The shocking truth is we’ve been thinking about mobile all wrong. I see it time and time again: people gushing online about how nightclubs need to create their own mobile apps to promote their venue. But this isn’t the case. It doesn’t make any business sense for every nightclub to spend the time and money developing and maintaining their own native apps. After all, very few of your customers are going to download these apps and keep up with your notifications. So let’s move away from the notion that mobile only exists as a way to push messages onto people, and realize that the true benefit of mobile in this industry is to use it as a tool to better manage your venue.
The key ingredient to a mobile management tool is that it has to be integrated into all areas of your club. We call this interconnectivity, which provides nightclubs the opportunity to manage all areas of their club through one central platform. When this platform is integrated across all devices – including web, phone, and tablet – you’re able to streamline operations, maximize efficiencies, and increase your revenue.
Here are 4 ways using mobile as a management tool will benefit your bottom line.
1. Better manage promoters
Too often, promoters are left to pave their own path in getting guests to come through your door. This doesn’t set your club or your promoters up for success. Instead, help them excel by providing them with a system that allows them to make transactions right from a mobile device. There are systems available that give all staff members – including promoters – a personal login to handle guest management and point of sale. Through this type of system, promoters can add guests to the guestlist, create a VIP reservation, or even sell a ticket to your event. It’s an easy solution for your promoters to sell in real-time and generate instant sales for your club. What’s more is you’re able to track the referrer of an individual customer, VIP reservation, or guestlist party. This makes it easier to identify not only who’s bringing in the most traffic, but also who’s bringing in the best traffic. And when you know your promoters are doing a job-well-done, you’re able to incentivize and reward them accordingly to keep them performing and maximizing results.
2. Increase sales with mobile point of sale
We alluded to mobile point of sale (POS) above, which is a major benefit to using mobile as a tool for your venue. You can couple your traditional POS system with a mobile POS system to allow your venue to collect more transactions than you’re currently doing, whether it’s by conducting pre-sales for mobile ticketing or collecting cover for general admission and guestlists. Not only does this help secure additional revenue, but it also optimizes your line and speeds up your night.
3. Collect important data on how your club is performing to optimize it for future success
The key to measuring the success of your club is by analyzing critical data – something a fully integrated technology solution can achieve. This system collects data from any area of your club, analyzes it, and presents it in easy-to-read charts in one central spot so you get a better understanding of:
• How much money you made or lost over a given time period
• Which days of the week are your busiest
• What type of liquor you sell the most on a given day
• How many tables are reserved a night
• Which promoters are bringing in the most and best guests
• Which servers are upselling the most and making the most tips
• What types of promotions or events bring in the most traffic
4. Give guests a great experience
Continuing on the analytics path, a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system that’s tied to your point of sale and integrated into your one main platform allows you to gather important information about your guests in one central spot. This means you can look up a guest in your mobile device and get access to critical information to provide them with an even better experience than they otherwise would have had. This information includes demographics, frequency of visits, average money spent per visit, and average group size. With your CRM system, you’re able to better identify guests in line, upsell guests before they walk through your door, provide personalized service, and improve marketing efforts.
5. Improve marketing efforts
Speaking of marketing efforts, getting your guests to interact with you via short codes and other SMS marketing techniques are a must. Because your CRM system tracks important customer activity, such as when they come to your club, how much they spend, what they drink, and how many people they bring with them, you’re able to send more targeted, personal and relevant messages to individual guests. This means you’re able to use filters to segment your customers into specific targeted audiences, which in turn means each audience gets messages that are 100% relevant to their habits. That’s powerful marketing, and that’s what continues to drive guests into your venue.
Whitney Johnson is the global director of marketing for BookBottles. Contact her at whitney.johnson@bookbottles.com.
