Table of Contents
Post SEO title
Key Takeaways from the NFAN Open Day Event at Tulleys Farm | Beyonk Blog
Meta description
We thought it’d be great to share our key takeaways from the event to share with other UK farm attractions on how to become a customer focused attraction and take your events to the next level.
On Thursday, 20th October 2022, our lovely team attended NFAN’s Open Day at Tulleys Farm where they got involved with the incredible Shocktober Fest event and learned more about how to create a successful Halloween and pumpkin experience.
We thought it’d be great to share our key takeaways from the event to share with other UK farm attractions on how to become a customer-focused attraction and take your events to the next level.
The Halloween experience economy
If there’s something we could all agree on, it’s that Halloween isn’t going anywhere. It’s a holiday that’s been around in some capacity for centuries and that isn’t changing anytime soon.
Whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, family events, scare attractions or all of the above, turn these commodities into an experience! They’re in-demand every year and customers are actively seeking out these types of experiences.
The benefits of creating experience events is that you can charge higher prices than you normally would as it’s much easier to market because you’re already taking advantage of a pre-existing holiday like Halloween.
At Beyonk, we’ve found those who get their tickets on sale earlier typically have higher levels of ticket sales. It gives you plenty of time to market your events to the public, generate awareness and a real buzz around the event.
Pricing strategies
Ticket pricing is a strategy in itself. Whilst this might seem obvious to some, it’s important to consider a few things when setting the price of your events.
Fast track tickets
You’ve probably seen these at the likes of big outdoor festivals and theme parks, but these can also be a great incentive for farm attractions, particularly your larger, more popular events.
It gives customers who are willing to pay a premium the buy the priority of skipping all queues.
It’s been proven to have great advantages for both the customer and experience provider, therefore is well worth considering.
Price per time slot
One effective way to encourage more sales is by offering a ticket price discount during the quieter days of the week, or earlier dates of your event.
For example, with Beyonk’s capacity and scheduling tool, you can easily increase or decrease the number of visitors you’re allowing on a particular day, week or even time slot. This applies to ticket prices too.
If you know your least busy day is Monday and you often don’t receive many bookings between 4-6pm, you can set the price of tickets to reduce at 20% and promote this through your social media channels and email campaigns to generate more sales for these time-slots. The same applies to earlier dates leading up to Halloween, for example. This ensures you’re maximising ticket sales and guarantees it’s not only the busiest times that are sold out.
Booking fees
A concern for many experience providers is booking fees and whether customers are willing to pay a fee for booking online in advance.
Research has shown this generally isn’t a concern for customers, particularly if you keep booking fees to a minimum like Beyonk does, charging only 4%. During the NFAN event, Tulleys Farm commented on how they’d risen booking fees for their events but had received zero complaints from customers.
The convenience of booking online, ensuring you get your preferred day and time-slot counteracts any negativity a booking fee poses.
At Beyonk we’ve found that as long as your booking fee is seen as fair and reasonable, your customers won’t have a problem paying them. We’ve also experimented with booking fees and have found those providers with a booking fee have a similar conversion rate to those without. For further insights on pricing strategies, download our guide here.
Source: Beyonk
New events- Pumpkin nights
Another insight Tulleys Farm provided was how businesses can look to create incremental revenue for their business.
Depending on the type of farm you run, you’re likely to either be operating during the daytime or nighttime. However, creating specialised events for different times of the day can help to sell more tickets and generate more revenue.
Tulleys Farm used themselves as an example of this as they are currently operating for 21 days and 14 nights of the month with various events. Their nighttime events has allowed them to have live music and a pumpkin bar - create entertainment venue for families in the evening - something that wasn't available before.
Post experience auto-emails
Your post experience communication with customers is just as important as pre-event. This is your chance to get genuine and honest feedback about how their experiences went.
Use your booking systems to your full advantage by creating automated email responses that get sent to customers 1-2 days after they visited you with a link to Trip Advisor so they can leave a review.
Merchandise
Something many providers may have not had the time to consider, is selling branded merchandise at their farms.
We all love purchasing souvenirs to keep as a reminder of holidays or experiences. This is a great way to increase revenue, offer customers something different from your competitors and keep your company at the forefront of their minds whilst at home, encourage further bookings.
Selling merchandise can be easy if you have the right tools. Either sell to customers on site or use your online booking system to include add-ons that customers can purchase in advance and pick up upon arrival. That way you can easily keep track of merchandise sales revenue through your reporting dashboard.
Whilst selling merchandise is a good practice in theory, you need to be careful that you are offering products that are of good quality and will be something customers will actually wear or use.
For example, comfortable and well-fitted jumpers and t-shirts in a reasonable colour, and make sure your logo doesn’t dominate the item. Opting for a minimal clean design and standard colour will help you sell more.
Beyonk’s Market Insights shows that providers offering add-ons generate 25% more on average for each transaction.
VIP passes
Tulleys Farm also mentioned how they have evolved from using plastic cards for VIP members into using wristbands.
This has allowed them to manage VIP visitors more easily and has meant they’re able to welcome guests quicker too.
Food and beverages
Tulleys Farm opted to partner with catering companies to sell amazing food at their events. This allows them to save money by not having the additional cost of hiring a venue’s restaurant to cook, manage and operate.
They've alway operated their own Bars though, this is due to it being much easier to manage, you don’t have to worry about things like food wastage, plus the margins are high too.
At the start of 2022, Tulleys Farm invested in selling coffee and donuts at their events too, which has been incredibly popular and has driven a significant amount of incremental revenue.
Having quality and tasty food and drink options onsite can have significant benefits for your attraction, it can help to provide an extra source of revenue plus ensures a great customer experience too.
If you would like to speak to our expert team about any of the above key takeaways, please book a meeting with us below - it’s completely free and we’re here to help!
You can ask us anything and we’ll even provide you with a live demonstration of our software.
Header Image Source: Beyonk
