7 Ways to Raise prices and Have Your Customers Thank You

Raising prices is one of the best ways to double your profits - because all the extra money goes straight into your pocket. Yet, isn't our greatest fear that if we raise prices we will lose customers - or that our new customers will go somewhere else that's cheaper?

Price is determined by the amount of value that your customers see in your product or service. Simply, if they see lots of value they will be willing to pay a higher price. What if you could quickly boost the value in your customers eyes, enough so that they will be willing to pay more for it?

That's where the bonus comes in. A bonus is something that you add to your product or service - that is highly valuable in the customer's eyes, but is very inexpensive for you to provide.  here are 7 ways to raise prices and have your customers thank you.

1.Special free gift.
Try to get a vendor to give you product for free or sell it to you at cost (one man's trash is another man's treasure) - and then give it to your customer with their purchase.  (what do the beer or liquor distributors give away that you can add to the purchase?) 

2. Add a service to a product.
Provide consultation services that only costs you time, but that the customer values greatly. (offer FREE coaching with an open play special.) 

3. Add a product to a service.
Find a product that your customer needs with your service. Partner with a vendor to provide it and share the profits.  (have a ball, bag or shoes anyone?) 

4. Bundle items together.
Put products or services together, that your customer values - but that cost you close to nothing to provide. (offer a slice of pizza and a soft drink or an alcoholic beverage with a late night mid week open play special.) 

5. Convenience.
Provide more convenience for your customers  without utilizing a lot of time or money.(open earlier, stay open later for kids camps, company parties, fund raisers?) 

6. Special arrangement.
Provide the product or service in a more beneficial format for the customer ( Pizza pins n pop, burgers n bowl, chicken wings n bowl?) 

7. Value pricing.
Add more bonuses for customers that will pay more, less for those who will not (my favorite). bonuses could be a free game with a red head pins trike or a 2 liter bottle of a soft drink or a pizza for bringing 5 people to your cosmic show.

Once you find the bonus that works and provide it as an incentive for raising prices - you will be able to raise prices and your customers will thank you for it.

7 Pillars of Success To Market Your Business on The Internet

I have watched many a proprietor try to build an on line marketing campaign, only to get tripped up on some key points. So I thought I would assemble my "7 pillars of online marketing success" for you.  Here they are>

Pillar 1: A Website You Control
You must operate your own website, which enables you to make basic changes to it yourself, preferably right through your web browser. Waiting for a "webmaster" to update text and pictures does not qualify as a smart use of your time or money. WordPress, an open-source (free) publishing platform, makes an excellent choice for managing and organizing virtually any size website.
Pillar 2: Google Maps
Google now stands alone as the "900 lb. Gorilla" of the online search world. However, most don't realize that "Google Maps" is the most basic component of local online marketing with Google. Get all the details at Google.com/places/. This tool is one of the fastest ways to get found in Google and, best of all, it's free!
Pillar 3: Basic SEO
SEO stands for "search engine optimization," which means making your website relevant when someone searches for your business name or terms related to what you sell. Building all the content, information, and text on your site around a central theme is the No. 1 thing you can do to increase your chances of ranking well in Google and other search engines.
Pillar 4: Make Value-Added Offers
Most people don't make offers on their websites. Their web pages look like everyone else's and say basically the same things. You must make offers on your site that spur people to action. Offer a discount or faster service. Give an incentive to come in today. Most important: Make your offers big, bold and obvious on your site while giving people a reason to do business with you right now!
Pillar 5: Drive Traffic
You won't make a dime with your website if the right people don't see it. The fastest way to drive traffic is to buy it, specifically with the Google AdWords pay-per-click program. Pay-per-click means you only pay when someone clicks your "sponsored" ad on the search engine listings, and Google's AdWords is the largest pay-per-click advertising network. However, make sure you set up a "geo-targeted" campaign when starting out so only people in your local area see your ads (instead of wasting time and money showing your ads to people who could never patronize your local business).
Pillar #6: Local List Building
Building up a local following that you communicate with using online tools rates as one of the smartest and most cost-effective things every local business can do. Whether through email, text, Twitter or Facebook (or some new tool), communicating with a targeted group and providing value-added information and offers can bring huge rewards. One coupon with the right offer to the right audience can turn a ho-hum Thursday into a blockbuster sales day.
Pillar #7: Consistent Follow-Up
The biggest online marketing mistake I see people make is NOT following up with prospects and customers. Use email and other communication tools to keep in contact with your prospects and customers and give them reasons to do business with you (by making offers) while providing useful information they want. As a wise man once said, "The fortune is always made in the repeat business."

Three Ways To Look at Our Business

There are only three perspectives from which we can view our business.

The first scenario is from the past. We look at how the business was and wish it would go back to that: Two (2) shifts of league bowlers, waiting lists and the only two problems we had was overbooking and slow bowlers. In this scenario, we do everything we can to take our business BACK to what it used to be.  Trouble with this perspective is that the particular jigsaw piece we are trying to fit into the puzzle is incorrect.  Because the puzzle has changed and the piece no longer fits.

The second scenario is the present perspective; we recognize the changing environment, economy, demographics and consumer attitude shifts and try to build contemporary products so we fire out a bunch of new promotions and programs, secretly hoping that we get ONE hit. (Hope is never a strategy)

The third scenario is the future. We build our products and programs in such a way as to define our vision of the future of our business. We don’t pray for the past or muck up the present with secret wishes. We work to build our future.

Better to ignore the past and present and look at our business with BOTH eyes on the future.

I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Much has been written about the jaded society we live in; the unending need for new stimulation and the desire to be first with the most new toys.

Yet, there seems to me to be an unfulfilled desire by people looking to find some new "satisfaction" in their purchases. People have come to settle for customer service that is just OK or to settle for a dinner that was OK or even a movie that was ho hum.

What are your customers unsatisfied about?

Is it the food and beverage offerings that they might describe as OK or is it the bowling experience which is about the same as anywhere else, only cheaper, or is it the fact that they really don't get  their hit of satisfaction with your whole deal...its just more of the same and its just OK?

If it was a better experience and was more satisfying, then more people would bowl more frequently. Sure 70 million people went bowling last year, but the vast majority of open play bowlers, some 65 to 68 million of them only went once or twice last year. 

Why is that?

Because they got the same experience, the same product and the same delivery, for better or for worse. We just didn't deliver anything new or exciting or, Heaven forbid, something different.

Think about your cosmic bowling experience. You have had it operational for over 10 years. The 16 year old high school sophomore who experienced it for the first time loved It and came every week. Now that sophomore is 26 years old and the cosmic experience that he once loved is 10 years old and not so satisfying.

If we settle for the tried and true; for the "way we have always done it" and for the obvious, we will continue to get a customer who only visits us once or twice a year instead of a customer who wants to visit more frequently because we are providing satisfaction.  Which kind of a customer would you want to have?

So here's the challenge, what are you or could you be doing differently to make your customer a more frequent customer?  Put on your brainstorm hat, your silly hat, your outrageous hat and...do something different?

For a change.








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New Kids Bowl Free Open Play Promotion To Be Revealed

Bruce Davis celebrated his 70th birthday last week with some buddies at his cottage in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  This beautifully wild and pristine  area was conducive to some great brainstorming and the Kids Bowl Team, who also spent some time there,dug in and came up with a great NEW open play promotion  for your center - it will  dramatically increase your open play lineage.  The good news is,  its not a discount program. And it all starts October 28, 2011 and will run through April 30, 2012
 
It's an exciting promotion that includes great elements:

- Instant FUN & Excitement for your existing open play guests
- Simple way to invite guests back in the next 45 days
- FUN National Prize Give Aways to build buzz to your open play program
- Done For You Emails To Your Entire Kids Bowl Free email list each week to invite them for the weekend & how to join in this fun PAID Games Promotion.

Bruce and Darin will share all of the details with you on a FREE tele-seminar...

Click here to get details on how you can join us on either September 15, 2011 at 3 PM EST or September 16, 2011 at Noon Est.

Click here if you can't attend either call, but you'd like us to send you the audio recording & have a member of our team follow up with you

Click here if you do not need an additional help with your open play traffic and do not want to learn more about this program

This exciting promotion will launch nationwide on October 28, 2011 and end on April 30, 2012.

Don't miss this FREE informational call where we'll  "tell all" and give you the first opportunity to participate.  

Please join us.

Have you Gone to the Movies Lately?

Recent reports indicate that movie attendance over the summer was down about 1%.  More startlingly is the fact that movie attendance this year was just 570 million visits; the lowest number since 2007 when attendance was 573 million visits.

Simply put, the economic stress on our country has deprived the middle class of discretionary income used for movies, gifts, restaurants, and guess what? Bowling?

Our core audience of 67 million people who went bowling has not shrunk. Its been about the same for about 15 years.  What has changed is the frequency of visits to our center.

We don't believe that frequency is down because the product is no longer appealing (although a few new product innovations certainly wouldn't hurt), but rather because of the pressing economics of the times.

Simply put, our customers either no longer see the value of bowling more frequently OR can no longer afford to more frequently bowl OR have traded off their decision to bowl with another activity (probably paying for food or gasoline).

To counter this, we need to find new customers. Customers with more discretionary income; customers who can afford bowling at the prices that will help us make a profit and enable us to reinvest in our business.  The alternative is to continue to discount our products  and make less and less money.

Who are these customers?  Households earning over $60k ( U.S. median household income is $49,000) with kids under the age of 12, households who have taken vacations, bought non essential items, households who own or lease newer cars and households that do not have extreme debt or owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth.

It may sound, in this economy, like looking for a few needles in a haystack.,  but it will be worth it in the long run

Start with developing a product and offer that looks and feels more upscale. Full color fliers, Full color ads in local publications. Focus on corporate parties and fund raisers.

Here are  Six action steps you can do right now:

1. Develop a data base of people, (or buy lists) of higher net worth individuals.
2. Link to websites that  attract more upscale customers.  
3. Develop new products that will appeal more to Mid level and Higher corporate level people.  
4. Appeal to people at private clubs,
5. Appeal to charitable givers and people who raise money for theater, arts, museums. 
6. Appeal to their kids for cosmic bowling, birthday parties and school fund raisers.                                                                                                                                                                                             These people HAVE discretionary income.  And that is precisely who your NEW bowling customer should (and needs) to be!!

Got Any New ideas?

I am frequently asked if I have any new ideas about marketing bowling.

More times than not I am able to provide an answer for my clients.

But then it got me thinking. Where do I get these ideas and when do they hit me?.

So I started thinking and made a list  of where ideas come from, in the hopes that maybe you can look at these and develop new ideas as well.

1. Ideas come from a problem. You have to solve it so you need to think of different ideas to solve it
2. Ideas come from being awake and noticing the environment around you
3. Ideas come from other industries. what are they doing to make their business better?
4. Ideas come from taking a shower when you are not trying, maybe when you're not even looking
5. Ideas come from reading books, both fiction and non fiction
6. Ideas come from your ego; a good healthy dose of generous and selfless input
7. Ideas come from "newbies" on your staff who have no preconceived notions or don't know that the "it won't work here" mentality exists
8. Ideas come from watching your customers interact, bowl, eat and drink and spending time in the center
9. Ideas come from customer complaints. If  a problem arises with a customer, you have to figure out how to fix it to not only quickly save the customer today, but prevent the problem from happening to other customers
10. Ideas come from fear; fear of failure or even fear of success. When pushed, the mind can reach new heights in creativity
11. Ideas come form becoming a customer who uses the product and looks at it with a critical eye to stimulate ideas for greater customer satisfaction (How about a designated parking space for your birthday Mom so she doesn't have to haul the kids, the gifts and the clothes across the parking lot in the snow in 12 degree weather??)
12. Ideas come from failure. You have to try lots of different ideas to get to a good on. But if you don't try, you never get to the "good one"
13. Ideas come from travel; from visiting different places and seeing how businesses in other places do commerce. (I remember being in Japan, many years ago, when it was not uncommon for automobile sales people to drive to a neighborhood, invite people to test drive the car the salesperson brought with them and sell it right on the spot)
14. Ideas come form embellishing an old product. Hey did you ever set up a small hula hoop on the lanes and asking people to bowl through it to get extra pin count?  Sure, its weird, but why not?  We're in the business of marketing bowling as an entertainment product, aren't we?


So start today. Challenge yourself and your staff.

"What new idea did we think of today to make our business better?  keep thinking. It will come when you least expect it.

Promise.