.

Again, if it’s your first time using Eventbrite, it will ask you some quick onboarding questions about the types of events you host. Unfortunately, there’s no way to skip these—but there’s just a few of them, so it won’t slow you down too much.

Once you’re done with onboarding, the app will again give you a choice: create an event or take a product tour. We’ll skip the tour for now, but it’s a great option if you’re new to event planning tools or need to use more advanced features.

From here, the tool is a little weird: it defaults to the AI event creation process, even if you previously selected the from-scratch option. There’s a tiny link to create an even the regular way—and that’s what we’ll walk through in this tutorial.

On the event creation page, you’ll fill in the basic information: event name, date and time, and location.

Some of these basic fields expand to show more options. For example, when you click Date and location, Eventbrite will ask whether this is a single event or a recurring event. You can also select a location for in-person events, mark your event as an online event, or even indicate that the location is TBD.

Below these basic fields, you can add more detailed information about you event—including a detailed overview, FAQs, and the age range it’s appropriate for. If there’s anything important that these sections don’t cover, you can choose to add additional sections to your event page.

Once you’ve filled in the required fields, click Save and continue.

Now it’s time to create tickets for your event. You can choose from three ticket types: Paid, Free, and Donation. If you need to offer different ticket tiers—for example, for a venue that has floor and balcony seating—click Create a section.

Once you select your ticket type, fill out the sidebar that pops open. Under Advanced Settings, you can also add a textual description of the ticket, change visibility settings, set a minimum or maximum per order, or specify the sales channel as “everywhere,” “online only,” or “at the door only.” When you’re done, click Save.

To fine-tune your event listing, you can use the customization options in the left sidebar:

• Click Order Options > Order Form to customize the fields on your ticket order form based on what information you want to collect.

• Click Order Options > Order Confirmation to personalize your order confirmation email to fit your brand personality (or just change your reply-to email address).

• Click Order Options > Waitlist to enable the waitlist, which will then automatically turn on whenever a certain ticket type reaches capacity.

When you’re ready, click Publish in the left-hand toolbar. This will take you to a final publication page where you can review your event, customize privacy settings, and publish it on Eventbrite by clicking Publish now.

How to add discounts to an Eventbrite event

Once you’ve published your event, you may want to offer ticket discounts as part of your promotional strategy.

In the left sidebar of your dashboard, click Add tickets. Then click into the Promotions tab. From here, you can choose whether you want to create a general discount that’s available to everyone who views your event—basically, a sale—or create a discount code that’s only available to select attendees.

If you click Create a discount, Eventbrite will prompt you to fill out information about how much you want to discount tickets in the right-hand sidebar. You can select either a percentage or a fixed amount. You can also choose which tickets to put on sale, how long the sale will run for, and even how many on-sale tickets an attendee can purchase. Once you’ve filled in all this information, click Create to set up your promotion.

If you click Create an access or promo code, Eventbrite will ask you to fill out a few similar fields. This time, however, you’ll need to give your code a name, and say how many total tickets you want this code to apply to. Once again, click Save when you’re done.

Once you’ve created your discount, you’ll see it listed under the Promotions tab. You can always go back and edit or delete it later, if needed.

How to email attendees through Eventbrite

Event registration is a great way to collect email addresses from people that are definitely interested in what you have to offer. Using Zapier, you can automatically send all your attendees to your CRM or email marketing tool.

But you can also email all attendees about event updates or other publicity directly from Eventbrite. In the left sidebar of your event dashboard, click Marketing and then select the Email Campaigns tab.

Click New campaign to create a new set of marketing emails. You’ll get a pop-up prompting you to name your campaign. Then click Get started.

Now Eventbrite will ask you to build your campaign. You’ll need to provide some basic information, like who the email is from and what the footer says.

Select the Content tab to flesh out what your email actually says. Using the rich text editor, you can format the body of your email just how you like it. You can also choose a header image, add alt text, and choose what page to link people to from the email. And if you want to let people know about the other events you’re hosting, you can include a link to upcoming events.

Once you’ve nailed down your email content, use the Style tab to make sure your email reflects your brand. You can choose a background image, primary color, and more.

When you’re done customizing your email, click Continue. Eventbrite will drop you onto a page where you can select the subscriber list you want to send the email to. If you don’t already have a list, click Create a new list.

From here, you can add subscribers a couple different ways: by importing them from a previous event, by uploading a CSV, or manually. Whichever way you choose, just click Done when you’re finished.

Finally, it’s time to send your email. You can choose to either send your email now or schedule it for later.

Once you select the option that’s right for you, click Send (or Schedule if you chose that option) in the lower-right corner.

How to check your event analytics on Eventbrite

Eventbrite offers a fairly wide range of reports and analytics to help you gauge and improve your performance. From the left sidebar of the event editor page, click Reporting to see your options. 

This will bring you to a reporting dashboard. Under the Organization Reports tab, you can dig into pre-created reports on ticket sales, marketing traffic and conversions, and more. You can even monitor at-the-door sales.

If you want to receive high-level insights on a set schedule, just navigate to the Scheduled reports tab and click Create a report. Then select the events you want to receive reports for, the report frequency, and the email addresses you want to send the reports to. Then click Save.

If you want to see a breakdown of your event attendees, head to the Analytics tab. Here, you can get an overview of attendees and sales, group by city, and filter by ticket type.

Automate Eventbrite with Zapier

Eventbrite helps bridge the gap between online marketing and building a real-life community. It incorporates all your social media and online advertising campaigns and gives them a single, consolidated point of sale—in a place where active people already gather.

You can do even more with Eventbrite when you connect it to Zapier. You can automatically add Eventbrite events to Google Calendar, send attendee information to your email marketing tool or CRM, or even create events based on activity in other apps. Here are a few more pre-made templates to get you started, but you can create fully automated systems with Eventbrite on Zapier.

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This article was originally published in June 2019 by Matt Ellis. The most recent update was in December 2024.