
Are your Membership schemes working?
Is a really valuable question, that all attractions would benefit from regularly asking.
When marketing spend is far less to retain customers, than the comparative effort/cost associated with gaining new customers, prioritising a review of your membership offering could be a game changer!
At ReWork, we frequently witness overly complicated membership offerings, which are not only confusing for the customer but cause ticketing suppliers an unnecessary headache to support.
Are you asking members what they want?
Before introducing or changing a membership scheme at your attraction, there are some key questions that need to be answered.
Here are just a few that ReWork suggests;
- Do you have a good understanding of what your customers want from a membership/what are you currently doing well?
- This can be easily achieved through surveys/questionnaires/social engagement, or by inviting members’ feedback through forums
- Have you benchmarked your offering against similar attractions within the industry?
- Remember to research a cross-section and not just your neighbouring attraction for a true picture.
- What are the main business drivers for membership at your attraction?
- Increased visitation on quiet days/trading periods/special events
- Increased revenue in F&B/retail areas of the business
- Create positive word of mouth to increase awareness of your brand
- Do you have enough data from your current ticketing system that allows you to make informed decisions about member pricing strategies for your business?
- Number of members and geographical split
- Average spend per member, per annum, per visit etc
- Demographics
- Visitation data, including the number of visits
- Interests
- Type of events attended
- Social engagement and campaign tracking
- Online conversion and membership up-sells.
- How much effort should you place into the research/launch of your membership offering?
- Does it reflect the level of opportunity?
- If the majority of your visitors are one-time visits, the time and effort may be better placed on increasing spend per head, whilst those visitors are on site.
Once you’re confident that you have a clear representation of your members/market/requirements, the next step is to consider pricing!
Customer ‘value’ will be the key reason many customers consider a membership, but that doesn’t always mean price.
The list of ‘value add’ for members is endless, but very much depends on the understanding of your market, your team, and the attraction.
Here are just a few suggestions from ReWork;
- Free standard admission
- Meet the expert
- Exclusive events
- Pre-sell tickets for events
- Free events
- Back-of-house tours, meet the owner/day in the life of
- Reserved times/trading periods exclusive for members
- Self-service – access to change bookings
- Exclusive offers – discounted catering, free audio guides/apps
- Exclusive information – newsletters that are tailored to members
One membership offer, i.e an adult/concession might work for you, however, it may be worth considering the benefits of offering multiple membership packages.
The physiology of pricing is a huge topic, but if you don’t have time to get your head around the multiple concepts and theories we’d suggest learning some simple practices.
Price Anchoring, outlined here is one clever method of focusing on the ‘good’ deal in compassion to the anchor.
This could be achieved by offering 3 different membership packages to your customers.
Remember to not overly complicate the offering so that customers are confused by the ‘value’ they are receiving.
Next, talk to your ticketing partner about your membership plans.
Share your objectives and your plans.
Ask them how the ticketing system would support the membership scheme.
In the most ideal system/membership user case, this doesn’t require any manual interventions by you/your team.
Think, streamlined processes, automation where possible, and an easy purchase and redemption flow for both the member and the team supporting the offering.
Other elements you may want to consider, include;
- How does the membership scheme/s affect your annual passes if you operate one
- How can a customer buy a membership as a gift?
- How can they be upsold memberships intuitively?
- How effective is the reporting of membership activity and how does this feed into your CRM strategy?
- How will you measure the success of the revised/new scheme?
- Pro-rata payments and direct debits all remove barriers to transacting – is this supported?
- Loyal members that receive good value will want to renew. Make it easy for them!
If your ticketing partner can’t support all of these aspects, are you making things too bespoke, OR are you looking at best practices?
**If your ticketing partner can support 9 out of 10 of the requirements, have you considered a workaround for the 10th?
Do you have a clear understanding of the additional development timescales?
** Remember there’s no perfect ticketing solution, just one that best meets your objectives and your priorities
As ticketing consultants ReWork supports you across your business, in all aspects of ticketing.
Membership is one form of ticketing and yes, there can be more complexities to them, but simplistically it’s a ticket that entitles your customers to added value beyond a ‘normal’ ticket type.
If your ticketing partner is not able to support your membership objectives and you need help in finding one that does. We’re here to help!
We also have bags of experience designing membership packages and platforms for this market, so happy to help on many levels to get you where you need to be.