What’s better than consistent revenue for your business? Very little.
That’s why it’s mission-critical to take the time and resources to properly explore how to structure, price, and promote your membership program.
After all, getting this first part right will mean that you have reliable cash flow and income that’s easy to forecast.
But what happens after you’ve set up your membership program? How do you keep your most loyal guests satisfied? Beyond that, how do you turn them into raving fans who encourage their friends and family to visit your venue too?
After all, we know that happy guests come back AND they tell others about their experience. The same is true of members!
Rather than looking at building a memberships program as a set it and forget it exercise, let’s see how you can improve your member experience at little to no cost.
Read this next: How to create an effective member journey map
1. Use reporting data to make better-informed decisions
As a business owner, one of the hardest things is making decisions blind. Without access to the right data, deriving insights and making meaningful decisions that impact your business is hard.
Knowing how your members behave, how they interact with your business, and trends in guest experiences can help you uncover new opportunities or address problem areas.Not sure where to start? Here’s a helpful tip:
Use reporting to learn how to price your membership tiers or to identify any seasonal or location-based trends. Having a better understanding of the current state of play helps you refine your strategy to acquire, engage and retain members.
2. Reduce friction in the arrival experience
Your members want to be treated like a VIP. One way to achieve that is by offering members priority entry so that rather than waiting in a queue with guests who have purchased a standard admission ticket, they get to “skip ahead.” They feel like they’ve saved time in the check-in process and experience your venue that much sooner.
3. Offer onsite discounts, rewards, and incentives to encourage spending
Reward your members with benefits that make them feel part of an exclusive club.
Offer discounts on branded merchandise, like socks and t-shirts, or go one step further with member-only versions that can be worn with pride and even help generate some buzz amongst other guests.
Discounted or bonus F&B items can also encourage additional onsite spending each time a member visits your venue. But when you’re considering the ways in which you can encourage members to spend more with your business, you should also consider the ways in which they prefer to pay for goods and services.
ROLLER Payments helps members pay with ease by automatically managing member pricing, avoiding the need for manually inputting payment information or dealing with invoices – and it offers a variety of payment options from Apple Pay to BNPL choices.
4. Provide an outlet for members to offer feedback
To better improve the experience of your members, you need to first understand what your guests truly think.
But traditional methods of feedback collection are often resource-intensive for venue owners and operators like yourself and difficult to action or operationalize within attractions businesses.
ROLLER’s new and free sentiment analysis tool, the Guest Experience Score helps owners and operators collect, analyze and action guest feedback at scale with just the click of a button.
How? It asks the right questions at the right time, ensuring guests have an opportunity to share what they think and venues have an opportunity to recover from service failures before they end up on a public review forum like Facebook or Yelp.
5. Acknowledge their preferences and share the love
Because of the frequency with which they visit, you should know your members more intimately than any of your other guests.
By taking note of their preferences among attractions and session types or even onsite F&B spending, you can create more effective and personalized offers and marketing campaigns.
When you better understand your guests, you can deliver a better experience. That’s why making sure that the tools you use to support key areas of your business help offer you a unified view of the guest and support the ways in which you build relationships at scale is really important.
Members likely make up some of your most satisfied guests. They come to your venue regularly, they spend more and hopefully leave after a visit and encourage others to come.
Because of the value they offer your venue by way of word-of-mouth referrals, it’s important to keep them engaged.
And as we’ve discovered it doesn’t have to cost a lot to make your members feel even more valued, so start by looking at some of the easiest places you could be bringing about real change.
We hope that you’ve found these tips here helpful so that you can continue to improve the member experience, drive more repeat revenue and grow your membership program in the process.
