Focus on Nightlife

A lot of promoters judge the quality of their master guest list by the number of names on it. A different way of looking at it is to evaluate your guests by how ’sticky’ they are — how reliably they attend the events you promote. A highly sticky guest is one that is likely to attend whatever you promote. A non-sticky guest is just a name on your list with no particular propensity to attend your events.

This isn’t about ‘labels’ — it is about understanding the profile of your guests so that you can identify which of them are the most valuable, what their characteristics are, and how best to leverage their ’stickiness’. Handled properly, understanding the stickiness of your guests can significantly improve the payoff you get from your master guest list.

Regularly analyze your master guest list and categorize each of your guests according to their stickiness. How, exactly, you do that depends on your particular needs and interests. A typical approach, though, would be to look at their turnout patterns — which you should be tracking, if you don’t already (use tracking codes on your invites, for example). Set some specific parameters for each ’stickiness’ category. For example, guests that turn out for at least one event / function per week might be classified as Category A guests. Those that attend one to two per month might be Category B, and so on. Create a special ‘holding’ category for guests where you don’t have any suitable information yet.

Once you’ve categorized your guests:

1. Give some thought to any consistent characteristics of each category of guests. If there are any similarities, you will know where to focus your list-building efforts. You want to invest heavily to obtain your Category A guests and you want to minimize expenditures on lower-level guests.
2. Try to find ways to move guests from the ‘holding’ category to their appropriate category (using tracking codes, etc.). Guests in the ‘holding’ category cannot be leveraged to their full limit.
3. Assign a specific value to each guest according to their category. This would typically take into consideration the per-visit and ‘lifetime’ spend. For example, you might determine that your Category A guests are worth, on average, $450 to you. A Category D guest, on the other hand, might only be worth $35 to you. Having clear, quantitatively-generated numbers in this way can make a material difference to your promotional efforts!
4. Look for ways to treat your top-level guests better, to bind them more closely to you and to encourage them to help bring you other top-level guests. This can include everything from ensuring that non-suitable mailouts aren’t done to them (don’t spam them about every single event you are running) to ensuring they get top treatment at the venues.
5. Look for ways to minimize your expenditures on lower-quality guests. This doesn’t mean treating them poorly (low-quality guests frequently become top-level guests), but you do want to generate the maximum overall results from your limited resources.
6. Constantly study your top-level guests to find out how best to leverage them. You don’t want to over-promote to them as they’ll get burned out and cease to be as sticky as they once were. Conversely, you don’t want to under-promote and miss out on potential revenue. By studying them, you’ll learn their characteristics and can best determine how to leverage them.
7. Study your less sticky guests too to find out why they aren’t as sticky. In many cases the reasons will be things beyond your control — no matter how great a job you are doing, you can’t satisfy everyone. However, often you’ll discover factors that you can manage. For example, maybe some of your current lower-quality guests are sticky, but only for certain types of events. If that is the case, then you need to revise your criteria for stickiness to reflect this. Maybe you shouldn’t be focusing only on the frequency of visits, but on the ratio of visits (ie, every time you have an event tailored to a certain guest, what percentage of the time do they attend?). Ultimately, you are looking to move as many of your guests as possible from lower-level categories to higher-level categories.
8. Track the trends in your master guest list over time - what is the rate of change in each category? what is the unsubscribe rate in each category? And so on. Critical info!
9. Be systematic in this process. It is most effective when done as a regular part of your promotional activities.

Of course, managing all this is best done through database software (though it can be done in Excel too, though not so easily). Depending on your software, you can probably automate the entire tracking process — all you’d need to do thereafter would be to review the reports periodically and identify new strategy / tactics to address the trends you find.

Systematically reaching your target market, and mobilizing that market, is critical for any industry operator. Mobile phone-driven tools, like that just announced by US mobile phone provider Helio, are going to have a growing role over how venues / promoters drive traffic through the doors.

According to Caroline McCarthy:

Helio’s new service, which is ad-supported, lets people in major U.S. cities search on the mobile Web site–linked from the home page of the carrier’s browser–for bars, clubs, and restaurants. Most of the data will be pulled from Buzzd partners like Flavorpill, TimeOut, and the IAC-owned Citysearch. Added on, however, will be “event feeds” with specific pricing and night-specific details as well as short user reviews in real time.

Helio’s service isn’t quite there yet — it still doesn’t fully link into the ’social networking’ of nightlife guests, but it is a tantalizing glimpse at where we are going. Helio may not be the company to succeed with this type of service, but some operator will sooner or later (likely sooner…).

A key characteristic will be the distribution of user / guest reviews. Imagine the impact on buzz on any given night from only a small number of ‘influencers’ shouting out their opinions of your club that night? Already, informal text messaging among friends is playing a huge role in night-to-night turnout at venues. Take that one degree further and systemize the ability for opinions / reviews to be widely circulated in real time…

This can be a nightmare for venues… or a huge opportunity. Those that figure out how to identify, track, and harness the influencers in their local market will have a huge advantage. After that, it becomes a matter of winning the ’small battles’ — encouraging your guests to evangelize your venue and start that viral spiral going in the right direction.