Category Archives: Sales

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Treat Every Night as an Event

What if you treated every night as an event? And what if that approach was the reason your customers were walking through your door? Or the reason your venue was earning more pre-sale revenue than ever before? Well, that’s exactly what we began to see at the end of 2015.

In the past, events were most commonly thought of as a hosting a major musical act or going along with a major holiday, such as New Year’s, St. Patrick’s Day, or Halloween. For these types of events, venues would book talent in advance, create their event landing page, and then start marketing and pre-selling tickets. These events were successful because they were planned in advance and had revenue coming in through the door well before the night-of.

Now, that thinking is starting to become the every day. Treating every night like an event (even the average nights) allows you to get the most out of every night. It builds buzz around a common night and elevates your venue to be one that is highly desired. People begin to know what to expect, and they start talking to their friends. Plans are easier for your customers. Walking through your door gets easier for your customer. And with this ease comes more money.

Here’s how you can take on this event-based approach.

1. Identify your inventory

A big part of an event is pre-sales. Without pre-sales, it’s hard to get that event-like mentality. Fortunately, pre-selling inventory is easy and can generate more revenue than not pre-selling at all. The first step is simply identifying what you have to sell. Some ideas are having your customers pay for cover in advance, booking a VIP table in advance, buying a VIP table ticket with bottles a part of the package, or even drink packages at the bar.

2. Have a dedicated events page

Your customers need a place to be made aware of your events and buy your inventory. Either have a dedicated page on your website for events or a different landing page specifically dedicated to your events. Whichever route you choose, make sure you have the ability for your customers to buy their tickets directly through you. Our system syncs directly into your website so users don’t have to get redirected. Plus, that money goes directly into your account right away so you can pay for your night even before it happens.

3. Build a marketing strategy

It’s not likely for your customers to just come across your event page right away. That means you’ll need a marketing strategy in place to get the word out. Set your promoters up for success by allowing them to sell on the streets, engage with your customers through social media, and leverage partnerships to build your base.

4. Collect data

The best part about pre-selling data (other than the revenue, of course), is that you’re able to collect your customer’s data easier than at the door. Your customers are used to making online purchases, and are used to providing their information to do so. This is an opportunity for you to collect their information in a non stressful environment and build your customer database. You can then use this database to better market your customers and keep them informed of your happenings. You can even segment your customers into specific audiences and send messages that are only relevant to that audience to truly get the right crowd in your doors. Data is a powerful tool, and is what’s going to propel your ROI.

5. Strategize lines and door pricing

It’ll take a bit of time to condition your customers into buying in advance. Putting a bit of strategy into your door operations on the night of your event is one of the best ways to show the incentive of buying early. Use different lines for different customer types, such as a line for your pre-sale customer and a line for customers paying at the door. This helps speed up the pre-sale line and shows the benefit of buying early. Also consider increasing your prices the night of your event to further show the benefit of making purchases ahead of time.

6. Review. Optimize. Repeat.

You’ll never know how successful your marketing efforts are if you don’t track and measure results. Review the data at the end of the night to understand what went well and what didn’t. Repeat the things that went well, ditch the ones that didn’t, and continue with new ideas until you find your stride. We recommend you use referral tracking codes to track all of your marketing efforts. This will help you understand which channels are the most effective for driving people to pre-buy. Once you know how well you did, you’re able to better set yourself up for success for your next 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.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

4 Ways to Maximize Your Revenue with Data

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.

Here’s how using technology can lead to uncovering 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. 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 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 and published 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 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: You guessed it — use a digital system to help manage your venue. 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.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Marketing Tools to Drive ROI

You can have great promotions without knocking dollars off the price of your food and drink items. But what tools are the best to use to get your promotions in front of the right customer? Just because you build it, doesn’t meant they will come. For any marketing efforts, start by knowing your audience, getting a good grip on your brand, outlining a strategy, and set out with goals in mind. From there, use the following tools at your disposal to hit the right people at the right time to drive up your ROI.

1. Digital Presence

In today’s digital landscape, it’s more imperative than ever to have an online presence that matches the style of our offline presence. This means that whatever you publish online should be the same as what you do offline. Create a website that has the same vibe as your venue. Use SEO on this website to generate inbound leads, such as guests filling out your reservation form, guest list form, or purchasing a ticket. Build your social media pages, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to connect with your guests in their own environment. Create content on relevant blogs, post in group discussions or forums, or even create your own digital content for your guests to read and become more enticed about your promotions. There are endless opportunities in the digital environment. You just have to start by creating your presence and tying it all back to your customers and your brand guidelines.

2. Marketing Segmentation

Chances are you have different audiences for different promotions. Perhaps you want to target your highest spending clientele one night, and ladies who have birthdays coming up for another night. This is both possible when using marketing segmentation tools. When you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, you’re able to track all guest history, data and trends. This helps you understand your different audience segments and also allows you to play with the data to get the right segment for your message. Sort your customers into the segments that you want, and use that information to send more targeted, personal and relevant messages to individual guests.

3. Social Media Ads

There are billions of monthly active users across social media networks. In fact, on Facebook alone there’s 1.49 billion monthly active users. That’s a lot of people you can capture by sending the right message to the right people. Facebook’s advertising algorithms have changed and improved tenfold since it first came out. Now, you’re able to create various specified targeted segments and save them in your ad manager page for later use. As we discussed in the marketing segmentation section above, you’re able to use these specific segments to target different audiences for different promotions. You can even run multiple promotions at the same time, targeting different audiences, and capturing a return for your different promotions at once.

4. Email/Text Message Marketing

Once you have your audience nailed down as a whole or into segments, you’re able to reach out to them directly to get immediate feedback. The two most popular ways are through email marketing and text message marketing. For email marketing, you can schedule ongoing emails to go out to your whole database, or target a specific audience with a specific message and call to action. Same goes for text messages. The better call to action you have in your message (ex: buy your ticket now with a link to your ticket page), the bigger results you’ll see. And the more targeted you are, the more relevant you message will be to that guest, and the more likely they are to take that call to action.

5. Street Marketing/Grassroots Efforts

It’s easy to get sucked into the sexiness of digital marketing, but there’s still a time and place for traditional marketing. I wouldn’t recommend spending a lot of time in this area, but supplementing your digital marketing efforts with traditional can help boost your results. Use your promoters to sell tickets or get guests on the guest list or VIP reservation list. The best way to do this is through a mobile system that ties back to your venue management system. Know where your audience is hanging out and get in front of them in a more organic and face-to-face way.


To learn more about how you can use marketing tools to blast your promotions, and to see the above tools in action, attend Whitney Johnson’s session during the 2016 Nightclub & Bar Tradeshow.

Author Whitney Larson Posted on

Incentivize Guests to Pre-Purchase NYE Tickets

New Year’s Eve can be stressful, especially when you’re hosting a big event. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine it’s hours before you open and your mind is at ease because you have thousands of dollars in pre-sold tickets and you’ve already paid for your event — the rest is pure profit. This could be your reality, and it’s easier than you think.

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

1. Set the price and use a yielding strategy

Encourage people to pre-purchase their tickets 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. This is your yielding strategy. It’s all about dollars per square foot. 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, you can do this with any amount of tickets, and you can do this 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 NYE events based on where their friends are going.

2. Hit the sales and marketing ground hard

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. Leverage your third-party partnerships to expand your audience reach. Engage though social an make it easy for guests to share their purchase with their friends on their own social channels. All the channels working together at once is what drives awareness, buzz, and sales.

3. Strategize your lines the night-of

Using a big of strategy in your lines physically shows your guests why they should pre-purchase their tickets. 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 is allows your staff handling pre-sale checkin to only focus on that task and increase line speed. 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.

This not only sets your event up for greater success next year, but could also incentivize your guests to buy tickets while standing in line (for an even greater price, as discussed in your yielding 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 on drinks.


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

Marketing Your New Years Eve Event

There’s less than a month to go until New Year’s Eve. The hype of the holidays is building, and your guests are starting to think about their plans. Are you in them? If you’re not a part of the conversation now, your guests are going to plan their night somewhere else.

Follow these 10 tips to set up your marketing campaign now and accelerate it through to the night of NYE.

1. Define your theme

There’s a lot of competition at NYE — why should someone choose your event over another? You need to make this clear upfront and provide people with the benefits of attending your event. The best way to do this is to create a theme and stick to it. People connect with events that have a focused theme. It’s what aligns customer expectation with customer experience. Define your vision, create the essence you want your customers to experience, and design everything – including your imagery, benefit-driven messaging, and your interior – around these items. Never lose sight of this theme throughout your marketing efforts. This is what drives consistency for the public’s perception of your event and what gets people excited about attending.

2. Set up your event landing page now

You need an event page and you need it to be launched now. This gives you time to market your event and garner visitors to your landing page to start making their plans around your party. Keep in mind that it’s important to have a section of your website or a specific landing page dedicated to your event. Simply having a sentence description on a third-party ticketing company’s website isn’t going to cut it. People want to know the vibe of your party, understand why they should attend, and get a gage at what they can expect by attending — something a page dedicated to your event can provide. Plus, having your own page allows for greater SEO opportunities, allowing guests to find out about your event in search results. Make sure you also include a call-to-action for users to buy tickets. The best solution is for your customers to buy tickets directly on this landing page and not be redirected to another website. Redirects oftentimes leads to cart abandonment.

3. Incentivize guests to purchase tickets early

Encourage people to pre-purchase their tickets 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. This encourages people to buy early and have time to share their plans with others. Plus, when guests pre-buy their tickets, you’re generating revenue before the night of your event.

4. Establish your social channels

It’s imperative to have an online presence that matches the style of your offline presence. Therefore, your social channels should be updated to reflect the theme of your event. Change your profile pictures and cover photos on your social channels to coincide with your event images. Add an events section on your Facebook landing page that gives full information about your NYE event. Integrate your ticketing page into your Facebook fan page for people to buy tickets directly through social. Keeping it all consistent between your website, social channels, and venue will strengthen your presence and increase awareness.

5. Engage through social

After you establish your social channels, it’s time to engage with your guests through them. Customers now make purchasing decisions on multiple platforms — including social — and they expect you to be there. Post your event on your social channels using referral tracking codes to track where your guests are purchasing from. Do contests or ticket giveaways to build engagement and interaction. Run Facebook ads to target a specific segmented audience, encouraging them to buy tickets to your event. The best way to do this is to craft different benefit-driven advertising copy for your different audience segments, then use Facebook to target these different audiences with your specified content. This personalized content becomes relatable and will drive more sales than one mass message.

6. Make it easy for guests to share

Speaking of social, make it easy for your guests to share your event and their ticket purchases on their own social channels. Include share links on your event page and make those links even more apparent after they buy their ticket. The majority of people attend NYE events based on where their friends are going. Allowing your guests to share your event in one click turns them into promoters and builds your organic word of mouth promotions, without you having to do any extra work.

7. Set your promoters up for success

Your promoters are a big part of your marketing efforts. Make sure they understand the theme of your event and know how to talk to it. Then, turn them into a mobile box office. It’s best to use a ticketing company that has a mobile app so you can do this. The mobile application will allow your promoters to sell tickets directly through their device through both cash and credit purchases. Consumers get a digital ticket, and that buying information is synced with the rest of your ticket purchases. This makes your promoters even more powerful, and drives more customers through your door.

8. Leverage partnerships

Chances are you have relationships with third-party outlets, such as your booked entertainment, sponsors, key social influencers, and media outlets. Tap into these relationships and leverage a partnership with them so they’ll promote on your behalf. Not only does this increase the amount of messaging that goes out, but it also exposes you to a new audience you may have otherwise not reached. Plus, the validity from these types of partners enhances your event’s credibility.

9. Strategize your lines the night-of

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 is another way to encourage pre-sale and allows your staff handling pre-sale checkin to only focus on that task and increase line speed. On the other hand, it allows your staff selling tickets at the door to only handle that task, aiding in long waits for door sales. 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 on drinks.

10. Track and measure your efforts

You’ll never know how successful your marketing efforts are if you don’t track and measure results. Use referral tracking codes to track all of your marketing efforts mentioned above, including your event page, organic social posts, paid social posts, guest social posts, promoters, and third-party partners. Use a unique referral code for each promoter and partner to truly track your efforts. You’ll be able to track where guests are purchasing tickets and what marketing efforts are driving the biggest results. This sets you up for success for next year to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.


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

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