Planning a membership program

We saw that members were coming four times more often than nonmembers to venues. Now that's a global statistic. In the report, we break it down region by region, but it's another reason of why membership programs can have a positive impact on your business.

Memberships can mean a lot of different things depending on your vertical that you operate in. For example, a trampoline park or a play center might have a monthly returning membership where it renews every month. You can also be in the water park vertical and have a season pass and also potentially an amusement park that has an annual pass. You could also have multi visit sort of passes. But at the end of the day, what we're talking about here is a loyal customer who returns to your business time and time again. And that's such a powerful asset to have in your attraction.

Memberships can be hugely impactful on your business. It can reduce the cost of acquisition, getting a returning member as opposed to a new customer costs you a lot less. It gives you predictability on revenue, so getting that revenue on a regular basis allows you to flatten a little bit of that cash flow demand curve. And while talking about cash, it gives you a bit of cash upfront before you actually incur any cost, which is fantastic for any business.

My experience when you're setting up your membership program, rather than going to the ultimate solution or price point that you want to put out there, you gotta understand the strategic reasons of why you're doing this. What problem are you trying to solve? Is it to fill in those low demand gaps in your business model? Is it to give you cash flow so you can operate in the low seasons to help you generate that cash at that point in time?

Whatever the reason might be, you've got to look at it from a top view first. What am I trying to achieve that will impact my business in a positive way? And then from that point, you can start to understand, okay, if it's cash flow, I really now have to think about, well, maybe I should look at a longer term membership base, you know, or maybe I should think about putting a sale on at a particular time of year that you can generate that cash and then allow that membership to come back over that period of time. So there's a lot of different reasons, but strategically look at it from the top.

Back in the day, I used to own a few businesses in the indoor skydiving vertical. It was called a frequent flyer club. What we realized, part of the community started spending a lot of time on the shop floor, so in our venue and they started talking to a lot of our customers and we quickly realized they were helping these people, they were giving them advice of what they should be doing in the flight chamber, they started sort of high fiving the excitement, the buzz in the venue and that made us realize not only are they great loyal customers and they're spending money at our venue, that little gray area in the membership program where you can't quite quantify it, but you can because you walk into a venue and it's just an amazing atmosphere.

There's also an element of data where you're able to collect the registration, certain a little bit more information about the member, and then you can use that information to sort of start targeting and building a persona of what a perfect member for your business looks like. And it allows you then to go out into the wide world from a marketing perspective and start targeting those people. You also get a seats and capture more data when they're on-site. What are they spending money on?

What food and beverage are they buying? What retail are they purchasing? What's the spend per guest that you're getting out of your membership community? And all that data wraps into a beautiful package, allows you to understand, I guess, your guests more deeply.

Whether it's season pass, annual pass or monthly recurring memberships, you've to be careful about how you place memberships in your business model. Look at it strategically, what is the impact that you want it to have?

When they get on premise, there's so much you can do. So whether that's advertising components across the park, memberships that fast track for memberships queue at the front, you might have a members only area that's very very clear and signposted within the venue, discounts for members only. Those sort of elements actually add to the awareness and as particularly on exit always have a call to action. They say they've seen all of that on prem, they've seen it online, there's a scan this code special only today to upgrade your pass.

And then obviously the post is your standard stuff, your emails, the ways that you sort of build those email journeys. Really start to build that FOMO component on premise. Don't dip your toe, don't beat around the edges on creating a membership program. Identify the reason why you're building it, the impact you want to make, what food and beverage are they buying, what retail are they purchasing, what's the spend per guest that you're getting out of your membership community and all that data wraps into a beautiful package.

To learn more about our memberships, watch our video series, It'll take you right from the beginning of setting up a membership program all the way through to implementation and maintaining the program. It's a fantastic tool to have at your disposal.