Editor's Note: Whitney Johnson's articles are provided by BookBottles.
Did you know the average lifespan of a club is less than two years? Let’s work together to bring that average up. In fact, it’s easier than you might think. With the right tools, processes, and systems in place, you’ll be on your way to gaining more loyalty and maximizing revenue for years to come.
Here are 5 tools you need in your wheelhouse to grow your venue.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
Recognizing your guests' faces or even their names is just the start. Imagine knowing how many times they've been to your club, how many reservations they've made, how much money they've spent, and what their most popular drink purchases are. Having a CRM system in place helps track this information to give seamless service from all staff members. What’s more is a CRM system can help boost upsales for your venue by recommending items based on the guest’s history and interests. For example, seeing that a guest checking in at your door is a regular attendee gives you the opportunity to upsell them to bottle service right then and there. The personal treatment you’re able to offer will provide your guests with a better experience, making them more loyal and more likely to refer friends to your venue.
2. Pre-Sale Ticketing System
Every event or venue benefits from pre-selling tickets. It's how you're able to pay for your event before it happens. It's how you know whether or not your event is going to be a success. And it's one of the easiest revenue-building things you can do. Look to event ticketing companies, like BookBottles, that set your entire event up for success and allows you to collect revenue from the get-go. These companies put money directly in your merchant account and provides you with a full 360-degree look at how your event is performing. This platform enables you to sell tickets from your website and mobile app, and automatically calculates your yielding strategy. Plus, when you connect this to your CRM system, you're able to use filters to segment your customers into specific targeted audiences to send information about your event to those that matter most. Now your event is profitable before it even happens.
3. Reservations Management System
Too many clubs operate with pen and paper to manage table reservations. Some have graduated onto email as their medium of choice, but this still results in double-booked tables and other errors. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of reservations using these old school processes. Reservations are coming in from different sources, tables are over promised, and what ends up getting marked down isn’t true to what’s actually going to happen that night. That’s where the reservation management system comes into play. Just give your employees and partners access to the system with their own personal login where they can add a reservation for a specific night and choose tables that are only available for that time-slot. This streamlines your process to maximize efficiency and accuracy.
4. General Admission Tracker
Tracking VIP reservations, ticket sales, and guestlist parties is a no-brainer for nightclubs and events (though it can be improved with the reservation management system mentioned above). Yet, many overlook that of tracking general admission. With a general admission tracker, you're able to detect how many guys and girls walked in your venue for a given night, how much he/she paid, and what promotions (if any) brought them to your venue. This gives you an accurate picture of who attends your venue and which of your marketing strategies are working in your favor.
5. Analytics System
The key to measuring the success of your club is by analyzing critical data. Yet, most venues don’t look at their data to get an accurate gage of how well their club is performing. The problem is few venues have a system in place to analyze this data, and even fewer have the necessary time and resources to comb through data points to make sense of it all. As a result, venues are operating blindly and wasting time and money on areas that may not be working.
A good analytics system takes the guessing work out of the numbers that are being reported by automatically presenting it in ways that make sense. It shows exactly what you want to know about a given area of your club, including your customers, servers, promoters, and venue as a whole. With this type of system, you’re able to define how much money you made or lost over a given time period, whether an event was profitable, which promoters are bringing in the most guests, and which servers are performing the best. All of this information leads to insight about your club to make better decisions for the future.
These 5 tools will help your venue propel forward and maximize your revenue. But don't worry - these five technologies won't add five different processes to your venue. Just look for platforms that have all of these tools under one system. That's easy, efficient, and streamlined operations for a big return.
Need more operational insight to streamline your business? Attend the 2016 Nightclub & Bar Show in Las Vegas to see all the lastest industry tools.