There are innumerable reasons as to why a subscriber decides to disengage from your bar or nightclub marketing. These could include an experience that they term disappointing with your offering, your location or your staff; or the passing of their requirement for your venue, perhaps just for a one time only party or other meeting opportunity. Comprehending your bar and nightclub customer’s lifecycle will assist you in properly developing, re-developing or applying a re-engagement process that will result in more successful engagement with your patrons.

Comprehend the Reasons for Disengagement

In order to identify and define your subscribers’ disengagement you need to delve deep into a profound understanding of how your bar or nightclub interacts with your patrons and how they interact with you. Prior to crafting a re-engagement message to these customers it is recommended that you comprehend the reasons why they have stopped engaging in the first place. To ensure that you conduct an accurate analysis, make sure that you consider all of the various subscriber lifecycle implications as you proceed.

It is necessary to realize at the outset that there are some customers who simply won’t be back no matter which reengagement strategies you pursue. These customers may simply have run their course with your venue, discovered that one of your competitors offers them an experience more to their liking, or may even have had their shoulder dislocated by your bouncer. These are the customers to whom you must bid a hearty farewell and move on. Fortunately, most disengaging subscribers are not quite so disaffected and antagonized and fall into one of these three types of somewhat recoverable inactive statuses:

Conversion Inactive

The subscribers who were once converting and interacting with your email marketing newsletter at a median rate and are now no longer converting are entitled Conversion Inactive. Their open rates are still steady but their reaction to your call to action has gone dormant. This category is the traditionally most highly targeted by bar and nightclub email marketers as it represents patrons who were once active participants and frequenters but have now dropped out of sight. The fact that they are still opening your emails, however, indicates that they are still in the market for something that your venue might provide – just not whatever it is you’re marketing to them right now. Switching up your offers to propose a completely different form of incentive could help you win them back.

Email Inactive

The subscribers who were once opening your emails but now simply ignore them are called Email Inactive. There are various guidelines as to what constitutes an Email Inactive but it is primarily defined by way of the frequency of your email newsletters. If you are sending out a monthly newsletter and have not had an open in a full year, it’s time to pull the plug. For weekly newsletters, four to six months generally indicates inactivity bordering on rigor mortis. Since these customers are simply not opening your emails, it’s next to impossible to offer them any incentive through conventional means. If you collected their phone number and address during the signup process, you could try approaching them with a motivating incentive once and once only in one of those ways.

Lifestyle Inactive

The subscribers who were patrons of your bar or nightclub due to specific conditions in their lives, such as attending college; being involved with a particular after-work group; or trying to find a relationship; but have now drifted away are categorized as Lifestyle Inactive. It may be very difficult to re-engage these specific customers for various obvious reasons: If they were frequenting your singles bar their current partner may not be too amenable to their return to your venue. In the expectation (or hope) that there is still some way to win these patrons back, innovative forms of incentivization such as invitations to elite VIP events may be effective.

It is a fact of business life that there will be some customer attrition, but reacting to the churning as it occurs can help to keep your subscription list strong and healthy!