Colorado Brewery - Event Registration
Turning Brewery Bingo into a Revenue-Generating Event: A Case Study
What's up? This is Chris with Get Hoptimized, and I want to walk you through a case study for an event registration campaign that we ran for a brewery client of ours. What's kind of fun about this one is that we got creative with how we went about promoting the event and turning it from something that didn't have any sort of registration before to something where people signaled commitment to show up, pre-paid for inclusions for the event. This turned something where we had zero visibility on who might show up to something where we had a list of the folks that were paid and definitely going to show up. We did this in a way that allowed us to sell something for the event without it feeling like a cover charge. So let's get into it and show you the process here.
The Event: Brewery Bingo
A little bit of background. This campaign was for a bingo event. Basically, it's bingo at the brewery. Folks would show up and play bingo for prizes and drink beer and hang out while they were going on. Now, previously, the way this event ran is that we promoted bingo just as a day. We'd say, hey, we've got prizes, and we were trying to use Facebook events and that kind of thing to get people to sign up. But that stuff isn't a very strong commitment for folks. There isn't a list of people that are going to attend. What we toyed around with in the ideation phase was, well, do we do like a free event? Free registration? How do we make this into something where people are committing? But there's also value here because we didn't want to have something where it was just a cover charge to show up.
The Solution: Paid Registration with Added Value
So where we landed was creating an event on their website where there was a paid registration involved. It was a $10 sign up. But what that $10 got you was your first pour and it got you a bonus bingo card. Normally you just get a bingo card for every beer that you purchased while you were there. Well, if you pre-registered online, that got you a bonus card. So now you start the game with two cards, as opposed to one, and you get your first pour included in that. So there's potential there for like a discounted rate on that pour to add a little bit of incentive for folks to pre-register. This has been an excellent success for this client. We now use this model for all of their bingos and all their bingo days and it works out great.
The Results: Impressive ROI and Increased Visibility
Let's talk about the results and what happened. From a marketing perspective, we had an e-commerce product page on their Squarespace website, really easy to create. We charged a $10 fee for that product to promote it. We ran meta ads and we also did email campaigns to support this as well. All in all, the ad costs for this were 180 bucks. There really isn't, I mean, there is some email costs associated with this because they're paying for an email service subscription, but it's negligible because we're running multiple emails throughout the month. That cost really is hard to divide that over all the emails that go out. So the cost to run email is pretty negligible. The real primary cost of this was the ad spend. And what we ended up with, between ads and email, is we had 75% of pre-registrations for a total of about 750 bucks, which is really good. I mean, that's almost capacity for them for this event. We did that ahead of time on this. So 750 bucks compared to that $180 in ad spend gets us a 4 to 1, 4.16 to 1, ROI. Meaning, for every dollar we spent on ads, we returned four. And that's just in pre-registration sales. That doesn't include any of the onsite revenue that took place. And there was definitely some of that. People show up, they order extra beers, snacks, or whatever was onsite. This ended up being a really good day for the brewery. And like I said, this turned into a model that we use for all of their bingo stuff moving forward and other events too. This whole get your first pour included with the event registration was a great idea. And it definitely worked.
The Bigger Picture: A Marketing Model for Taprooms
This really fits into our model for how we drive results with marketing for a taproom. We use a combination of advertising and owned channels. In this case, it was meta ads to promote the event with two targeted groups of craft beer drinkers and restaurant goers. Plus we had the owned channels involved here. We had the email going out. Had there been an SMS list or some kind of app that was with this brewery, we would have used it. They just didn't have that stuff. But between email and meta ads, it performed really well. And those things run, they push traffic to a product page.
On that product page is where we're pushing the event registration. There are a couple important things that happen on that product page. One is, that's a place for us to sell the event details. You don't get a chance to express all of that all the time in an ad, but by using that landing page, that product page, now we can explain the prizes that are going to be involved. We can explain the price and the food truck or whatever else was there and going on the times. All those details are there.
Also, when people buy, there's a level of commitment and this was a big difference for this campaign. Previously you kind of just promote an event and it's like, well, I hope people show up. We don't really know, but with this event, we knew that at least 75 people were going to be there and that helps them better plan staffing, supplies, all that stuff.
Now, once this sale actually takes place, that sale counts as eCommerce revenue, which is good. That's revenue for the business. But then that eCommerce revenue is actually going to lead to on-site revenue in the form of people buying more stuff while they are there. Anybody who wasn't already on our email list, now they've opted in by purchasing. We've got them in our email list, which adds more to our own channels as well.
Anytime we do an event like this in the future, they're going to get those emails. It just adds more contacts to our own channels, which we love because own channels are super great for ROI. You got to check out our couple of our other case studies, specifically the one about the beer pre-sale. That is an excellent case study on the difference between ads and owned channels return on investment with that.
This is a great example of running the whole entire funnel and the impact it can have. This is how we approach our marketing with all of our taproom clients. So if this is something you're looking at and saying, yeah, this is interesting, I'd love to learn more. Please reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you about how we can apply this strategy and formula for your brewery taproom.
