Ideas to Keep Your Business Top of Mind With Your Customers

Do you spend more time courting new customers or adding value to existing ones?

Most B2B (business to business) businesses I know get the mix all wrong. They spend tons of time, energy and money trying to bring in new customers. If they spent 30% of those resources on existing customers, they would be far better off. Why? Because existing clients already know about you so that cuts down the sales time. They are also more likely to refer you new opportunities. And referrals are much easier to close than cold calls. But what does this have to do with your B2C (business to consumer) Family Entertainment Center?

A lot. Think about your advertising. Is it directed to new people or existing clients? Exactly.

What are you doing inside of your center to get people to come back?

Loyalty Program

Sure some of you have or are thinking about a loyalty program, but how is it working? Maybe a better question is how are you working it? The single biggest way loyalty programs fail is because companies don’t tell their customers they have one. Or maybe they tell them about it, but they don’t explain it correctly. The key to a loyalty program is to make sure the customer feels GREAT about being loyal to your business. It should be a big deal. Make sure your staff knows this.

More Loyalty = More $$$ — Start a Customer Loyalty Program

What about a referral program for Customers?

Are you incentifying your existing clients with a reason to come back to your place AND bring someone new? You don’t have to over think this. Make it easy on you and them. It could be as simple as a BOGO (buy one get one) laser tag, a handful of game tokens, 100 redemption tickets or a free hot dog. Test different ideas every month. See how often each one works. Track it. Than offer a standard program moving forward.

Weekly specials or discounts

Pick your slowest night and offer the best specials. It doesn’t matter if it’s on food or on gaming or on something else…just give people a reason to show up. Then watch them do it. Pretty soon your slow nights, become your busiest nights. Be mindful that when choosing a loss leader (fancy term for something you may lose money on to get people in to spend more money elsewhere) that you may lose money on this offering. Don’t ever make these special offers without the fine print.

You can also do things that reach your customers outside of your venue IF you do the right things while they’re there. What are you doing to collect their information? If you have a rewards program you can get their name, e-mail and maybe a phone number or home address. If they have to sign a waiver you can get their name and e-mail at the least. You can ask them straight away if they’d like to sign up for e-mail discounts and coupons. How else can you get their info?

They may not love it, but you'll get new data — Google “Waiver Form” and find one for your Customers to sign

How you reach Customers outside of your space:

Email

This is a pretty easy and consistent way to stay in touch with your clients. Choose a service like mailchimp or constant contact (both offer free accounts for a limited number of subscribers) and begin sending a monthly or bi-monthly newsletter. Note bi-monthly can mean every 2 weeks or every other month. I know content can get tiresome to produce so make it easy on yourself. Set up a template that’s plug and play. Put in a few sections:

Calendar of events: Here you highlight what your upcoming specials, discounts or other big events for the coming month are

Featured game or experience: Pick something every month to showcase *Tip: If you have only a few experiences think about ways people can get more enjoyment out of them

Photo of the month: Take a pic of someone enjoying themselves or even better, ask your customers to upload a pic to your Facebook page and highlight that in your newsletter

FEC Funny: Do a search on Google for Arcade or Fun Center memes and share one in every note. Click to see an example from the search “Laser Tag Funny“.

Direct Mail

You can send surveys, product announcements, special promotions and more. They can be a postcard or a big fancy envelope with lots of info inside. This idea works a LOT better if you have their address. If not, than go the Val Pak route and pop a flyer in the envelope. Don’t like that idea? Find a direct mail firm who can deliver mail based on a zip code and target a few of your neighbors.

Could be a great way to reach new customers near you — We’ve all gotten this piece of mail

Social media

You have started a Facebook page, right? If you haven’t, now wouldn’t be too late to do so. Get your people involved in what’s going on in your world. Give them insight on how to enjoy your space more. Let them know from your perspective how they can work better with you. Add value to them. Always remember that your clients NEED (well, at the very least Want) you to be successful so you can continue servicing them. They are some of your biggest fans. Treat them as such!

You can use this on your facebook page to attract customers — Some centers are so sensitive 😉

Any of these options will work for you. If you did them all, that would work too. The key is to make a choice and then a concerted effort to make it happen. I hope you will implement some of these ideas because I am sure your business will grow.

August 17, 2017August 18, 2017

Pricing Ideas for your VR Arcade

This post is based on one of the most important lessons I’ve shared after years of offering my time and talents as a consultant and coach. Getting your pricing right from the get go can change everything. The challenge is, without some trial and error, it can be really tough. When that is the case, the best advice I can offer is to do some market research and learn what others in your space are charging. Before we get into the specifics, let’s look at the considerations.

What are we measuring?

Can we just use a pricing calculator — We Need to Measure Something

Funny thing about VR experiences is that some of them are fairly static and take a set amount of time. Others are predicated by how well or not well a player does and vary in length based on that. And finally some can be completely skills based and will allow a player to play as long as they can keep going.

So the first consideration is do you want to charge people by time or by the experience?

Why Time Matters for Pricing

Our software has a cool time clock — There has to be a better way to measure time.

Since the biggest factor of VR arcade success is “throughput” (meaning how many people can have pay for your experiences in a given time) you want to choose a consistent measure. Considering that each of these experiences could run from four or five minutes up to 10 or 12 minutes or way longer, it’s really hard to schedule your day. As such, choosing time as your unit of measurement should be a no-brainer.

Bundled time

Pricing made easy — As the clock runs down, the profits go up.

This is a more interesting consideration. If we agree that you should be selling minutes, than doesn’t it makes sense to look at just how many minutes? The majority of experiences (not clips or videos, but actual games or similar) are a minimum of 5 minutes in length. So maybe you should look at blocks of 5 minutes? That could work. Or maybe those blocks should be a bit longer…like 15 minute blocks. Or 30 minutes. What about an hour?

Think this through. From your own VR experience, what is the longest amount of time you’ve spent in the goggles straight? If you’re like most people, it’s less than 30 minutes. So while an hour (or more) may seem like a good plan, that only really works if you allow multiple people to share that hour. Which you can. And likely should consider. I’ve seen some VR arcades say their pricing per hour is only good for two people. Not sure why you would limit it at two. I could see limiting it to four, or maybe six, maybe.

Licensing rates

Aside from making mad stacks of cash with your VR Arcade, your pricing matters because of licensing rates. What are licensing rates you ask? Well, only a few of the VR experiences are free to download and free to play. And as the trend of VR Arcades continue to grow, more and more developers are moving to a “pay per play” or “pay per minute” model. In effect, you are licensing the game.

It’s super important to play by these rules too. If you operate a VR Arcade without paying the game developer, and the next group does that and so do the others, all of a sudden the game developers aren’t making money. What’s the first thing they’re going to stop doing?? Right…making games. So let’s all agree that paying them is of utmost important.

We have negotiated some pretty good rates with game developers across our multiple locations. Those rates are between $.07 and $.20/minute (there are a few experiences like The Lab which are free to play). HERE is a list of games we license.

Currency conversion

So many choices — Pricing in your currency

I live in the Detroit area which is in a state called Michigan in the North almost Central part of the United States of America. As such, when I think about money, I only think in terms of dollars. I understand that some of you are reading this from different parts of the planet (comment where you’re from if you’d like). To make the following paragraph make sense, I’ve included this handy currency converter link: Honestly, I normally just go to Google, but I couldn’t get a link from them.

Pricing at our locations

Our software is in two different types of locations:

VR Junkies locations that we own or operate as stand alone VR Arcades.
Our client’s sites who are typically operating a Family Entertainment Center of some sort and have launched their own VR Arcade inside of it.

For the most part, all 20+ locations share the exact same pricing strategy. It’s really simple. It’s $1.00 a minute. Earlier we talked about “bundled time” and we do that. We give a price break at an hour. We charge $45.00 for 60 minutes as opposed to $60.00.

To be fair, we do have a pretty big name client who has amazing foot traffic, especially in the summer months. They have made the decision to offer 30 minutes at $25.00. That makes some sense to me. It is interesting that they sell four times as many 15 minute blocks than 30 minute blocks. The first possible reason is that people at this location look to enjoy many of the other amenities. So 30 minutes could seem like a long time. The other reason could be that people who haven’t experienced room scale VR are unsure if they’re going to like it. $15 may seem easier to take a flyer on than $25.

Other Numbers to consider

The rest of the numbers looks like this:

Average sale = $21.00

Most frequent sale = $10.00 with a 10 minute add on

Average minutes played per booth per month = 2230 – This number can be misleading as some locations have 6-8 booths. Less booths = higher playtime per booth. Also important to note that while 1 of our locations is over 1 year old, most locations have less than 3 months of existence.

Largest number of minutes played in a location = 48,000. They are in a very popular beach destination. Are open 14 hours a day and have 8 booths.

Average number of booths per location = 3.8

Least amount of booths = 2

Most amount of booths = 8

Speaking of booths, if you’re interested in looking at some cool Booth Designs, click that link.

Curious to hear about your pricing strategy if you have one. Or feel free to bounce ideas off here in the comments and I’ll get back to you. Thanks for taking a look and I hope you found this helpful.

July 5, 2017

5 Reasons Your FEC Should Be Using LinkedIn

Get Your FEC LinkedIn

Assuming you’ve the got the Real Estate thing handled the most important words for your business are no longer Location, Location Location. Those words are now Marketing. Marketing! Marketing!!! This post is going to provide you a quick education on why LinkedIn is worth some of your attention for your Family Entertainment Center. Here are 5 quick things you need to know, now.

It’s Strictly Business

Let’s pretend Facebook is used 40% business and 60% for personal use. Those numbers are a bit high, but they’re close. LinkedIn is 95% business and 5% personal. What this means to you is that promoting your business can be a bother to those on Facebook looking for cat videos or to hear about your weekend away. People on LinkedIn expect to hear about what your business is doing.

It’s a “Blue Ocean Strategy”

In the international best seller by W. Chan Kim, Kim makes a very important distinction between blue oceans and red oceans in business. A red Ocean strategy is one that all of your competitors are employing and the waters are bloody as a result of the “fight”. A blue Ocean strategy is one where you zag, while everyone else is busy zigging. Think about the number of FECs you see on Facebook and compare that to those on LinkedIn.

You want morning business on a weekday?

Does your business feel like this in the a.m.?

Unless it’s summer or some other time when the kids are out of school you really only have one choice: corporate events. Those can be super hard to book unless you know how to connect with the right professionals. You know which social media site both caters to business professionals AND has a fabulous search feature to help you find them?? I’m not going to give out any names but it’s initials are Linked In.

You can offer team building opportunities

Corporate culture and team building is all the rage in business. Do you offer activities where two or more associates can play together or against one another? If you answered yes to that, than you can say you offer team building. Getting people out of the office for shared experiences is a tremendous way to get them to work better together on projects. This is your selling point.

Connect with event managers

Earlier I mentioned the power of search. That is where LinkedIn really shines. When you start building your network on LinkedIn you’ll be able to easily find and connect with folks who are responsible for building events for their companies. Connect with enough of them and some are bound to do business with you. Do a great job for them and they will tell their friends. Added bonus, they will likely book events for their kids too.

Bottom line is, you’re likely spending a portion your day working on a Facebook strategy (or just goofing off on Facebook, whichever). Do yourself a favor and allocate 15-20% of that time on LinkedIn. You and your business will be glad you did.

BONUS TIP

Click HERE for a quick video that will help you grow your LinkedIn network while you sleep.

If you want to learn more about how to leverage LinkedIn and other ideas to grow your FEC, check out our PLVR Club.