How to increase your guests expenditure at your business

Quite clearly one key objective of all businesses in the leisure and entertainment space is to ensure they’re maximising what their customers will spend at their venues, and one way we see our customers have success with this is by ‘second spend items’. 

Whether your main product offering is selling trampoline jump sessions, climbing experiences or paintball games there’s also a huge amount of customer spend you can get on your second line items – in fact, our data shows that on average, 23.16%* of our customers total income comes from second line spend items, such as food and drink, merchandise and equipment. 

Below are just a few ways you can look to increase what your customer’s spend with you.

Upsell during the booking process 

Firstly upselling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a comparable higher-end product than the one in question, while cross-selling invites customers to buy related or complementary items. 

So if you’re looking to upsell during the process, consider items like memberships or queue jump entry – we’ve previously explored how memberships can benefit Family Entertainment Centres and similar businesses which you can view here. 

Cross sell during the booking process

The booking process is a great opportunity to cross sell to your guests – consider what would most appeal to them at this point, if you’re a trampoline park then it could be jumpers socks, or for a paintball zone then how about grenades or additional bullets?

You could also consider selling these at a slightly reduced price to encourage your guests to buy in advance instead of purchasing at the venue, securing guaranteed income. 

If you’re a multi-activity venue then why not use this opportunity to push guests to book in an additional activity after their main one has finished. 

Allow pre-ordering for food during the booking process

If you have a food offering already – and if you don’t, here is what you’re missing out on – then we’d recommend allowing guests to pre-order food in advance. This offers a few advantages:

1. Guests are more likely to pre-order food if it makes their lives easier at the venue.
2. It helps you get an idea of staff required in advance of any guests.
3. Helps your kitchen team prepare in advance if they know what food will be required when.

This also gives you a good chance to market that you sell food too, portraying yourself as more than just an entertainment centre but also somewhere guests can enjoy some food and drink. 

Make it as easy possible to purchase additional items

You don’t want to create any friction in the purchasing journey for your customers – both when it comes to bookings and second spend items. 

In terms of making your second spend items as easy as possible to purchase, make sure that merchandise or equipment is placed at the front of the house in clear view of guests checking in etc. 

In terms of food and drink, you could place QR Codes on tables, or if you’re a bowling alley, add them on each lane to allow customers to order and pay for food and drink – our data shows us that implementing self service menus can increase your food and drink sales over 20%, so it’s a must have for all venues in our opinion. 

Have staff upsell and cross sell

Of course it also helps if staff are trained to upsell and cross sell effectively, so whether that’s offering items at check in, suggesting to upgrade food portion sizes, or upgrade the experience it pays to have staff trained to upsell – you can also incentivise them to do so by offering commission for successful cross sell or upsell if it’s financially viable to do so. 

It goes without saying, if your staff can build a rapport with your guest then this will only increase their chance of successfully upselling or cross selling!

We hope this has given you a few ideas you can put to practice in your venues and hopefully give your income a boost – to find out how the BookNow solution can help with the above just get in touch via our form below.