Where can I find a million visitors?
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👤 Featuring Pierre Perez, Success Director & Angie Judge, CEO of Dexibit
Discover proven strategies for growing visitation at attractions, hitting 1 million visitors, boosting revenue, and optimizing operations using data and AI.
Transcript (generated with AI)
If you want go from gut feel to insight inspired, this is the Data Diaries with your hosts from Dexibit, Pierre Perez and Angie Judge. The best podcast for visitor attraction leaders passionate about data and AI. This episode is brought to you by Dexibit. We provide data analytics and AI software specifically for visitor attractions so you can reduce total time to insight and total cost of ownership while democratizing data and improving your team’s agility. Here comes the show!
Angie: Where do you find a million visitors? I don’t how many, times talked a visitor attraction lately. Where two things are happening that kind of conflict with each other. One is that year on year visitation has been declining and the attraction a negative growth. And the second is that executive have issued a goal for. Extreme growth in the quite short term, and often that is this magic number of hitting a million visitors if they haven’t already. So today we’re gonna talk about how realistic this is. How you achieve it? What do you do if this is the goal that you’ve been with, and where do you find those million visitors?
I’m here with Pierre.
Pierre: Hi Angie, amazing.
Angie: let’s dig into it. So, the first thing that I wanted to talk about is actually the realism of some of these goals. How do you think about sort of looking, when you hear about big, hairy, audacious goal that’s maybe a bit too big, hairy and audacious how do you go about managing for that?
Pierre: I think I think we need to first look at when is this goal being put in place? And why is it in place? Right. You just mentioned that you are hearing very common themes when you speak to people right now is one, visitation has been declining somewhere and two, Almost simultaneously with that is that someone put a goal in place, and that’s sort of like human nature, right? When things don’t go according to plan, when things don’t go you know the way you want, you’re gonna start to wanna put a plan in
Angie: Let’s aim for the moon.
Pierre: Exactly. And you’re gonna aim for the moon, right? So, which is normal behavior. But. When we here, we want to add, you know, a million visitors or we want to get to a million visitor. The first question that we have is by when? When are you actually tracking that goal for? Is it in a year, 2, 3, 5? Like, you know, and then we can sort of reverse engineer how, what did you call it? Hairy and big is that goal, right? Like how realistic is it based on the time that you give yourself to reach that goal?
Angie: And by the sounds of it. Why as well? Because, for me, that question always, always sort of brings up like, is this a commercial thing or not? Because if it’s not commercial, then what is the motivation behind it? And if it is commercial, then what are the other options on the table that maybe are an easier reach?
Like if we’re talking about bringing more money in the door. That might not necessarily translate to more feet. Maybe it’s getting the visitors that we have to spend more, or maybe it’s about converting them into members and sort of concentrating on some of those things, which in perhaps a negative growth environment can be a little bit more achievable too.
Pierre: Absolutely. We spoke about that a little bit during a previous episode, right? Like, what is the easiest thing to grow? Is it visitation? Is it members, is it revenue? And both of us sort of agree that revenue is probably one of the easiest to do, right? Like it’s very in your control. It’s very, quantifiable as well.
Pierre: Like you can tweak a few things to get to where you want very easily. Visitation is in my opinion, at least, the the hardest thing to grow for different reasons. And one of the reasons, that I can think of straight away right now is that there’s two different kind of events, that are part of this goal or that are part of visitation.
One is that you can control some of it. Yes, you can put, you know, blockbusters exhibitions on, you can do more programming and et cetera. But then there is the other sort of events, right, that you cannot control is that, you cannot control another attraction opening in the same city or nearby. And then sort of, taking away from your pool of customers, right?
We are in the entertainment industry, whether or not you know, we want to admit it, and people are competing with Netflix, with restaurants, with cinemas- with theme parks, museums. Like all of this is entertainment, right? So. cannot control something else popping up and behavior change from your regular visitors.
Angie: Yeah, that’s such a good point. And I think if we sort of come back to the numbers, like let’s say I’ve got 800,000 visitors at moment I’m trying to get to that magic number of a million. You know, if what I’m trying to do is that maybe $10 a hedge trying to increase my revenue by like, what, $2 million?
Maybe it would be easier for me to try and get that, or at least some of that. If I got my caps on my 800,000 visitors up by a dollar, a dollar 50, like I’m already closing half that gap. And so that’s where I think it’s interesting to sort of dig into the whys. And then like you say, then map that over time in terms of what does this mean by when are we trying to achieve this?
And then like, how does that translate into that year on year growth rate? Because if we’re suddenly expecting to achieve 20% growth in a year, in a downturn market, like we’re just setting ourselves up to fail.
Pierre: What do people usually tell us when they say that? I usually hear a sentence such as, we want more people to come when it’s quiet, and we almost want a little bit less people to come when it’s busy because they are, you know, most people think of the overall experience of the visitor, right? Like some venues actually cannot handle more visitors on specific days of the week or hours of the day because they’re already at full capacity. So it’s always a. You know, I’m sure you’ve heard that before, right? It is like, we want more people to come when it’s quiet. And it’s not easy. Right.
Angie.: Yeah, the magical, capacity demand spread very hard to accomplish and you can throw a lot of time and energy and money at this problem and achieve very little result. ‘Cause like you always say people are gonna come when people are gonna come.
 Sometimes it doesn’t always result in more visitors or more revenue. And you have to balance that risk against the fact it adds a lot of complexity as well and its own cost in implementing it.
So just to think about, like when it works, it works, but when it doesn’t, it’s quite a big burden for you. It’s quite a lot of complexity to add into the visitor experience. And so if you’re not already sort of at operating close to your you’re a largely commercial organization, then it might be the right fit.
I think when it comes to trying spread demand, other ways to think problem aswell. If your filling with, you know, there’s other strategies like, know, send your visitors to different places and use things like entertainment to draw them into places.
So for example. If I am a location-based experience and I’ve got like a fixed tour where I send my guests going here, then here, then here. Can I develop a visitor journey that sends them almost backwards so that can sort of send half in one direction and half of them other. Same I’m a museum and people typically start here and go here.
Can I suggest to some of them at some point that they start over here and then come here? Or if I’m at a zoo, can I put on a feed the animal over here pull this particular out on display over here, and kind of spread visitor better through my site. So working out where you’re really feeling that capacity and solving for of those pinch points, you can can be easier than trying to spread.
 The demand across days times or using that same sort of technique through content to accomplish that. So maybe I have a parent and bubs, session some point where parents can bring young children and be comfortable going to scream and shout. Or can I offer a low sensory time or I offer a, slow time for some of older visitors at different times in the week where I’m sort of encouraging them to visit when they can versus when everybody else is maybe at school or at work.
Yeah I like that idea. And we’ve seen that, we’ve seen that starting to pop up quite a bit, recently as well with, you know, these, you mentioned the low sensory tours et cetera, et cetera. I like that.
Angie: It is things like, you know, turning the lights down if there’s a lot of bright lights, it’s turning the sounds and music off, if there’s a lot of, that going on. sort of reducing the sensory noise in all senses of the word down for maybe a particular two for people who, who enjoy or need, that kind of experience.
Pierre: I like how this has been sort of developing because there’s been just more awareness of the need to have such an experience, right? Like I don’t recall, you know, in my younger days, no, it’s not that long ago. But, you know, I don’t recall this sort experience being offered by, by places, right?
So I think it’s sort of like a developing thing and a developing environment, based on the observations, I like it.
Angie: Yeah, it’s definitely that accessibility, is priority a lot of visitor attractions and I think sometimes it’s seen as a nice to have where it should really be a must have.
I wanna come into another sort of alternative approach to, which is when you’re staring down this big audacious of say, a million visitors. Another way to solve that is to check your visitation rules. If it is like not a financial goal and it’s just sort of a we wanna hit this particular target for whatever reason, sometimes.
Working out that you’re under counting your visitors is a very big opportunity for whoever spots that first. And this might seem to be really obscure, uncommon thing, but you would be really surprised about how often, we come across this. Has a few, major wins himself in this realm where he’s found.
Places that been undercounting visitors. course we also find the reverse to be true sometimes. I, actually had one just earlier this week where when dug into some visitation recognition rules. This particular site visitors the area, sort of mingling around their attraction, and then would encourage them to actively check in and were using that check-in number as their visitation.
But of course, that check-in was optional. They’re unpriced, ticketed location, so it’s probably representative of a fraction of their visitation. Rather than representative of whole number. So if you do have a really big target and you haven’t recently audited the sort of data governance of how you count your visitors, this can be one place find, them.
The downside to doing this is of course managing the communications of where we found all of these visitors. And that can be a really uncomfortable truth. For example, in London, there’s been a couple of famous cases going back a few years where the footfall cameras. Broke silently.
In one case, a very large national museum. The light bulb next to the footfall camera dimmed and it cast a shadow on part of the image where footfall camera was counting from, and then under counted, by many, many visitors, over course of the year, which made this organization look like it was underperforming.
And so when they found it, magically found all of these extra visitors. But of course there was some big questions raised over how long had gone unnoticed for. The other sort of downside to this this, tactic, if you like, is that it will sink your per caps a bit which is just really a theoretical metric to a degree if you’re pulling the same revenue and under counting your visitors.
But, just something be considering when you are sort of messaging this out, that you might have achieved growth on visitor numbers, but your average revenue per visit will, decline if those visitors have magically come out of nowhere from under the rug. Pierre, you’ve had some, without naming any names, you’ve had a couple of examples of this, yourself that I can think of.
Pierre: Yeah, there’s quite a few scenarios that’ve played up. But, you know, an easy one is usually like not counting groups or like large groups through the door. For whatever reason, these groups tend to come, earlier than the official opening hours, and sometime part of this group actually get missed by what we call the hardware.
Again, it depends how you counting people, right? We’re talking about fruitful right now, which is usually a combination of hardware, firmware, software to you know, have access to that data. But you know, with my experience in the biotech industry, for example, every time you deal with hardware. There has to be recalibration process in place for you to ensure that there is accuracy, right? We talk about accuracy you know, on, on the ticket side and the rules in place, and this can change, but the hardware, as you mentioned, is sort of outside of your control, right?
There’s a lot of elements that could actually play or could have an impact, sorry, on the accuracy of that hardware such as, temperature, lighting you know, multiple, multiple, multiple element that could have an impact on that. So, recalibrating this or just making sure they are counting people correctly. We usually recommend like, what, twice a year? Let’s say once every six months at least to ensure the counting people correctly.
Angie: Do part of your daylight procedures. We always suggest, and you’ll never forget.
Pierre: That’s a very good point. There is other cases where you know, that specific hardware did not count either, short people, kids or people in wheelchairs because they were sitting with a threshold that was too high. So there is all of these rules, right? That, I mean, all of these instances that could literally throw off you’re using this, this hardware, and it’s not a vendor thing, it is just a hardware thing, right?
Angie: And if you’re, still manually counting with a click account, you’re probably under counting by about 20%. So easy growth find there as well to magically produce some visitors to hit this golden number. of course no real gains on the ground with that one.
So, maybe about , some real tactics to bring some real human beings , extra. What would be your first one up on your list, Pierre, to, to suggest to look at?
Pierre: I’ve said this before and I will say it again. I think new content for me is, number one, making sure your content is refreshed enough or your experience is refreshed enough and ensuring that you’re marketing this out to your user base, right? To your current, customer base. That would be one, the priority number one for me.
Angie: Good point. before you move on to your second one, one of the things to watch out for is number of advertising dollars that you’re spending on promoting your regular your regular experience. Versus the ratio of advertising dollars that you’re using promote seasonal content.
Always try and in of the periodic content as opposed to just the because will have more impact for bringing in those visitors
Pierre: No, I love that. I love that. That’s so true. That’s so true. And it, I think the key takeaway here that I have to stay on that point is that. It doesn’t need to be a blockbuster thing, right? It doesn’t need to be anything extravagant. But making sure that content is slightly refreshed right, is, is really important.
Angie: Yeah, we could add on to that. The dark periods, the reverse, like some places, just for anybody who doesn’t know who’s listening to this, wondering what dark period is, it is time usually in cultural institution where they are hosting exhibitions and there is a time when one exhibition is packed out and other exhibition is still being brought in and hung or whatever installed.
And if that exhibition space comprises quite a large footprint in the, say, museum or gallery or whatever it is, that is known as a dark period because either the whole place can’t open the visitors feel that they’re having a substandard experience and either the institution needs to offer a discounted ticket as a result or the visitors have a very unhappy experience and we do see this in reviews as quite a common theme that comes up of people by paying full price and getting only a subsection of that. And some places that we hear of these huge dark periods. You know, add up the number of dark days in a year. Again, and really question every single day that you’ve got dark period on because every day costing you visitors add up cost for your team so that they can see the extent of Because if it means working extended hours or overnight, if it means just pushing faster or harder or doing it smarter it so worth it. Having big dark periods is a real turnoff.
Pierre: I agree. Staying on that, on that new exhibition, you know, exhibition rolling topic, what is your point of view to, essentially spread out, right? The craze of a new exhibition opening? Right. What we usually see is that we’ll do, people will do a preview for members only of. You know, before the weekend of opening or even the week before the opening, what’s your view on that?
Do you like, to sort of spread out how busy an exhibition will be or, or are you against it?
Angie.: Yeah, I think having a really strong lead up we often see this providing some nice attendance spikes. And these can be directed, you know, press friends. And then of course members and then preview. So a, more expensive ticket for those that want to get in first. And then sort of going into opening.
One of the quick tricks on this is that sometimes you’ll see say a museum or a gallery opening an on a Sunday and doing a preview on a Sunday, and then sort starting the week. I would always advise against that. And what we see is that, when you do your previews on say, Wednesday, thursday, and open on ideally a Friday or Saturday, ideally time, the beginning of that for maybe a public holiday weekend or maybe the beginning of a school vacation or something that’s going to give you that seasonal lift at the same time you get sort of your maximum bang for your buck on on that growth of the opening.
But we do see some quite interesting behaviors. Usually in the days in the lead up to an exhibition, you’ll see a decline in visitation as people hold off their visit to come. Then you’ll see of course the big booms at the start. Usually some sort of exhibition lifecycle curve, which might sort of, bell or buck over the course of the exhibition, depending on how long it is and how strong it is. And then that FOMO tail it typically starts about 80% into the exhibition. So 20% to go, where you can really start to change your advertising message and say, get in now before this thing closes. And the more you boost that message, the higher that peak of that tail can get.
So I would go really hard on that. And then of course, slightly after the exhibition, often you’ll see that softening as well. So just expecting those attendance declines pre and post and really making the most of your peaks at the beginning and end, will help you maximize your visitation over the course of that.
But yeah, make sure you start that preview on a Thursday, open on the weekend. And don’t just start up with the first day of the week.
Pierre: So it sounds like we have a good strategy to maximize attendance during an exhibition that will get you closer to your new big call. Another one that I usually find is that some institutions have usually one day of the week that they’re closed. And very often, I’m very surprised to hear that day is a Monday. Now we know here you know, in Australia and New Zealand as well as the United States and actually pretty much. I mean, not pretty much, but in a lot of countries around the world, public holidays usually for on a Monday and public holidays are huge driver of visitations. Especially if it’s on a Friday or on Monday.
We see people taking an entire weekend off. They usually travel, they make a trip out to a destination and it’s a huge driver visitation. . So when I hear that. My initial thinking is that if you need to close one day a week pick a Tuesday, not a Monday. And you know, some people are really receptive of it.
Some people are like, oh, but we open especially on a Monday for public day. But the fact is that if people are used to your venue being closed on a Monday, it’s gonna cost you a lot. To market the fact that you open on that specific Monday for the public holiday. Right. And what do you think, Angie, I’m, I’m asking you like, do you think it has the same impact as just business as usual on Monday?
Angie.: Yeah, I mean, we’ve seen customers make this change for this reason. and also when we look at the data across other visitor attractions who are open seven days a week, Tuesday is usually their quietest day, not Monday.
So you’re shooting yourself on the foot twice by closing on Monday rather than on a Tuesday. So I’m, I definitely stand with you on this one. First of all, if you are closed on Mondays and you’re closed on public holidays, when they’re on Mondays, you’re really missing out. Secondly, like Pierre says, like if you are closed Mondays and just open public holidays, probably a lot of confusing messaging out there in the public, which diluting that.
And Then thirdly it may be that Monday would be quite a bigger busier day for you than a Now, the counter to all of this, course, is that it’s a little bit inefficient for the organization to open up on a Monday and then close on a Tuesday if you need to be closed one day a week, either for administrative reasons or just because it doesn’t suit your cost basis.
But it’s worth it if you’re trying to find these extra visitors. It’s worth it make that. That leap it can really add up over the course of the year, especially if you’re striking, you know, quite a few of these Monday-ised public holidays or public holidays that otherwise are naturally falling on a Monday.
Because when they do, they really hit big especially when they are up against that weekend. Like that gives it that extra boost.
Pierre: I like the way we’re going here, Angie, because it’s almost like we look in an entire year and looking at a calendar where your exhibitions are planned, which month, et cetera. Then we sort of like went to Granularity Finder and look at specific weeks, right? And days of the week, and now I actually wanna talk about hours,
Angie.: Oh yeah.
Pierre: how can you maximize, people coming depending on what hours you are opening. Like I remember when I first started here at the exhibit seeing some heat tables of some of our clients. And I was straightaway shocked by seeing such a small amount of visitors coming during the morning and actually these heat tables getting darker and darker in the afternoon and we’re just like. Hold up a second. You guys need to open half an hour, an hour later in the morning and push that opening time later during the evening because that’s when people are actually coming, right? And, and the others can be true. , The other way around can be true, right? You could have a lot of people coming in the morning and leaving early in the afternoon, but you really need to look at. the visitation data at this granularity to understand if you’re maximizing your opening hours.
Angie.: Yeah, it’s, I’m glad you, you added on that bit at the end. ’cause I do think that this is quite polarized and a lot of it tends to come down to the demographic and origin of your audiences. Two types of audiences that tend to come early. One is. Tourists, they sort of get up and their hotels have breakfast and they’re ready to go.
And if you’re not opening till 10:00 AM they’re walking around the city aimlessly looking for something to do and walking past your front door. And the other one is toddlers. So tourists and toddlers Pierre and I have both got them at home. They get up at five o’clock in the morning. You’re amping to get out the door, so as long as there’s something you can take them to do and, preferably if they sell really good coffee there with it you’re in. And again, waiting till 10:00 AM is really painful, especially if you’ve got a toddler that naps at midday. And you’ve gotta get them home. So at that point, you can only sort of do the one hour, one and a half hour for places opening at 10:00 AM So if they open at nine or if they open at eight, like that’s a real win.
Where places tend to do better in the evening is of course when they have a slightly older audience, in a more local audience, especially during the week. And that’s when sort of looking at maybe opening late nights, making that. Not just one late night, but two late nights. And I think that the big thing here is just look at your data, look at where the visitation is naturally headed, and just optimize towards there.
And question these assumptions because it’s like, oh, we’ve always opened from 10:00 AM till 5:00 PM and that’s like the business day for us. So that’s. That’s why we’ve sort of set those hours. But is that what your audience, when your audience want to visit? Like, is that when they actually are coming in you know, what are some of the assumptions and the reasons for having chosen those opening hours and have you questioned them?
One of the things we’ve been doing a lot of analysis of recently is comparing pre versus post COVID on opening hours for these heat tables. And often we’ll see some change or maybe looking at winter versus summer and weekend versus weekday. So really like digging in question when your visitors are actually coming and steer towards there.
Pierre: I like how you mentioned season as well, right? It is very depending. It could be very dependent on the season based on, on, on different factors, but you know, when a tourist visiting, they may, there may be a peak during the year, compared to other month of the season. So yeah, I like that. So opening hours, look at season and look at the trend, right?
Angie.: Yeah, absolutely. And speaking of, seasons, one of the really, really big successes that we see our customer base are those that run seasonal, festivity events.
So a classic, one of this is like the lights season where you’ve got sort of the lights that come on at night. Sometimes it’s marketed as a separate paid ticket, which is fantastic as well. Whole new audience, whole new opening period, or opening times.
That you can open up at nighttime for this. These events pull major, major numbers and for those that do it, they often represent double digit percentages of the annual visitation. Like it is mega, the audiences that these things pull in and often some great revenue with those, you know, you can do the, the food trucks and all of things and really them into an event. Another one that we see popular with this is the Easter event season and things like egg hunts and, and so forth. So yeah, seasonal festivity events, major pull. When you sort of zoom out and look at that year that Pierre was talking about, if you can fit a couple of these into your schedule and really develop marketing around them. The effect that they have on visitation and on the bottom line.
Pierre: So that’s, you know, to tie up the visitation, to increase that visitation. Would you agree that once you have a look at that and if you want to make some change, you also need to. Realign your resources based on the change and the outcome that you want. Right? So we talked about increasing visitation.
Yes, great. We can increase visitation during, you know, A, B, C but what we want also is to increase revenue. So you need to put a strategy in place to actually increase revenue, you know, almost exponentially from that visitation increase, right? So. For example, one of the you know, one of the scenarios that we’ve seen in the past is that a lot of people were visiting a specific venue that we work with, huge visitation numbers, right? And they had different shops, you know, within the venue and every single person was shopping upon exiting. Fairly normal behavior. But what we saw that there was a huge amount of people walking through the store, right before the museum closes. And then when we look at the store data, we actually saw that the average spend and the average basket size at the store was lower than any other time during the And our assumption was that the store staff were literally brushing people around telling them they were about to close and that they had to close the shop and the museum. And that’s sort of a missed opportunity, right? You’re making sure that your people are coming in, making sure that they’re, going through the shop, but you need to allocate a little bit more resources at the shop, for example, to maximize potential revenue from that growth of visitation no matter when it is coming.
Angie.: Yeah, that’s such a good point. Another objective is often when we’re trying to grow audiences, trying to diversify those audiences at same time. So bringing in more people, bringing in new people. And these sorts of seasonal festive events can do a really great job of tapping into that.
But if you don’t optimize for that as part of the guest experience and the staff briefing and the way that you’re allocating those resources, as Pierre says , it might not be that there is quite the push on the visitor to return. So really, really being very thoughtful and planned about that. You know, making sure that the visitor receives a special offer to, to return. That they’re sent multiple invitations and follow up about returning that the experience that they’re having is a. Great one, and that they’re not too, like capacity affected, which some of these seasonal festive events can get really, really heavily capacity affected.
All of these sorts of things can encourage that visitor to, to return and come back. A really popular one is providing them with a. Bring a friend and new come free kind of offer, to encourage them to return and then bring somebody else with them. All of these sorts of things can help, achieve that goal if diversity is part of that play.
And that works equally with other programming as well. So like, for example, if you’re running education programs, encourage the kids to go home with an offer to bring back the family and then reach those new audiences, particularly if you’re aiming for that diversification and that audience group as well.
Pierre: I love that, it is usually harder to get someone through the door once, right? And you can, you need to take every single opportunity that you have to bring them through this door once give them an amazing experience to make sure they return.
Angie.: And how do you feel about free Days? Pierre
Pierre: Ooh, you know me. I don’t like anything that’s free.
No, I’m kidding. I’ve seen some extremely good results. Coming from this from free days, right, on some of the institutions that I work with one of them who used to have three days, I think about once a month. Ad hoc introduced three days every Wednesday, for example. And. I met with them this week actually, and interestingly, they’ve starting to offer three days last year in 2024, every Wednesday. What happened is that we saw a huge increase of visitation, right last year on these Wednesdays, but across the whole year. This year, what’s even more surprising is that they’re growing against last So even they have even, though they only introduced three Wednesdays last year. Yes. 2024 against 2023 was a great year, but 2025 right now against 2024 is also great here because it’s. Almost like exponential visitation from free Wednesdays. People talk about it, they’re getting more tickets being scheduled, et cetera, and they just had more people coming through.
Even if it’s a second year and they’re doing really well, their retail is up. You know, their visitation is up obviously, but it is a very, very successful operation for them
Angie.: Yeah, I think this is a great one. If the number of visitors is just a pure play here on the goal. The only sort of place I would kind of caution against it is if revenue’s actually the goal. And we’re reframing that as a number of visitors. And the reason for that is that per caps, you would think. Kind of logic plays out that if the ticket’s free, surely the visitor will spend more at the shop and the cafe, they don’t, they actually spend less because they presumably have this view in their mind that we’re going for this free experience. And so their wallet is often very firmly in their back pocket.
And so quite frequently we’ll see per caps drop on a free day rather than rise. Even when you sort of normalize for the fact that the ticket prices, not there. So that, that’s one thing to watch out for is that if revenue is the true hidden goal behind the big visitation number it can actually not be as great as you thought it was going to be on those business lines.
And the second is that it can slightly cannibalize your membership as well. If the, the primary goal behind the membership is often a free. A free element. So, just something to consider well is just to watch out that you know, why have a membership if you can come free on a regular basis.
The reason I think one of the reasons why this particular place does so well with their free days is they are a Wednesday and not any other day of the week. So strategically choosing your day of the week you are free and that you are only reaching a select audience that might otherwise not come.
Is a really great way to make sure that you protect some of those other visitors that would otherwise come on your different days of the week. And you might even make that just for locals as well. Regardless of you’re funded, that’s a very reasonable restriction to place on this. So that somebody has to provide a proof of residence in the city and you’re not cannibalizing your tourist market who would otherwise comfortably visit on a weekday anyway too.
Pierre: That was my question. How do you feel about locals being being free and, and others paying for their tickets?
Angie.: I think it’s a really easy explanation when you are funded in that way. So like if you’re funded by a local city council or a similar state authority, it is a little bit harder when that funding explanation isn’t there. And I also think it’s the only thing that you have to watch out for is how you enforce this.
First of all, most people don’t necessarily carry a proof of address with them when they’re out and about just visiting a local attraction. They might have. Form of ID on them, but it might not have a proof address on it. So that can be a really tricky logistical thing to get around.
And you can also get yourself fairly hot water fairly quickly if your staff start enforcing that via sizing up visitors and making assumptions about where they’re from. So something to train very specifically for, if this is strategy that you’re going for, that you don’t have staff, assuming that they know that a visitor is not a local based on say, their accent or their ethnicity.
But I think, you know, if done well, why not? Like, if it’s a great way to be able to encourage your regular visitors to visit more often, even if they’re not members, and a great way to still maximize your opportunity from that tourist market. And most tourists naturally have a higher appetite for spending than a local visitor. So, um, definitely worthwhile capturing upon that.
Pierre: My last question for you around three days would be, if you were responsible for making the decision to, whether or not do a free day, would you, how would you be influenced by your environment in terms of other venues that are around you and whether or not they are either one, offering a free day or three all the time or not offering a free day and, you know, being a paid venue, would that influence your decision at all?
Angie.: Of how competitive I am towards them. I gonna pick their, , big launch day and, and choose that one. Do you mean
Pierre: Absolutely. Maybe.
Angie.: I don’t know how evil I am in practice? Depends if I’m commercial or cultural, I guess Pierre.
Pierre: Like if you were a paid venue surrounded by paid venue that never offer a free day, it’s not a bad strategy will you consider it? say Yes, I will. I will. do a free day and I will make it on a Saturday.
Angie.: I happened to have chosen this exact day. Speaking of sort of competing with the locals a multi attraction passes great schemes to, to be to sign up for. So this is, maybe you’ve heard of something like a city pass. There’s a couple of other brands out there that do them yeah, whether it’s something that you team up with your frenemies on to organize yourselves or whether you’ve got an operator in your city that’s selling these, they’re a great way to just increase that, reach a little bit more. Of course you don’t get quite the same admission per caps through them, but certainly worth a try. Only caution around here would be watch that. You are not actually cannibalizing of your locals with these. Usually you’re aiming at a tourist audience with these like people who are in a particular city for a certain period of and they buy one of these multi passes to see it all.
But often we’ll find when you dig into the origins this data, that sometimes will be using them during the school holiday school breaks. So I just watch that they’re not cannibalizing what could be maybe a membership offering something else. As well. So just something to keep an eye around.
Pierre: Keep an eye on the data. Right. We’ve seen that. Also we’ve had some surprises around that where we thought this sort of tickets were targeted for tourist and funny enough, we had a lot of locals, buying these tickets. But there’s a lot of various reasons why that maybe.
And maybe locals with family visiting from different cities, from different country and actually. Buying these tickets to take their families around, et cetera. We know it’s really common on our side of the world here, right? Like, because we’re so far away. And when you have families visiting, usually take them around and you’re gonna take that multi attraction pass you’re gonna make, you know, a few days out of it or a week out of it
Angie.: Yeah. And speaking of, the member offering. This is a really great lever to pull. Like if I’m coming back to this example where I’m 800,000 and I’ve got maybe 80,000 members on my books at the moment or something. Getting those 80,000 members to come back for one more visit each year again, can just close like 10% of, of my, visitation again. So just deliver me that extra growth. So that might be half my growth goal, for example. So this is a really good lever to pull. We always talk about it’s easier to get somebody who’s already in the door to spend more. It’s also easier to get somebody who already knows who to come back one more time.
So thinking about what can draw that member back in. Is it a special offer? Is it a special experience? What’s the incentive for that? What extra marketing we are putting down around that you know, getting that metric up. That number of average visits per member up by one point, major, major achievement on, on that visitation goal.
Often members are good spenders on the per caps as well, because they’re not paying for the admission. But again, this is depending on what the. True motivation behind the million visitors really is because if it is about that admission, margin, then this one’s not gonna work much.
Pierre: What else do you get in the bag angie?
Angie.: Oh, I know we’ve been on a rant about this for a while. I’ve got, there’s stuff around corporate team buildings, you know, B2B sales around that education and really Mark going out to market hard on that. Really treating that like a sales channel. Speaking of channels, you know, going down the channel partner route, really optimizing for that.
Talking to your, OTA partners for online travel and things like that, local guide companies especially, where they sort of turn, turn up by the busload. I think the only one that, we haven’t covered that I think we can’t not mention. Is your marketing spend and optimization. This is probably one of the biggest factors within your control, but also one of the things to think the most about because the harder you are pushing on this growth goal, the more expensive your. Visitor acquisition cost, you know, your per unit cost of bringing in each additional member, visitor becomes and at some point it’s not worth it. So really keeping an eye on those numbers and working out what that dollar value is and how that dollar value is changing as you’re reaching further and further into a stretch can really help with that.
And then getting really, really harsh about optimizing for, you know, if you’re, putting the, the flags on the lamppost and the ads on the back of buses and not really thinking about the attribution of those in terms of rail feet through the door. Some of those dollars can be, better used elsewhere and particularly online when they can, where they can be tracked.
And so really optimizing for that marketing spend. And sometimes it’s even going right, right, right, right, right down into the details. Like getting into your Google Analytics data and going, Hey, we’ve got a whole pile of ad spend going to these zip codes or these states, and we don’t actually have the visitors coming from them, so let’s chop those and focus on these markets and these missed markets that we’re gonna try out or.
You know, hey, we’re advertising this event this far in advance and that doesn’t actually match up with the booking lead time of our tickets for that, so let’s peel that back or push it forward, or whatever it is. So really like using the behaviors of what your visitors are actually doing and sort of testing and then validating that against how you’re spending, can really help you, you optimize that marketing spend.
But yeah dig deep into that space as well. So I think that’s probably all we’ve got time for and we’ve, we are maybe out of, out of juice on all of these different ideas, but hopefully that’s given you a whole pile of food for thought over where you are going to find a million visitors. And let us know what your strategies and tactics are.
Love to hear what everybody else is doing, and we constantly see such innovative things like places sending down. Recruiters down to meet cruise ships to bring people up, or, putting objects into airports to be part of the visitor greeting experience. So whatever those creative ideas are that you are trialing out, we’d love to hear about them as with the community.
So do do put them out in the world and let’s share a like, see you next time.
If your goal is to get more visitors through the door, engaging and spending more, leaving happy and loyally returning – check out Dexibit’s data analytics and AI software at dexibit.com. We work with visitor attractions, cultural and commercial, integrating with over a hundred industry source systems across visitor experience and venue operations, providing dashboards, reports, insights, forecasts, data management and a unique data concierge.
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