Email personalisation is when you send emails to your players, but personalise them to suit their identities, wants and needs. It can be as simple as including their name in the first line, or as complex as sending specific automated emails based on which rooms they’ve played, how well they did, and who they played with. It’s more than just,

“Hey, we’re offering 10% off all our escape rooms this weekend”,

it’s

“Hi Mairi, because you found the treasure in ‘Pirate Ship’ last month, we want to invite team Escape Roomer back this weekend to take on the sequel, ‘Treasure Island’. Here’s 10% off, just for you.”

The best part is? An email like the second example can be set up in seconds, and personalised to thousands of different players with no additional effort on your part… And, it works!

Here at Buzzshot we’ve been hard at work building up an all-in-one software for escape rooms that helps you manage your venue, take care of your players, and grow your business. Recently, we unveiled our Broadcast Email feature, and more recently we rolled out Email Automation to all Buzzshot customers for free. It’s never been so simple to get started, and in this article we want to give you the practical tools to supercharge your escape room marketing with personalisation.

If you’re wondering what sort of things escape room companies can personalise about their emails, some popular ones include

• Player’s Name
• Team Name
• Birthday
• Escape Time
• Points Won
• Rooms Played
• Rooms Not Played
• Player Persona
  • e.g. Enthusiast, Corporate, Family with Kids

The Benefits of Email Personalisation

Outside of just the escape room industry, consumers are much more likely to purchase from a brand that uses personalised advertising. Whether that’s true for escape rooms or not, individually a personalised email that includes a name in the subject is anywhere between 26% and 50% more likely to be opened (sources: Campaign Monitor and Hubspot).

With these sorts of numbers, the power of personalisation is clear, regardless of industry. Consider the following benefits,

The Personal Touch - In the competitive world of the inbox, your goal is to make your email stand out. It doesn’t get more eye-catching than having a name, or something unique to that player in the subject or first line. With the right personalisation, emails can feel like they come from an individual who remembers hosting their escape room, and not just a faceless business sending an identical message to thousands.

Greater Conversion - The right emails, at the right time, for the right people. Statistics show that customers are much more likely to convert when the marketing message, or offer feels personalised to them. On the one hand, there’s no use emailing players about rooms they’ve already played, and on the other if a player always books a particular room at a particular time of year, use this data to your advantage!

More Powerful Data - By creating segments and tags, you can monitor and track engagement across different segments, unique to your escape room. Do enthusiasts always open your emails but never book? Do emails to a “corporate” segment convert more over the year? Greater analytics data means you’ll understand your business more, and be able to supercharge your marketing machine.

Getting Started with Email Personalisation

So, how can you use email personalisation to help your escape room? Here at Buzzshot, we have an exciting brand new feature called “Automation”, which gives you the power to email your lists, segments, and customer tags intelligently based on player behaviour.

But first, you need to ask the right questions and collect the right data.

The best way to collect data is simple: You ask your players for it. Within Buzzshot, you might be collecting information about your players by using:

• An email sign up form, embedded on your website.

• A waiver or checkin for teams to fill out before their game.

• Or inviting players to fill out a post-game survey.

Exactly what you’ll want to collect will be unique to you and your escape room, but this is the perfect opportunity to plan ahead for your marketing. Depending on what type of emails you’d like to send, you may wish to consider going beyond just a first name to ask about their preferences, booking types and demographics too.

Once you’ve got your data, it’s time to segment it and apply tags. Here, automation can be a huge time saver. Rather than manually apply a tag or move a player into a segment, you can use Buzzshot to do this automatically.

Some effective segments and tags you can use for your escape room include:

Type of Player: Enthusiast, or new player? These people think of escape rooms in a very different way, and you may wish to adjust the way you market your rooms.
Type of Booking: Your corporate booking will be looking for something different from a young family, and your message might be a little different.
Escape Time: You may wish to reward the record-breaking team with a promo code, and invite the team who didn’t finish back for a second try.
Past Bookings: If someone has played 3 out of 4 of your rooms, you can encourage them specifically to book the remaining room.
By Location: for offers and news that might only be relevant to those living in your immediate area.

Once you have your segments and tags set up, the only thing left to do is to start scheduling your emails. In Buzzshot, we have two handy ways of doing that:

Broadcast Emails: For one-off, email blasts to large groups of people. For example, when you’re running an escape room-wide promotion. This email can still be segmented. You might be running a promo for all 4 of your rooms, but only want to show the offers for rooms players haven’t yet played.

Email Automation: An automated marketing machine that sends emails based on player’s behaviours throughout the year. For example, an email set to one month before every player’s birthday, or a follow up email a week after their last booking.

The possibilities are endless, and as we say - no two escape room marketing strategies are (or should be) the same. Feel free to get creative and experiment with what works for you!

Buzzshot makes it easy for you to supercharge all parts of your escape room business, not just email marketing! You can get started today with a free trial, or if you’re already using Buzzshot, email broadcasts and automation are already available, right now. Let us know how you get on!