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 13, 2017September 1, 2017

VR Arcade Commercially Licensed Games

How Can We License VR Arcade Games?

One common question we often see is what games are available for our VR arcade. It’s a great question. The fact that people are looking at how to license these games legally makes it even better.

Over 70 Games

You can simply click HERE to learn more about the games. That link will take you to a page with images for each title. Whether you’re on a computer or mobile device you can click each image to learn more about the game. There is a quick paragraph describing each game as well as a video of the game itself. Note: Remember to X out of the description as opposed to hitting the back button. You will find the X in the upper right hand corner. There are also some specifics on each of the games that are very helpful because they allow you to:

Select Your Games Based on Categories

Number of players- Is it single player, co-op or multi-player? The majority of games are single or co-op and we just added a new multi-player.

Movement- Does the game require low, medium or high amounts of movement. Always good to make sure your customers know how much energy they’ll exert.

Difficulty- This rates whether there is a low, medium or high amount of difficulty. We offer a nice blend of low and medium difficulty experiences. We have about 10 that score in the “High Difficulty” category.

AZ Sunshine High Difficulty Extreme Intensity

Intensity: This looks at how involved the game is. Intensity is scored on low, medium, high and extreme. It can change based on several factors like: gory, adult content, language and whether or not math is involved.

Age Group: We have broken down the experiences into different age ranges. The lowest age range is 5+ and we have over 15 titles for this age group. We have almost 30 titles in the 10+ category. We have 10 in the 14+ category and 1 in the 18+ category but it’s not what you’re thinking.

Min Play Time: We have titles that are set to a minimum play time of 5 minutes all the way up to 20 minutes. Some games are designed to played as long as people want. Others are experiences that generally take a specific amount of time to get through.

Great Per Minute Rates

At the time of writing, Private Label VR and our sister company, VR Junkies have more VR Arcade locations than any other group in the United States. As a result, we have a compelling story for game developers and they are generally eager to work with us. We can take our great rates with them and share with you. Obviously rates vary by title, but what we are seeing across all of our headsets is between $.07-$.12 per minute. Compared to other VR Arcade licensing platforms this saves you between 25-50% for every minute of play.

What else can Private Label VR do for you?

Our Software Helps Manage Your VR Arcade

Having awesome experiences for your VR Arcade customers is just the beginning of what we do for you. We’ve put together a most comprehensive VR Arcade Management Software to help you manage your business. We are continually adding new features to further automate the processes. Some of the highlights for today’s version include:

In Goggle Game Selection- This makes it super easy for your customers to choose their next experience. It also eliminates the need for an employee to manage this simple task.

Game Play Tracking- We show you exactly how many minutes were played on each title. This is great for knowing which titles are worth keeping and which aren’t. Two things that really make this feature exquisite: 1. We collect data from over 15 different locations (as of 7/13/2017) and can really give guidance as to which experiences are winners and which are less so. 2. We use these numbers to calculate your monthly payments to the game developers and invoice you then pay them directly. This feature is not only great for you, it’s also imperative for our industry. Turns out the creative folks behind these experiences like getting paid too.

Setting Up Your VR Arcade

Don’t have a VR Arcade yet? Even better. Allow us to utilize our expertise in getting you setup and ready to rock. We take care of everything. We will help you with everything from space planning and VR Arcade design to equipment procurement to actual install on your site. Oh yes and we can take of training your team to provide optimal customer experience. For a deeper dive, check out our “VR Arcade Business in a Box” offering.

Our PLVR Club Helps You Grow Your VR Arcade

Don’t think we get you setup and then leave you alone. No way! The install is just the beginning of our relationship. Once you’re setup and ready to take in customers you become a member of the PLVR Club. This is where all of the magic happens. Consider this your one stop support group. We offer technical support. We provide operational support. There is even marketing support. If you need support, this is the place for it. As an added bonus, you will be in a group with other VR Arcade owners and operators who will share best practices, tremendous wins and even some things to avoid.

If you’re interested in learning more, shoot us an e-mail and we will be happy to answer any additional questions.