Case study · Hangar Events
When Hangar announces a headliner, the hype peaks within hours. Across a season of headline shows, Hangar used Innercrowd pre-registration forms and WhatsApp shops to turn those moments into tickets.
The organiser
Hangar Events builds electronic music shows around three things: a big headliner, a landmark location and a full-scale production. To get the picture: Tiësto at the Atomium, Solomun at the Palace of Justice, and Black Coffee at the Royal Palace.
Shows at that level live or die by the announcement. The name drops, the location does the rest, and within hours attention reaches the highest point it will ever reach. Hangar combined Innercrowd’s pre-registration forms and WhatsApp shop to hold on to that moment until tickets went on sale, then convert registrants into ticket buyers instantly.
Before the sale
A headliner announcement creates a short, intense spike of attention. Fans want it straight away but tickets go on sale later. Everything that usually happens in that gap works against the organiser. People scroll on, make other plans, or simply forget the show exists. The organiser is left hoping that the audience who was ready to buy on Tuesday is still watching on Friday.
The usual answer is to push harder on the announcement post and hope reach does the work. But reach is not a list. When the sale opens, there is no one to tell. Hangar needed a way to catch fans at the moment of the announcement and to reach exactly those fans the second tickets went live.
Pre-registration and WhatsApp
For each headline show, Hangar opened an Innercrowd pre-registration page as soon as the show was announced. Fans left their WhatsApp number and opted in to be messaged, in exchange for first access to tickets.
Registration stayed open for a short window and closed when the pre-sale began. At that moment, every registrant received a WhatsApp message with the shop inside it, so they could buy without leaving the chat.
The same registrants were reached by email as well, so the two channels ran side by side on the same list. That gave every fan a second way in, and it made it possible to see what each channel adds.
In the words of Hangar
“Innercrowd streamlines the entire customer journey, from pre-registration to purchase through the WhatsApp shop, delivering a faster, smoother checkout experience that helps drive conversion.”
Cameron Heal
Founder and CCO, Hangar
Three decisions
Hangar made three decisions that turned a registration list into sold-out shows.
Most registrants became ticket buyers
Across the shows Hangar ran with a registration campaign, the majority of registrants went on to buy a ticket. That ratio is decided by timing. The first day after the announcement brings in the biggest share of all registrations, and a second, smaller peak lands the day before the shop opens.
WhatsApp drove the large majority of pre-sale tickets
From the same fans and the same shows, the WhatsApp shop sold several times more tickets than email. Read rates on delivered messages were consistently high, even counting only fans with read receipts switched on. The shop sits inside the message, so buying is a few taps away rather than opening a new browser and losing potential buyers along the way.
Multiple shows sold out
KI/KI at The Tunnels shows what the list is worth beyond the sale itself: it sold out almost instantly through the WhatsApp shop, leaving a large part of the list without a chance to buy. Rather than leave them in silence, Hangar sent those fans a WhatsApp message to say tickets were gone and that they would be first to hear about a new date. Most of them read it.
The takeaway
If you sell on names and locations, your hardest problem is not demand. It is that demand peaks days before you can do anything with it.
Hangar solved that by treating the announcement as the start of the sale rather than the start of a waiting period: a page live from the first minute, a short window ending on a clear last call, and a shop inside the channel fans actually open. Across the season, that built a large, engaged registrant base, most of whom bought inside a chat window, and delivered several sell-outs.
Nothing in that approach is exclusive to a headliner of Tiësto’s size. Hangar’s smaller shows in the run converted strongly too. The mechanism is the same at every scale: capture the spike, keep the list warm, sell where the fan already is.
That is what Innercrowd pre-registration pages and WhatsApp shops are built for.
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