Retention Marketing

Carousel Insights specializes in helping out-of-home, location-based entertainment venues grow the lifetime value of every guest.

A lot of marketing teams in the out-of-home space focus almost all of their efforts on driving awareness and consideration through advertising, PR, and what are essentially mass-market messaging on social media. Very few make the investment in time, technology, or staff needed to maximize the opportunity they have to leverage their most valuable marketing asset: their mailing list.

Carousel Insights specializes in helping out-of-home, location-based entertainment venues create and execute retention marketing strategies that grow customer lifetime value. That is: we help you use your mailing list to get people to visit often, spend more money, and remain your customer longer.

Lifecycle Marketing and the Guest Journey

It begins with the guest journey, which looks similar to the diagram above for most out-of-home entertainment experiences. Most marketing dollars are spent on the first two blocks — awareness and acquisition (advertising). While there is always ways to optimize how the money is spent in this category, the real opportunity lies in the last two blocks: retention, renewal, and advocacy.

There are several reasons why a optimized retention strategy makes sense for out-of-home entertainment venues:

  • It increases profits. Increasing retention rates by only 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.
  • It’s much easier. Brands have a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer versus only 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer
  • It up to 5x more to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one.
  • Existing customers spend much more over the long haul.
  • Happy existing customers help you acquire new customers.

We can help you to create an optimized retention marketing program that drives visitation, gross margin dollar, and EBITDA.

Retention Marketing Services

Carousel Insights can help you grow your attendance and customer lifetime value by:
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    Retention Marketing Assessment

    Mark and his team will map your customer journey, review your existing product mix, subscription/pass programs, CRM, onboarding programs, loyalty programs and retention programs and identify opportunities for improvement.

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    Retention Product Mix Redux

    Mark and his team will review your existing product mix, collect guest feedback, and identify specific changes you can make to drive higher engagement/visitation.

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    Identify Upsell/Add-On Program

    Mark can help you identify and implement cost-effective programs to push one-day visitors into multi-day visitors.

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    CRM/Personalization Program

    A great CRM program lies at the heart of any great retention marketing program. We can help you affordably leverage your list to drive 1:1 personalized relationships with your guests using email, SMS, and apps that will drive engagement, loyalty and higher CTV.

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    Onboarding Program Design

    One of the top reasons people abandon membership programs (or don't renew subscriptions and season pass programs) is because they don't get the value they initially expected when they signed up. You can mitigate that by leveraging your CRM program to ensure that every new guest is "trained" in how to use their benefits.

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    Recurring Revenue Program Development

    Recurring revenue programs where consumers sign up for a membership and stay in the program until they cancel change the paradigm for out-of-home attractions: instead of selling and reselling the same product to the same customer each year, you just have to sell it to them once! While these types of programs make sense for many organizations, they don't work for everyone. We can evaluate the pros and cons, and help you roll out a program if it makes sense.

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    Loyalty Program Development

    Loyalty programs for out-of-home entertainment destinations work a little bit differently from what you might see at a grocery store or gas station. They don't necessarily drive incremental visits or spending, but they do have ancillary benefits that make them well worth the cost. We can help you determine if such a program makes sense for you, and if so we will help you implement it.