Founded in 1998, Dallas-based Main Event Entertainment is an event-organization company offering birthday parties, company retreats, special anniversary events, prom events, laser tag, virtual reality games and much more. They are rapidly growing, with over 40 centers across the United States serving more than 20 million guests annually.
“We were looking for a platform that would be marketer-first, easy to use and integrate easily with our POS. We have looked at a homegrown solution, at two other similar platforms and Voucherify has blown everybody else away in terms of out-of-the-box capabilities. Additionally, the willingness of the CEO, Tom, to meet all our needs and to meet us where we were at was just refreshing. We chose Voucherify not just because of the tool but also because of Voucherify team's willingness to help us get started.”
Key challenges
- A need for a promotion engine that will integrate easily with their POS.
- A need for a promotion platform that is easy to use for marketers.
- Lack of testing capabilities of promotional campaigns in the previous platform.
- Migration from legacy custom-made CRM to a new out-of-the-box solution and the need to migrate the existing offers to a new backoffice.
Main Event had a CRM system that was custom-built by a consultancy that was offering a barcoding solution tied to their POS. They have decided to stop using that platform and migrate to a new CMS software, Emarsys. The new solution was missing the barcode feature so Main Event had to look for another software to fill that gap.
They were changing their technology stack to a future-proof, best-of-breed technology architecture and wanted to find a promotion engine that would sit on top of their new CRM platform and communicate directly with their POS – a solution that would work both online and offline.
They chose Voucherify as their promotion platform. The integration, including uploading product inventory and re-creating legacy offers took a little over a month, using an external software house. Thorough testing took another couple of weeks.
Main Event had to migrate legacy offers to Voucherify as these were already available to the customers in a printed form. They had to re-create the same offer logic using the pre-existing printed codes. They have managed to do it and keep the legacy offers alive, without breaking the customer experience.
Main Event sends out coupon codes in a form of barcodes to their customers via email, SMS and printed materials that can be then redeemed in their brick-and-mortar establishments. Here are some examples of promotions Main Event runs using Voucherify:
- Buy a gift card for games and get 2x the value.
- Get a free bowling or a laser tag game.
- Food and beverage discounts, like 30% off pizzas or burgers.
- Refund gift cards in the printed version.
- Pre-paid seasonal passes.
“Voucherify allows us to do much more testing than we used to do. We are testing different offers for different segments, something we were not able to do with our previous technology stack. That is one of the biggest benefits we have found with the platform so far.”
Thanks to testing the campaigns out before launch and testing them on small customer segments, they can launch campaigns faster and avoid the issues they had in the past. Here are some of the channels Main Event uses to distribute Voucherify-generated offers include:
- Printed gift cards and voucher codes.
- POS (offline) offers.
- Website.
- Email (via Emarsys).
- SMS (via Emarsys).
Solution
“Voucherify offers a lot more data than we expected, like full transaction details or transaction metadata. We are actively looking into that data and how we can use it to create higher offer personalization and reach higher customer loyalty.”
It is difficult for Main Event to estimate the impact of the offers on the customer acquisition and retention due to huge disruption in the entertainment market because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They can say that they are doing better than they have expected in these difficult times, keeping offer redemptions at a pre-pandemic level.
