Why your venue needs to be sending Push-Notifications

If you work in a leisure venue such as a zoo, a theme park, a wellness location, or even an indoor playground, probably your main concern is getting your guest to visit your location and ensuring a great in-venue experience. But, doesn’t it happen that your marketing efforts are mainly focused on getting your guest through your gates? Do you sometimes feel that after this moment, you lose direct touch with them? Don’t worry, the struggle is real. 

Push notifications are a great way of constantly staying in contact with your visitor, before, during, and after their visit. Especially if you are looking for a solution on how to influence your visitors in-venue, Push Notifications is the answer. Of course, in order to even be able to talk about all the great benefits that Push Notifications offers, we need to be on the same page regarding guest-facing mobile apps and how they are leisure´s latest game-changer.

Push notifications have a great impact on the customer's journey across all industries, as described by RubyGarage, but let's talk about how the leisure industry can benefit from them.

 

How do Push Notifications work for a Leisure business?

Good news, the list goes as far as your creativity will allow it! If we see this from a Customer Journey perspective, Push Notifications can be customised and personalised for every step of your unique journey. 

If you want to learn more about other strategies and practices you can implement in order to improve your conversions along every touch-point of your customer journey check out these related reads:


- The future of leisure’s digital guest journey and how to get it right

- 3 reasons to digitalise your customer journey from start to end 

 

In this blog post however, we are focusing on Push Notifications - Let’s see some examples: 

Awareness 

In this stage of the journey, you are probably trying to make your brand known and communicate a specific product or offer. If your guest has your app installed on their phone, you could simply trigger a message to make them aware of the offer. Try to make sure you create some urgency to make it more effective. 

 

Don’t have an app yet but would like to get one? Check this out

Here is a Push Notification example: 

Surprises don’t last forever… only until tonight! Check this limited offer just for you: Buy a flex ticket + burger meal and souvenir with a 30% discount"

Consideration

This is the moment where your guest is evaluating if it is worth visiting your venue. In uncertain times like these, communicating your safety measures is probably a good way of reassuring your commitment to providing a fun and safe experience. You could also use a small testimony from a happy guest who had an experience as smooth as silk.

Here is a Push Notification example:
Doubting to visit us? Our guest say: “I had such a great time and never felt exposed to any danger! Will come back soon” Reserve your visit now!

Purchase

Once your guest decides to visit, the next step is the purchase. It goes without saying that your eCommerce shop should be mobile optimised, right? A small double click on this topic, only this year more than 65% of our partners’ customers have done their bookings through mobile. This means that having a checkout process that is not optimised for mobile can slow things down and cost you a good amount of drop-offs.

Here is a Push Notification example: 

Ready to reserve your next adventure? Buy tickets here, it will take less than 3 mins (we promise!)” 

Visit

Here is where we can really influence our visitor’s in-venue behaviour both to enhance their experience and boost direct revenue. You can tailor the messages based on certain actions, on specific locations (geo-based), on specific times, or just generic messages. Once again, you decide what the best strategy is! 

 

Here are 3 Push Notifications examples: 

As they arrive:Welcome to {venue’s name}, download our map and plan your great adventure.” 

Near lunchtime: “Do I hear your tummy growling? Pick up lunch on {restaurant or snack bar}” 

When they are near your exit gate: “Already leaving? Make sure you take a memory with you from the souvenir shop!

 

Loyalty

This stage of the journey refers to all types of communications that happen after your guest’s visit. Your goal here is to make sure they visit you again and maintain your customer retention. In leisure, you can tackle this aspect in several ways, but the most common ones are offering discounted re-visit tickets or offering season or membership passes. 

Here is a Push Notification example: 

After 1 day of their visit “One day and we already miss you! Is the feeling mutual? Buy a discounted season pass here and visit us whenever you feel like it!” 

As you see, Push Notifications and the Leisure Industry are a perfect match. There are thousands of creative ways to use them,, and can perfectly adjust to help you fulfil your goals. Either if it is enhancing their visitor experience, or boosting up direct revenue by selling tickets or upsells, or why not? Combining both!

If you are still some steps behind on mobile-technology adoption and feel like implementing something like this in a quick and easy way, you can hop into Tap and get your own app -  we will get you right on track! 

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