Category Archives: Sales

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

How to Track Your Data to Increase Profit

New technology creates new ways to do business. It also opens up doors for you to better understand your business and your customers. And that’s important. Without knowing who your customers are, you’re unable to attract the right crowd or provide the experience they’re expecting. And without knowing how your business performs, you’re on your way to driving it into the ground.

With a software system, you’re able to experience better operations while tracking the data you need to perform even better. Plus, the right software automates data tracking & reporting — so you can continue to do what you do best while data just collects in the background.

Here’s how you can begin to track and uncover data, and how that data ultimately allows you to maximize your revenue.

1. Collect information about your guests

The issue: Nearly every nightclub and bar has an estimate of how many guests walked through their door on a given night. What they don’t know is who walked through their door. They get people in, serve them, and let them walk away without knowing anything about them.

The fix: Use a digital system to handle every aspect of your door process, including checking guests in on the guest list, counting general admission walk-ins, serving VIP reservations, and selling/checking-in guests who bought a ticket to your event. Using one system to handle everything allows you collect data on every type of customer that walks through your door. And when you connect this to your point of sale system, you’re able to unearth even more valuable information.

The benefit: Now you have a database of all your guests, including their name, contact information, 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. This means you’re now able to better identify your guests, upsell them before they walk through your doors (hint: more $), and provide personalized service (so they spend more $).

2. Improve marketing efforts

The issue: Venues end up spending marketing dollars on mass marketing efforts (or sometimes no marketing at all), blasting vague messages to a broad range of people who may or may not be their customers. All because they don’t know who their customers are.

The fix: With the digital system, you have a complete buyer persona for all of your target customer segments, including demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. Use this to your advantage. As an example, you can segment your audience into a list of females who attend your venue on Friday nights and spend at least $100. You can then send a text message to this list with a message that’s 100% relevant to them. You can also track exactly which of your marketing channels are bringing you customers. And that’s powerful marketing.

The benefit: You’re no longer wasting marketing dollars on efforts that don’t convert. Instead, you’re able to know which channels to focus your efforts on, drive your most loyal customers back into your venue with personal messaging, you’re able to establish a healthy mix of male and female customers, and you’re able to drive customers who haven’t visited in a while back through your doors. Better marketing results in better guests which results in bigger spending.

3. Provide better service

The issue: A recent study published in a Nightclub & Bar article shows why millennials aren’t frequenting nightclubs. Long lines to get in, pretension, and rude staff are a few of these reasons, amongst several others.

The fix: Using a digital system fixes the three issues mentioned above. When you use a system that manages you’re door, you’re able to streamline your door processes and optimize your lines. There’s no denying that having a line gives the impression that you’re a hot nightclub, but there’s a difference between a healthy line and a bottlenecked line. Plus, when your door system ties to your guest database, your staff is able to treat each guest with respect and a more personalized service.

The benefit: Putting a bit of strategy can help your speed of night, improve customer morale while waiting in line, and get people through your door to start spending money inside your venue faster. Plus, when your guests are treated with great service, they’re more likely to enjoy themselves and want to stay (and spend more while they’re there).


4. Know your business results

The issue: Most venues don’t look at their data to get an accurate gage of how well their venue 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 or may not be working.

The fix: Use venue management software that puts data and analytics at the hub. This system reports back on valuable information about your venue’s results, including:

  • How much money you made or lost over a given time period
  • Which days of the week are your busiest
  • What types of liquor you sell the most on a given day
  • How many tables are reserved a night
  • Which promoters are bringing in the most guests
  • Which servers are upsetting the most and making the most tips
  • What types of promotions or events bring in the most traffic

The benefit: This information allows you to get a true sense of how your venue is performing, which in turn allows you to understand what is and isn’t working so you can make the necessary changes. Is a certain promotion bringing in a ton of people? Keep doing it! Is a promoter not providing results? Fix it. That’s the true power of data. When you have absolute clarity around your venue’s performance, you can do even more to increase your success. Without data, you’re simply just guessing.


Get started with Vēmos to discover your data and maximize your revenue.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Hosting Profitable Events

Hosting events is one of the best ways to get people through your door. But if you don’t take the time to plan it out, get everything in place, and throw a good party, your event could take a dive for the worst and leave you owing more than you made.

Here is a 5-step plan to set you up for success when hosting an event.

1. Plan your event

We’re starting basic and boring, but planning is one of the most important aspects of throwing an event. You need to first identify what you want to get out of the event, and plan accordingly to achieve it. The best questions to answer during this step are:

  • What’s your goal?
  • What is your budget, and how much can you spend in each area of the event?
  • Who is your audience and what are they interested in?
  • Is this going to be an event tied to a holiday or time of year?
  • How will you get the word out about this event?

Once you answer these questions, you have a better way of moving forward. You know exactly how many promoters you need, what staff members are responsible for, how much money you can spend on talent, what type of talent you need to hire, if you can offer drink specials – the list goes on.

2. Hire the right talent

Talent is a big portion of what lures people into your venue. But you need to make sure you hire the right talent. Do your guests prefer a headlining DJ or a local band? What type of lighting and sound equipment do you need to enhance the experience for your guests? After all, the people you are throwing the event for should define the event’s path. Know what your audience wants and what they’ll pay to attend. Having a system to gather your customer information is a great way to understand their habits and preferences. And above all else, stay within the budget you allotted in step 1 to maximize your profits and achieve your goal.

3. Generate revenue, even before the day of the event

We’re talking about pre-sales. Every event or venue, regardless of size, benefits from the pre-sale of tickets and inventory. The best way to sell tickets in advance is to get everyone on board with a single platform. There are platforms available that allow you to create and manage an online event page, publish the page for consumers to purchase tickets, have the page integrate with a mobile app for promoters to sell tickets directly from their devices, and track ticket sales and results along the way. This type of platform syncs all promoters and marketing efforts together so you know which of your efforts are working to bring in the most guests along with the highest paying guests. This then allows you to keep doing what works and table what doesn’t so you maximize ticket sales and revenue. Make sure you work with a ticketing system that integrates with your bank account so you earn your revenue leading up to your event rather than making up for your expenses weeks after.

4. Be a good party host

Your event efforts must continue, and perhaps even spike, during the night of the event. Make sure you’ve figured out your door process. Have a separate line for those that bought in advance vs. those paying at the door. Treat everyone like VIPs, from the bottle buyer to the general admission guest. Focus on service levels and make them feel appreciated no matter what. Your guests will not only continually come back, but they’ll also tell everyone they know about their experience. This sets you up for success for the long run.

5. Analyze results to better prepare for the next event

The only way to know whether your event was a success is to analyze the data. If you got on board with the aforementioned platform, your life will be significantly easier since it will all be in one spot – not to mention the data will be broken down by individual guests and staff members to truly identify areas of strength and weakness. Once you know how well you did, you’re able to better set yourself up for success for your next event. Optimization is key to long-term success. The more you know, the better your results.


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

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

The Value of Venue 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 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.

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 to save and possibly even increase your time and money.


So what are you waiting for? Get started today with a Vēmos account in minutes and start reaping the benefits of interconnectivity.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

5 Ways to Improve Your Results

We live in a world of technology and data. Yet, it’s hard to take the time in the bustling hospitality industry to comb through all the data points to make sense of what’s happening. But it’s absolutely critical for your business that you do. If you don’t, you’re missing out on a lot of insight, opportunities, and revenue.

I’ll be the first to admit the intimidation that tech and data has in the business world. There’s a lot of information that gets collected in multiple places, and it seems like there’s a lot of setup to get this information in the first place. But with the right system, this really isn’t the case. Vēmos is built specifically for this industry, and we allow you to manage all areas of your venue from one dashboard so you can easily see your data that’s collected from these areas in one spot. This is what gives you insight to make better decisions for tomorrow. In fact, these are 5 distinct areas where data will help you improve your results.

1. Understand Your Business

We’re starting with the most obvious: data allows you to track your business results and performance. And when you use Vēmos to track all areas, you have an even better understanding of exactly what’s happening, including:

  • How much money you made over a given time period or for a specific event
  • How many reservations you have over a given time period, and how much you earn on average
  • When your customers start buying tickets to your event, and when the uptick of ticket sales really begins
  • How many customers walked through your door over a given time period
  • Real-time information on when guests are checked-in, and how many people are currently inside your venue
  • Which days of the week you sell the most inventory
  • Which staff members are bringing in the most guests (and the biggest spenders)
  • Which promotions bring in the most traffic
  • Which of your marketing channels have the highest conversion

We automatically collect and display this information in visual charts and graphs. That way, the hard analysis work is done for you so you don’t have to spend time setting it up and figuring out what everything means.

2. Uncover Staff Involvement

Data doesn’t always have to be about tracking revenue. As noted above, you’re able to track which of your staff are bringing in the most customers along with the biggest spenders. So if you’re paying people out based on metrics, you now have clear metrics to work from. Make sure each staff member gets his/her personal login to your system so you can track their activity. They should each also receive their own affiliate link they can use to promote your event or venue, which tracks click and conversion rates for customers buying tickets or making reservations from various media channels. This information not only allows you to understand your staff’s involvement with driving guests through your door, but also allows you to reward and incentivize employees based on their performance. And when employees feel recognized and rewarded, they tend to work harder for you to drive even more success.

3. Learn about Your Customers

When you use a system to manage your operations, you’re able to track guest history and information. This includes their name, contact info, how many times they’ve been to your venue, which events they bought tickets for, which ticket type they purchased, whether they’re a pre-sale/general admission/VIP customer, which promotions brought them in, and how much money they’ve spent at your venue or event. This information on each individual guest at the palm of your hand allows you to provide personalized service. And that personalized service makes them feel appreciated and recognized, which oftentimes leads them to spend more money with you. This also gives you the opportunity to run better, more effective marketing campaigns to keep these guests coming back, as explained in the next point.

4. Strengthen Your Marketing

Venues end up spending marketing dollars on mass marketing efforts (or sometimes no marketing at all), blasting vague messages to a broad range of people who may or may not be their customers. All because they don’t know who their customers are. Using technology, you have a complete buyer persona for all of your target customer segments, including demographic, geographic, and psychographic information. Use this data to your advantage. Filter your audience into specific customer segments and send messages that are 100% specific to that audience. You can send that message through email, text, and social, each channel targeting your individual customers. Use affiliate links to track which channels are bringing the most clicks and purchases based on your call to action. With this data, you’ll uncover exactly which marketing channels work the best for you and your audience, and which messages drive the most conversions. Now you’re not wasting your marketing dollars on mass marketing that doesn’t work, and are instead investing it toward strategic personalized marketing that brings an even bigger bang for your buck.

5. Increase Revenue

All of this information is what gets you a true sense of how you’re performing, from your venue to your customers to your staff. It’s what allows you to understand what is and isn’t working so you can make the necessary changes. Is a certain promotion bringing in a ton of people? Keep doing it! Is a promoter not providing results? Fix it. That’s the power of data. You get true clarity about your performance and can make data-driven decisions to do more of what increases your revenue. Stop spending money in areas that aren’t working for you, and start putting dollars behind those that are making you even more. You’re no longer guessing or making emotional business decisions. You now have your own business results to leverage your success.


Contact us today to get started with Vēmos to improve your results.


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

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

7 Steps to Profitable Summer Events

Summer is the best season to amp your experience for your guests and boost your revenue. People are looking for big ways to spend their summer months, and are more prone to attend events and parties. The most successful venues host multiple, recurring events throughout the summer to appeal to their audience and boost revenue. Let’s make sure you’re seizing the season and capturing your guests for the most profitable summer season you’ve ever had.

Here are 7 steps to set yourself up for success, whether you’re hosting one event or many.

1. Define Your Theme and Hire Talent

The first step is to make sure you have the high-level strategic information of your event figured out. This includes picking your event dates and times, defining your event theme, and hiring your talent. Remember, there’s a lot of competition during the summer — why should someone choose your event over another? Events that have a focused theme and stay consistent with that theme during their promotions attract the right guests. That’s because the likelihood of you catering your theme to your specific audience is higher than if you never thought through it in the first place. Know who your audience is and what type of party they’re looking for. This will help set the stage for hiring the right talent and providing expectations from the beginning.

2. Get Your System in Place

Make sure you have full control of your events and get access to all of your data before, during, and after the event. This means you’ll need to get an event & ticketing system in place to help you manage your event and pre-sell tickets on your website. Vēmos incorporates ticketing into the rest of your efforts, giving you a complete picture of your event and venue’s results. So not only are you able to manage your events and pre-sell tickets, but you’re also able to handle day-of check-ins from the same system along with your reservations and guest lists. All of your efforts are synced together, which is not only easier for you to operate, but allows you to maximize ticket sales and revenue before the night of your event while capturing all your data in one central spot.

3. Train Staff on System and Set Expectations

Now that you have your system, it’s time to train your staff and make sure everyone is on the same page. After all, new systems and processes only work if everyone is on board and following them correctly. Make sure everyone understands how to use the system so there aren’t any issues the day of your event. Set expectations of staff involvement for your event, including the number of tickets they need to sell and night-of shift expectations. The more crystal clear you are, the more your staff will all be aligned for smooth operations.

4. Use a Pricing Strategy

Encourage people to pre-purchase their tickets for your events by creating supply and demand. Showing them your price will increase as the event gets closer creates demand for the few supply of early bird tickets. You can set your tickets to increase price by the week, day or even hour leading up to your event. You can also set your tickets to increase by quantity after x amount of tickets are sold. Take this example (for easy math, let’s assume your have 100 tickets to sell):

  • Tickets are released and priced at $50
  • Once 25 tickets are sold (one-fourth of your venue), raise the price to $75
  • Once 50 tickets are sold (half your venue), raise the price to $100
  • Once 75 tickets are sold (three-fourths of your venue), raise the price to $125
  • Once 90 tickets are sold, raise the price to $150

You can do this with any dollar increment, with any amount of tickets, and at any time interval. However you do it, it’s going to earn you more dollars per square foot per person, and it’s going to encourage people to buy early and have time to share their plans with others. After all, the majority of people attend summer events based on where their friends are going.

5. Market Your Event

It’s important to first define your audience before you start marketing your event so you know exactly who you’re reaching and what their call to action needs to be. Publish your event on your website event page or create a landing page so people can start buying your tickets. Segment your customers into specific audiences and send messages that speak directly to each segment via text and email. Create a Facebook event and invite people to attend. Boost targeted social ads to your audience to build awareness and interact with your audience. Turn your promoters into a mobile box office to sell tickets on the street from their mobile devices. And throughout all of it, use affiliate links to track all your marketing efforts so you know exactly what is and isn’t working for you.


6. Experience Seamless Operations
It’s the day of your event, and you should already be well-informed of how many tickets have been sold and feel at ease with the revenue you’ve already earned. Now it’s time to make sure operations are seamless for an enjoyable night. To do this, you need to optimize your lines and focus on getting your guests through your door so they can get inside to enjoy heir night and spend money on drinks.

Using a bit of strategy in your lines not only ensures a seamless door, but also physically shows guests why they should pre-purchase their tickets for your next event. Create a different line for a different type of customer, such as a line for your pre-sale customer and a line for customers paying at the door. This allows your staff handling pre-sale checkin to only focus on that task and increase line speed for those that bought ahead of time. On the other hand, it allows you staff selling tickets at the door to only handle that task, aiding in long waits for door sales. We helped a venue check in more than 1,200 pre-sale guests within 15 minutes with this strategy. The more organized your lines are, the faster your speed of night will be, the happier your customers will be, and the faster they’re through your door to spend money inside your venue.

7. Analyze and Optimize

Now that you’re event is over, it’s time to analyze results for a bigger return next time. Getting access to your data gives you the opportunity to truly understand how your venue and events are performing. This is why we recommend using a unified system like Vēmos, where all functions are operated through one dashboard. That way, all of your data will be in one spot – not to mention the data will be broken down by individual guests and referrers to truly understand areas of strength and weakness. You’ll know what marketing efforts worked and which didn’t, along with which items sold and which didn’t. Repeat and enhance the initiatives that worked and table the ones that didn’t to continue to grow your efforts and increase your revenue. This information allows you to set yourself up for even more success for your next events throughout the summer months.


Interested in hosting more profitable summer events at your venue? Contact Vēmos to get started on your free trial.

1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 18