Description
Our-Venue.com is an online platform tailor built for venues, with the sole purpose of helping venues meet their client's expectations.
Each venue has their own customised app that they can use to improve their enquiry process. The app enables potential clients to play around with everything that the venue has to offer. Brides can now build their own wedding packages in the comfort of their own home, resulting in more enquiries and a higher conversion rate. The same can be done for conferencing and functions.
Speciality
Many venues experience the following problems:
- It is difficult to convert a larger number of customer enquiries into sales. The venue-hire market is big and competitive, so venues need to convert on leads more effectively in order to stay on top.
- The enquiry process is usually a long and cumbersome one. Because each potential client wants a detailed quote before they will even consider a venue for their function, a lot of effort needs to be put into initial leads. Every one of these leads that does not result in a sale is wasted time, and therefore wasted money.
- There is no easy and instantaneous way for potentially interested customers to interact with their venue. The number one rule of sales is to βget clients while they are excitedβ β rather than allowing too much time and thought to change their minds. Currently, there is no way venues can do this besides having the person come through to the venue.
What Are The Benefits For The Venue? There are three major areas where an Our-Venue.com App adds value to the venue using it.
- Customers Love it We live in the age of instant gratification. The bottom line is that customers love to interact with businesses who appeal to their way of life, and meet their expectations. We have received overwhelming feedback from people who say that the venues on Our-Venue.com are doing exactly that. Here are two examples: - Every week we receive emails from brides who contact us directly to ask if we can create an app for their favourite venues. They want to be able to play around with all of the different options and configurations for their weddings without having to email back-and-forth (often over periods of weeks) with the sales people at the venue. - One of our clients (the General Manager at one of our venues), recently said that the App has βcannibalisedβ his enquiry stream (he meant that in the positive sense). In other words, the moment he put the App up on his website, the majority of his first-point-of-contact enquires now come through via the App. This shows that it is definitely appealing to their prospective clients. And it works out better for him, because he has to put in zero effort for all of these fully qualified leads to come through. This leaves his work-force free to focus on closing deals, rather than writing up endless emails and quotes.
- It Saves Time for the Venues and Their Clients It is essential that venues react to potential clients as quickly as possible β but often this means hiring teams of dozens of people to answer emails all day. Our-Venue.com enables instant response times to interested clients, without having to sacrifice on personal touch. Here are a testimonial from one of our clients: - Rosemaree Anderson, Venue Manager at Summer Place in Sandton, said the following: βHi Jason & Team, Thank You so much for taking so much time & effort in making βOur Venueβ App so perfect! It has not just assisted us but also our clients in getting their wedding quotes much faster. β Through a study conducted by our team, where we measured the average response time of 30 venues in South Africa, we saw the following: - The average response time to traditional email enquiries is 3.4 days. - The response time for venues using the Our-Venue.com platform is 10-20 seconds (depending on your internet speed). The difference between the two is highly noticeable by clients β which is why venues using Our-Venue.com are securing more bookings.
- It Brings in More Enquiries At the end of the day, appealing to potential clients results in more of them enquiring. Without fail, we have increased the number of enquiries received for every single one of our clients thus far. Whether a highly established, high turn-over venue; or a smaller, family-run venue, our Apps have increased their average enquiry rates. - Our bigger venues are getting (on average), 60-80 additional enquiries per month because of the app. They are still getting phone and email enquiries β they have simply opened up to a bigger target audience who prefer to do things online. If these venues have a conversion rate of 5% on these enquiries, it will result in one extra wedding per week. - Our smaller venues have gone from getting 1 enquiry every two weeks, to 3-4 enquiries per week because of the app. This is an 800% increase in enquiry rate.
How do potential clients interact with a venue's app? After the venueβs app is set up, they will be given a web link to access and distribute it. Because each app is web-based, it can be opened in any browser β whether on a phone, tablet or computer. They can now connect the app to their website, social media accounts, email lists, etc. The sky is really the limit. From there, potential clients can interact and enquire with the venue like never before.