Category Archives: Sales

St. Patrick’s Day is big business in the nightclub & bar scene. In 2014, 45% of 25-34 year olds attended a party at a bar or restaurant, and St. Paddy’s spending as a whole grew to $4.8 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. If you haven’t started yet, nows the time to start planning and putting the right vendors in place to make sure you get a chunk of the spending.


Follow these 5 tips to get your St. Paddy’s day on the right track.

1. Get Creative

Green beer and special St. Patrick’s Day cocktails are always a must, but every bar in your vicinity is going to offer that. Differentiate yourself by thinking outside the box. After all, St. Patrick’s celebrants simply follow the party. Some promotional ideas include:

• Hiring Irish bands as live music entertainment
• Drinking games, such as beer pong or Irish quarters, against a “lucky leprechaun” (to make even more revenue, offer this option at a buy-in rate only)
• Being a part of a St. Paddy’s day pub crawl to draw a new crowd
• Creating drink bundles, like a flight of Irish beer or a series of Irish whiskey-based cocktails, to increase spending
• Taking the party outside by hosting a patio party or even a block party. You can also couple this with a scavenger hunt to find the hidden treasure.

The best way to know if your St. Patrick’s Day theme will work is if it’s in line with your audience’s wants. Know your demographic and your target audience to determine if an over-the-top Irish affair or a low-key celebration is the route to go.

2. Don’t Forget the Food

A big part of Irish culture is the food, which also happens to be a big part of drinking holidays. If you don’t offer food, your customers are likely to leave at some point to grab some grub somewhere else. There are a number of Irish items you can add to your menu, which should always be governed by how equipped your kitchen is. Perhaps simple finger food or appetizers is all your bar can handle. Or maybe you have a full kitchen to offer corned beef, Irish stew, and shepherds pie. Try to stick to traditional or well-known Irish food to appease your customer’s appetites and the theme of the day.

3. Hire the Right Talent

Once you’ve identified your promotional theme, it’s time to start hiring. Are you bringing in live talent? A DJ? A leprechaun character? Whatever it is, make sure you hire your talent and put enough staff members in place in all areas of your venue to handle the influx of guests. Nothing is a showstopper more than having a great turnout but being unable to handle the party. Great customer service in tandem with a great party keeps guests spending all night long.

4. Put the Right Tools in Place

Having the right tools help you automate your night, which in turns leads to efficiency and increased revenue potential. Do you need to sell tickets to your event? (If so, you should pre-sell them to gain more revenue than just selling them at the door). Do you need to automate your guestlist? What about speeding up the line at your door? Identify which areas you could improve on and find the best tools and systems to help with these processes. There’s a few platforms available that have all this and more integrated together to allow you to handle all functions from one system.

5. Spread the Word

Now’s the time to market and drive people through your doors. The best way to reach your customers is by using the channels they’re already on, such as social media, email, and text messages. You should also always keep your regular guests who stop by your venue before St. Patrick’s day informed of your plans so they have it on their radar. Another option is to do paid advertising to generate even more buzz than organic marketing alone. If you have a CRM system in place, use filters to segment your customers into specific targeted audiences to provide each audience with a message that is 100% relevant to them. Make sure your messaging is consistent across channels and is compelling enough that your customers want to share the news with their friends.


Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.

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. Unfortunately, most venues don’t know how to incentivize their guests to pre-purchase their tickets, resulting in wasted effort.

Follow these steps to incentivize your guests and earn more pre-sale revenue for your event.

1. Set the price and use a yielding strategy

It’s critical to understand what your customers will pay in return for your type of event. People understand and have been programmed to pay top dollar for major events. They even understand that ticket prices generally go up as it gets closer to the event date due to demand. It’s all about dollars per square foot. This is yielding, and is something you need to use to your advantage. Take this example (for easy math, let’s assume your venue holds 100 people):

• Tickets are released and priced at $50
• Once 50 tickets are sold (half your venue), raise the price to $75
• Once 75 tickets are sold (three-fourths of your venue), raise the price to $100
• Once 90 tickets are sold, raise the price to $150

This yielding strategy earns you more dollars per square foot per person. It also incentivizes your guests to get their tickets early rather than waiting the night before or the night of the event.

2. Get the right ticketing system

Not all ticketing vendors set you up for success. Many simply provide a place where guests buy their tickets and not a whole lot more. Money doesn’t go directly into your bank account until weeks after the event, you never get to see your customer data, and you don’t get a clear picture of how your event performed.

Instead, look to event ticketing companies, like Vēmos, that puts money directly in your hand 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 through a mobile app, and automatically calculate your yielding strategy, all while tracking results along the way.

3. Start selling

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand. While your sales team is out there making transactions, make sure your marketing team is working alongside them with spreading the word. Use a multi-channel strategy to sell your tickets, such as one that consists of online, mobile, and in-person sales. Turn your promoters into mobile box offices by selling tickets to customers directly from their device (contact us to learn how). If you have a CRM system in place, use filters to segment your customers into specific targeted audiences to send information about your event to those that matter most. All the channels working together at once is what drives awareness, buzz, and sales.

4. Strategize your lines

What’s the benefit of a guest pre-buying a ticket if they don’t even get to skip the long line? Do not have just one line at your event. Oftentimes, there are 3 different audiences standing in this one line that you need to consider:

1. Guests who pre-bought a ticket
2. Guests who were on the VIP guestlist and did not need to buy a ticket
3. Guests waiting to buy a ticket at the door

Putting a bit of strategy into how you treat your line can increase your revenue and speed of night, especially when it comes to pre-sale tickets. Use a separate line for different functions and slow down the general admission line just a bit to amplify the speed of the pre-sale line. This entices guests to make behavioral changes to buy a ticket ahead of time, which in turn equates to more money in your pocket before the night of your event.


Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing at Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io or fill out the form below.

It’s a new year of possibilities, and a great time to identify which areas in your nightclub could use some improvements. We asked several venues we work with what they’re looking to improve on in 2015, and many great answers tumbled through. But one common and surprising theme was to improve marketing efforts.


Marketing is one of the last thought-of areas in today’s nightlife landscape. While our consumers are digitally savvy and looking to be talked with through their everyday channels of communication, nightclubs are still incredibly primitive, relying on flyers and mass messaging. It comes as no surprise that this area is one that needs improvement, but it does surprise me that so many owners identified it as an area of weakness.


The best thing you can do for your marketing efforts is learn how to use marketing segmentation to your advantage. Segmentation allows you to capture the right audience at the right time with the right message – essentially leading to a higher conversion rate. So, without further ado, here are 3 ways you can improve your marketing efforts to increase your revenue through segmentation.

1. Use a CRM system

Few venues have the necessary insight on their customers to understand what niche their business falls into and what customers they need to attract to be successful. That’s where a customer relationship management (CRM) system comes into play. The best run venues work with a robust CRM system that’s tied to every area of their venue, including their point of sale system, to track customer habits. This is what we call interconnectivity, and it’s what allows a venue to uncover key information about themselves and their customers, such as:

• Your guests’ names
• How many times they’ve been to your venue
• How much money they’ve spent
• What days of the week they come into your venue
• What their most popular drink purchases are
• How many people they typically bring with them

That’s valuable information, and that’s what’s going to propel you forward in your marketing efforts.

2. Identify your audience

Before you can send any type of marketing message, you first need to identify your audience. You may have different audiences for different promotions or events, or you may have one audience you want to attract. Either way, it’s important to know which type of people you are targeting, and what type of message is going to drive them through your door. It’s not enough to have a basic understanding of only demographics. You need to discover their idea of a good party, the music they like to hear, and even the alcohol they like to drink. This is what develops your buyer persona, and is what allows you to create targeted messages that drive consumer spending.

3. Filter your audience into segments

This is where we connect the first and second steps. Because the CRM system tracks important customer activity, you’re able to segment individuals based on categories. Perhaps you want to target females who come in on Fridays, spend at least $100, bring more than 3 people with them, and typically drink vodka (because you have a vodka promotion going on). That’s easy with a segmented CRM system; it’s just a few clicks and you have your audience. Then you craft a targeted message that’s 100% relevant to their habits and send it out to them. You can even create different segments for different audiences for the same night to achieve a good ratio of people. That’s powerful marketing, and that’s what continues to drive guests into your venue.

Gone are the days where it’s acceptable to mass blast a marketing message. It’s no longer a matter of trying to capture the general nightlife population; it’s a matter of catering to your specific audience and niche, and reaching them in a personalized way that drives them to make an emotional buying decision at your venue. This is what allows you to offer the impeccable service your customers need, and is where the secret of customer loyalty lies. Segmentation and personalization is the new wave of nightlife marketing, and what gets your customers to become loyal, long-term guests.


Whitney Larson is the president and director of marketing for Vēmos. Contact her at whitney.larson@vemos.io.