Category Archives: Data

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

How to Make Your Nights More Predictable and More Profitable

Can you confidently say your night is going to be profitable? Or are you opening your doors and hoping for the best? Chances are it’s the latter, and you’re not alone. It’s common in this industry to not have an accurate idea going into the night of whether it’s going to be a boom or a bust. In fact, few venues have an idea after the night is over whether it should be deemed successful.

While this may be common, it’s a big issue for your business and is one of the main reasons why the average span of a nightclub is a mere 18 months. Fortunately, there are solutions built for the nightlife industry to help you get a hold of your business and to help make you even more profitable. Here’s how you can do just that.

1. Become Interconnected

Running off pen & paper isn’t helping your venue in the long-run. Having different systems for different sections of your venue isn’t helping either. The way you truly understand how your venue is performing is by being interconnected across all areas of your venue. Think about the different solutions you use in your venue. There are point of sale systems, reservation management software, event & ticketing software, employee scheduling programs, customer relationship management systems…the list goes on. But unless these technologies are programmed to connect to each other, the data and processes will ultimately be useless. Why bother with 5 different technologies if it’s going to add 5 different processes? That’s wasted time with duplicated effort, wasted time with manual data entry, and lost data between the systems.

The key ingredient to a successful platform is one that’s integrated into all areas so you can be fully interconnected. Look for a comprehensive venue management platform, like us at Vēmos, that automatically has integration functionality built within it. This is what allows you to manage, understand, and grow your business from a single dashboard.

2. Use Data to Become Predictable

Once everything is connected in the right system, you have access to all your data in one place. This means you’ll be able to predict how your night is going to go based on historical data. Do you consistently get slammed around the same time? Staff accordingly. What issues have you experienced in the past? Fix those issues with processes. How many people have signed up for your guest list, made a reservation, or indicated they may be a general admission walk-up? What were the results of past nights similar to this one? This all helps you predict what your night is going to be like. Pre-selling inventory is another great way to make your nights predictable. It also helps you to understand how far in advance people tend to pre-purchase and whether you’re on target to hit your numbers.

3. Decrease unnecessary costs

Just as your past data helps you understand if you need to boost staff and processes, it also tells you when to decrease unnecessary costs. Do you need to have as many servers as you do working at 8 pm when you consistently don’t get busy until 11? Do you need to pay your promoters a per-guest fee when the guests they bring in don’t end up spending anything once inside your venue? Know where you’re over spending and cut costs accordingly so that the money you are spending is going toward better ways to increase your profitability.

4. Turn Marketing into an Investment

Speaking of knowing where you’re over spending, marketing is one of those places you’re likely throwing money in the wrong places. But when you track your marketing efforts, you’re able to see exactly what drives traffic and results. So while a third-party website may claim to have garnered you 100,000 impressions, you know that it actually only got you 3 clicks and $0 in return. Now you know not to spend money there in the future and redistribute those dollars toward activities you know work for you. Having a system that tracks it all allows you to easily see what you get in return of what you put in. This not only saves you from wasting your dollars, but helps to bring in more money than before, turning your marketing from an expense and into an investment.

5. See it All Come Together

When you use one system to track all areas, you have a clear understanding of exactly what’s happening in your venue without having to log into multiple data systems. Now, you can easily track:

  • How much money you made over a given time period
  • How many customers walked through your door over a given time period (and who they were)
  • How many table reservations you booked, and how much you earn on average
  • When your customers start buying tickets to your event. or start arriving to your venue
  • Which staff members are bringing in the most guests (and biggest spenders)
  • Which marketing channels are and aren’t working for you

You can experience a huge uptick to your bottom line after switching to a system backed by data. That’s because you know exactly what’s working and what doesn’t, which allows you to spend their money more wisely. You also improve your operations to get your guests in the door faster to get to the bar more quickly, resulting in increased bar sales. When you have absolute clarity on your venue’s performance, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply just guessing and could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Marketing, Talent, or Timing: What’s to Blame?

Your event is coming up, but ticket sales aren’t going according to plan. How do you know if it’s due to a lack of marketing, bad timing, or the wrong talent? That’s the million dollar question for marketers and event organizers alike. While there’s no one-size-fits-all formula to determine the root cause, there are ways for you to understand your event performance as well as set yourself up for success regardless of timing or talent.

1. Provide Consistent Experiences

This is an ongoing task for your venue, regardless of an event you’re putting on.

Showing consistent positive experiences is going to allow you to have more creative reign to experiment with your events. When you’re consistent, people have a level of confidence that your venue is the place to be. It’s the place to have a good time, to see great music or talent, and it’s worth the risk of coming out to a new artist. When you don’t have that historic level of great experiences, then you have to make sure the talent you’re bringing in is worth people’s time and money. Make sure you’re providing great experiences every night of the week you’re open — from online to in person. That’ll set you up for success more than anything else. After all, people value experiences more than anything else.

2. Understand What Your Audience Wants

As always, you need to know your audience and what type of people you’re trying to attract. Typically with events, your results are going to depend more on the artist or talent than anything else. This means you need to understand what your primary audience wants in an artist, who it is they are most likely willing to pay to hear, and how much they’re willing to pay to attend. The more you know about your audience, the more likely you are to get your event right. As with experiences, you should be collecting information on your guest every night of the week you’re open so you truly understand your target demographic. This will help you for an event as well as your everyday business.

3. Invest in Marketing

Marketing is the one aspect of events that you can control, and it should also be seen as an investment rather than an expense. The best thing you can do for yourself is be able to look back and know that you did all you could to make your event a success through marketing, and to understand which marketing efforts did and didn’t work. The best marketing efforts have both an online and offline presence, and a clear stagey with goals in place. Your venue should be a walking billboard for your event. You should have a clear sign outside your venue so people know where to go. You should also update your social media profiles. to be centered around this event. Have a yielding strategy in place starting with early bird prices and growing so the price of tickets increase as demand increases. Your goal is to get people in your venue — if you have bad door sales, then you can assume you’ll also have a bad bar night. Not every event is going to be a smashing hit. When his happens, know who your influencers are and provide them a number of comps to hand out. While this may hurt ticket sales, it won’t hurt bar sales and it will still help to bolster your experience for future nights.

4. Monitor Metrics and Compare Results

The only way to know how your event or venue is performing is to track your metrics. There are systems built specifically for the nightlife industry that handles event management, tickets, reservations, and general admission while being backed by easy-to-understand data and analytics. And when everything is in the same system, you’re able to compare past results to see how your current event is trending. You can also set up tracking links for all your marketing efforts to know what brought in your traffic — both to your ticketing site and to your physical event. These results will inform you of what you should and shouldn’t be spending your tied money on. And when you can compare results to a previous event, you’ll get insight into whether it was bad timing, the wrong artist, or a lack of marketing efforts that caused your event to not do well. That’s the true power of data. When you have absolute clarity around your efforts, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply just guessing.


Get started with Vēmos today so you have the tools you need to host profitable events.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

How to Provide Personal Experiences

In last week’s blog, we talked about promotions that drive millennials. Two of the biggest takeaways were 1) millennials prioritize experiences over anything else, and 2) they expect personalization.

The bad news is the nightlife industry is dwindling in they eyes of millennials — fewer and fewer people are going out to nightclubs. There’s several reasons why that is, as discussed in this article. But the good news is we in the service industry have the opportunity to not only provide amazing outing experiences, but to also make those experiences personal.

Here’s how you can provide personal experiences to your guests to attract and maintain their loyalty to your venue.

1. Capture Guest Information

A survey conducted by Accenture discovered that 85% of their participants are willing to provide their information to trusted retailers in exchange for targeted, personalized information. Use this to your advantage. Your customers are not only willing to give their information to you, but they’re conditioned to do so. This is especially true when pre-purchasing items online. Use guest list, ticketing, or reservation forms on your site so your guests not only begin to buy in advance (note: more guaranteed revenue), but also so that you can collect their information. You can also capture this information during your night at your door using a digital system. That way, you’re able to collect data on every type of customer that walks in your venue. And when you connect this to your point of sale system, you’re able to unearth even more valuable information. This means you have a database of all your guests, including their name, contact info, how many times they’ve been to your venue, whether they’re a VIP/guest list/event/general admission customer, how much money they’ve spent, and what their most popular drink purchases are.

2. Send Personal Marketing

With your database, you now have a complete buyer persona for all your target customer segments, including demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. This means you have the opportunity to get personal with your marketing. You can send a specific message catered to a specific group of people, such as sending a birthday text message to anyone celebrating a birthday this week and inviting them to celebrate with you. Or you can target customers who have attended a certain event in the past, and send them an exclusive invitation to an upcoming similar event before tickets are released to the public. Making your customers feel like you know what’s happening in their life, or like you understand their interests, is what makes your messages personal and powerful. They’ll feel like insiders and will naturally establish a deeper connecting with your venue. This also helps to make sure the time and money you’re spending on your marketing is spent wisely and giving you a return on investment.

3. Make Their Night Special

Your personalization shouldn’t stop at marketing. You can keep this experience going when they get to your venue as well. When you use a system, you take the guesswork out and are able to understand your customers at a deeper level. Say goodbye to paper guestlists, and start providing personalized serve at your door. Greet your guests when they arrive. If you see that a customer is a regular guest list cover who comes to your venue every week, upsell them to a VIP table and provide a complimentary bottle of champagne as a thank you. Or, offer them a round of drinks on the house at the bar. This costs you very little, but means a lot to them. It’s a simple gesture that’s perceived by the guest as a premium, highly personalized level of service. It shows that person how much they are valued and entices them to stay longer, spend more, bring more friends, and com back more often. This is how you organically build loyalty.


Treating guests like the individuals they are and catering your experience to their needs isn’t hard. All it takes is a system that captures all your information in one place, your staff to use that system so it automatically pulls necessary information on the guests walking through your door, and your ability to execute on providing that exclusive experience. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference to your guests and brings the biggest dollar to you.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

How To Excel Your Venue Using Past Results

The key to measuring the success of your venue is by knowing exactly how you’re performing. Yet, many venues I talk with don’t know their numbers. How much revenue did you earn over the past month? Which days are your busiest? What times are your busiest? Which channels bring in your guests? Are your promoters just bringing in bodies or are they bringing in spenders? How much are you giving away for free?

These are all questions you should know the answer to. And luckily, there are systems that will automate this for you so you don’t have to spend time combing through it. Not only does that save you time, but having this data at your fingertips is what allows you to make decisions to become even more profitable. When you know exactly what’s working, you’re able to spend your money more wisely and grow your return every month.

Here’s how you should be looking at your data to maximize profit potential in the future.

1. Make your nights more predictable

Nightclubs go into each night without an accurate idea of what the night will hold. And when you don’t know how many guests will arrive for a night, it’s hard to plan and staff accordingly. If you’re more busy than anticipated, VIP tables get double booked, the door gets bottlenecked, and staff aren’t communicating to solve the issues. Your guests notice this, and it hinders their experience before they even walk in your door.

When you use your data, you’re able to predict how your night is going to go based on historical data. Do you consistently get slammed around the some time? Staff accordingly. What issues have you experienced in the past? Fix those issues with processes. Pre-selling inventory is another great way to make your nights predictable. It also helps you to understand how far in advance people tend to pre-purchase and whether you’re on target to hit your numbers.

2. Decrease unnecessary costs

Just as your past data helps you understand if you need to boost staff and processes, it also tells you when to decrease unnecessary costs. Do you need to have as many servers as you do working at 8 pm when you consistently don’t get busy until 11? Do you need to pay your promoters a per-guest fee when the guests they bring in don’t end up spending anything once inside your venue? Know where you’re over spending and cut costs accordingly.

3. Improve marketing efforts

Speaking of knowing where you’re over spending, marketing is one of those places you’re likely throwing money in the wrong places. But when you track your marketing efforts, you’re able to see exactly what drives traffic and results. So while a third-party website may claim to have garnered you 100,000 impressions, you know that it actually only got you 3 clicks and $0 in return. Now you know not to spend money there in the future and redistribute those dollars toward activities you know work for you.


Venues we work with have seen an average uptick of 30% to their bottom line after switching to a system backed by data. That’s because they know exactly what’s working and what is not, which allows them to spend their money more wisely. They also improved their operations to get their guests in the door faster to get to the bar more quickly, resulting in increased bar sales. When you have absolute clarity on your venue’s performance, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply guessing and could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

The Benefit of Nightclub Management Software

Running a successful venue isn’t easy. You have various departments in charge of different tasks, not to mention an array of staff members to account for. That’s why it’s more important than ever to stay connected, both from a personnel and an operations standpoint. Fortunately, there are solutions available to help you streamline your operations to be a revenue-generating powerhouse.

So What’s Stopping You?

Despite the opportunity to become a powerhouse, many nightclub owners and managers respond to venue management systems with hesitation and fear – fear of the unknown, fear of change, and fear that technology will end up slowing down the speed of night. But after working with many nightclubs on switching them over to integrated digital solutions, I can assure you that technology has actually done the opposite of what they feared.

The key ingredient to venue or nightclub management software is that it has to be integrated into all areas of you club. We call this interconnectivity. Without everything connected together, your venue suffers.

Think about the different solutions you use in your venue. There are point of sale systems, reservation management software, event & ticketing software, employee scheduling programs, customer relationship management systems…the list goes on. But unless these technologies are programmed to connect to each other, the data and processes will ultimately be useless. Why bother with 5 different technologies if it’s going to add 5 different processes? That’s wasted time with duplicated effort, wasted time with manual data entry, and lost data between the systems.

What to Look For

Technology should not be complicated. In fact, it should be used as a tool to save time and money while enhancing customer experience.

The key ingredient to venue or nightclub management software is that it has to be integrated into all areas of your club. Look for a comprehensive venue management platform like Vēmos that automatically has integration functionality built within it. This is what allows you to manage, understand, and grow your business from a single dashboard.

Having one dashboard that houses reservation management, guest list management, general admission, events & ticketing, your CRM database, and all of your analytics is what allows you to streamline your operations and grow your business. You spend less time on the tedious process and more time focusing on bigger, more beneficial tasks.

Reap the Benefits

With a comprehensive venue management system like Vēmos, you become interconnected across operations, staff, and customers. This means you’re now experiencing the benefits of:

  • Accessing and managing all your information and departments in one dashboard
  • Getting your staff in the loop on one system for seamless communication
  • Getting to know your customers on a deeper level so you can better market to and serve them, which ultimately enhances their experience
  • Understanding which marketing activities work and don’t work to drive more customers and generate more revenue
  • Seeing in-depth analytics across all areas of your venue in one dashboard so you truly understand how you’re performing
  • Remove duplicate processes and duplicated information across multiple systems. Everything syncs together for efficient, effective results.

When you have multiple areas of your club, or even multiple clubs for that matter, you need a solution that combines everything into one central spot. This is what helps you to truly understand how your venue is performing and who your guests are, which allows you to make better decisions to make more money. Plus, the efficiency of having everything tied together saves you time. Save time, make money, all with a simple setup. That’s what digital can do for you.

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