Sales
Pre Season Ticket Strategy: Selling Out Before Opening Day
Most farms wait until opening week to push tickets. The farms that sell out start in July. A complete pre season playbook for filling peak weekends before they even arrive.
Most farms treat opening day as the start of the selling season. By that logic, the first ad runs the week before opening. The first email goes out three or four days out. Tickets go on sale and then everyone scrambles.
The farms that consistently sell out start much earlier. By the time opening weekend arrives, half the season is already booked. Friday afternoon panic doesn’t exist because there’s nothing left to panic about.
Here’s the pre season playbook we run with partner farms.
The five week pre season window
Most farm seasons can be aggressively pre sold in the five weeks before opening day. The framework:
Week 5 before opening: Email list reactivation Week 4: Early bird launch to existing list Week 3: Public tickets open, paid ads begin Week 2: Influencer activations Week 1: Final push, social momentum
Each week feeds the next. By opening weekend, ticket sales should already be tracking 50 to 70% of the season’s total target.
Week 5: warm up the existing list
Send one email to your full guest list from prior years. Subject: simple. “What’s coming this year at Sunny Acres.”
Content: a quick recap of last season, what’s new, opening date, and a one line tease that early access tickets drop next week.
Don’t sell anything in this email. The point is to wake up the list. Open rates on this single email tell you who’s still engaged.
Reply rates also tell you something interesting: families who reply are your highest intent buyers for the season. Tag them in TicketSpice for prioritized follow up.
Week 4: early bird launch
Send one focused email to the engaged list. Subject: “Early access for Sunny Acres families.”
Offer one of three things:
- A small price discount (10 to 15% off) on opening weekend tickets
- First access to time slots before they’re available publicly
- An exclusive bonus, like a free coffee or a kids activity ticket
Any of these works. The choice depends on your brand. Discount based works for budget conscious lists. Access based works for families who care about getting “the good slot.” Bonus based works for premium brands.
A well executed early bird typically fills 15 to 25% of opening weekend before the public even hears about it.
Week 3: public tickets open + paid ads begin
This is when most farms start selling. You’re already three weeks ahead.
Open tickets to the public on a Tuesday morning. Announce the launch on every channel: Instagram post, Facebook post, email blast, SMS to opted in subscribers.
Start the paid ad budget on the same day. The first audience is families who visited last year (Facebook Custom Audiences pulled from your TicketSpice export). The second is families on retargeting lists from your website. Cold acquisition starts in week 2, not week 3.
The “warm” audiences in week 3 convert at much higher rates and lower cost per ticket. Spending on them first is the single highest leverage paid ad decision a farm can make.
Week 2: influencer activations
This is where most farms get nervous. “We don’t have a big influencer budget.”
You don’t need one. Local micro influencers in the 5,000 to 50,000 follower range, focused on local family content, are dramatically more effective for farm tickets than national accounts with 500,000 followers.
The math: a single post from a trusted local family content creator can drive 30 to 80 ticket purchases. Cost per partnership: a free family visit and 200 to 500 dollars cash. The ROI is consistently strong.
Pick three or four micro influencers. Offer each a free visit plus a small fee in exchange for content. Schedule the posts to land in week 2. Provide them with the early bird link or a tracking code so attribution is clear.
We track every influencer with a custom tracking link. We know exactly how many tickets each one drove, so you can double down on the right partnerships next year.
Week 1: final momentum push
This is when the season really starts to feel real. Daily Instagram stories. Twice weekly emails. SMS opt in announcements.
The messaging shift: from “season is coming” to “this weekend is happening.”
A specific tactic that works almost every season: a “100 tickets left for Saturday” countdown post on the Thursday before opening. Even if you have 800 tickets available, you can frame the visible number as the remaining “premium time slot” or “morning slot.” Scarcity messaging accelerates the final decision for families on the fence.
What changes when you actually do this
Three things, every season:
Opening weekend feels calm. Capacity is mostly known. Staff levels are right. The day runs smoothly because the load was predictable.
Marketing budget is more efficient. Most of your ad spend went to warm audiences, which convert cheaper and faster than cold. The same season is filled with significantly less total ad spend than the “wait until opening” model.
Your team isn’t burned out by week 3. Sustained sustainable selling beats sprint exhaustion every season. Your marketing team can focus on the second half of the season instead of triaging the first.
What happens if you don’t have an email list
If your list is small, the pre season strategy still works, with adjustments.
Week 5 becomes “build the list,” not “reactivate.” Run a lead magnet campaign: a free seasonal planning guide, a fall family activity checklist, anything genuinely useful in exchange for an email opt in.
Week 4 still does early bird, but to the newly built list. Smaller audience, higher engagement.
Weeks 3 to 1 lean more heavily on paid ads to cold audiences, with the understanding that next year’s pre season will be much stronger because you’re building the list while running the current season.
This is the slow compound that turns first season pumpkin patches into reliable annual operators by year three.
A real example: a fall festival pre sale
A partner farm came to us with weak pre season sales. The previous year, opening weekend was only 40% sold out by Friday, with the team running emergency Facebook ads.
We ran the five week framework. Result: opening weekend was 95% sold out by the prior Sunday, with zero emergency ads. Total season ad spend was lower than the previous year. Revenue was up 47%.
The strategy isn’t complicated. It just requires starting five weeks earlier than most farms do.
What we do with our partner farms
We plan the pre season calendar in July. We write and design every email in the sequence. We build and run the paid campaigns starting in early September. We manage the influencer partnerships, the tracking, and the reporting.
Selling out a season isn’t magic. It’s a five week sequence executed consistently. Most farms can do it with discipline. The ones that work with us let us run it so they can focus on the farm itself.