4 Emails that leisure & entertainment businesses need to be sending

Whilst marketing is constantly evolving, one tried and tested staple of any marketing strategy is email marketing. Now hear us out, whilst it isn’t as exciting as a TikTok account, email marketing is still one of the most impactful tools available to businesses, and is also pretty low cost, with an average ROI of 36:1.

Whilst there’s no one size fits all when it comes to email marketing, there are certainly a couple of essential marketing emails we would suggest all businesses in the leisure & entertainment space consider implementing into their arsenal – and best of all, most can be set as automations, saving you valuable time.

Take a look at our favourites below.

Birthdays

Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way – you have to be targeting your customer base in the build up to their birthday, it’s such a low hanging fruit.

Using automation you can easily set up a nurture campaign that messages your customer 45, 30 & 15 days before their birthday encouraging a party booking at your venue. To further incentivise them to book, you could include gradually increasing discount codes i.e. starting at 5% 45 days out and 15% at 15 days out.

Additionally, you can look to use a similar principle in the build up to popular times for you, such as Easter & summer holidays encouraging a group booking to get the kids out of the house – that’s one of our favourite things about automations, they’re easily cloned and edited to fit any purpose.

Revisitation

A topic we often speak to our customers about is revisitation rate – if you’re not familiar with this term, you can view our article “What is revisitation rate” here – but in short, revisitation rate is a key evaluator in how healthy your leisure/entertainment business is:

“Revisitation rate is defined as your total customer pool (live customers on a rolling 12 month basis) divided by your total annual ticket sales. As an example, should you have an existing customer pool of say 300,000 and £600k annual sales, your rate would be 2.0.”

You can find out what a good revisitation rate would be classed at on the article linked above.

One effective way to boost revisitation rate is by introducing an automation email that sends an exclusive discount to customers to use in the next 4 weeks, within a couple of hours of them finishing their visit to your venue – in fact, this is one we recommend to all customers and we’ve seen an average of £30,000 per location directly attributable to this automation.

Like all marketing, it’s important you monitor the data and run split testing to maximise your results – for example with revisitation emails, work out what the optimum time period to wait is before your customers get their revisitation email.

We’ve missed you

Again, another one you can easily set up as an automation (noticing a pattern here?). If you haven’t had someone visit you for 3-4 months, why not have an automation sends a simple “we miss you” email?

We’d also go a bit further in terms of making this feel personal and set it so it looks like it comes from a member of the team – a human touch can go a very long way, so for this why not consider dropping the branding and marketing fluff and making it look like it comes from your front of house manager, as an example?

This will not only help your email stick out from the usual loaded graphic marketing emails customers are used to from brands, but also help customers forge relationships with the actual people that make your business the success it is – your staff.

Don’t forget the second line spend items

From trampolines, to climbing walls to bowling lanes – your main product offering will always be your focus, and rightly so. However, you shouldn’t forget the importance of your second line spend items, specifically food and drink.

After-all, whilst it’ll be children that are mostly in your venue it’ll be parents paying and those are the ones you want to entice and stay in your venue, so running promos on food and drink is a great way to get them in your venue and keep them in there.

So with email marketing you could consider segmenting your audience with guests who you know have young children and target them with exclusive food and drink discounts – particularly thinking about timing, those school holidays… that’s the time to strike.

Thanks for booking

Finally, as a little bonus idea we thought we’d include this one too – following on from the trend above regarding a personal touch, we’d also recommend you tailor your “Thanks for making a booking with us” confirmation emails in a similar vein, using a personalised feeling email from a member of the front of house team – again, this helps add a human touch to your business and help solidify the relationship between you and your customers.

We hope this has given you some ideas on how you can maximise the performance of your email campaigns – if you’d like to find out how BookNow Software customers are utilising our solution to power their email marketing, particularly through email marketing please get in touch via the form below.