Brand home managers are the unsung heroes of brand home experiences. By overseeing the day-to-day flow, they’re uniquely positioned to understand what’s working and visitor reactions and sentiments. But brand homes can be opaque; with the amount of iteration these teams do, getting the full picture of the industry tends to be challenging. It’s tons of research, and who has the time?

We definitely do after 11 years of serving brand homes, so we asked the experiential marketing world what they cared about. Many brand home leaders answered, allowing us to get a transparent look at the brand home industry.

So, how did brand home teams think about success in 2023? 

The three most important metrics for brand home teams are:

1. Ticket Sales
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
3. Marketing Opt-ins 

Ticket Sales

As expected from a ticketed experience, ticket sales are the top priority, coming in at 42% of those surveyed. It makes sense; brand homes and their experiences are an additional revenue source for brands and act as a popularity barometer. 

Ticket sales also showcase which specific experiences appeal more to target demographics, like private tours versus mixology classes. It’s a good metric to test popularity, especially when collecting and aggregating guest feedback isn’t an option.
After all, that’s what brand homes are for; getting as many consumers as possible through the gates for an immersive and personalized experience. That way, they can create a strong and personalized experience that will use memory to win consumer loyalty and brand advocacy.

How to Improve Brand Home Ticket Sales 

When brand homes run multiple events, it can take valuable people hours to consolidate performance across multiple angles like time of day, month, and specific experience. Brand home leaders need to make quick decisions about what works and what doesn’t to improve their experiences (and ultimately, ticket sales), but the easiest way to hit a home run on the first try is to listen to visitor feedback. 

Increase your ticket sales by using feedback to ask your audience what they’d like to see. Whether that’s more specialized tours, VIP tastings, or a new class offering, surveys are a winning strategy to improve the breadth of brand home experiences. 

For those low on time and resources, using an AI-powered feedback analysis tool like Pinpoint can reduce the amount of aggregation and analysis by days. This frees up your team to invest more time in experiences and get face-to-face time with visitors instead of spending valuable time in the office trying to decide what’s next for growth and scaling.

See for yourself!

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Of course, NPS remains a key metric for brand homes. Although it’s used less than ticket sales as a key indicator of experience success, it’s a vital metric in understanding brand home health. 

NPS tells you current brand sentiment, especially after consumers visit your brand home. With the average NPS improvement for brand homes coming in at 84 (a stellar number) from a low 30 pre-visit, it’s easy to see how the effort to personalize and provide a memorable experience affects consumers. They’re a great way to tell if a brand home is doing its job and if tweaks need to be made for a better rating. 

How to Improve NPS in Your  Brand Home

Improving NPS means understanding the full customer journey, from booking a tour to the post-experience follow-up email. By reducing friction points in key places, like ticket purchasing, you begin to smooth out the bumps that reduce your score. 

Consider all the times you cross paths with your visitors; delivering consistent, on-brand interactions at every step in their journey, starting with your booking process will help improve their overall experience with your brand. Answer questions like:

• How easy is it to find our events and purchase a ticket?
• Does the booking process look and feel like our brand, or does it feel like a third-party experience?
• How personable are tour guides and tasting experts? What kind of training do they need to better personify the brand?
• Are walk-ins easy to accommodate, or is it a lengthy and complex process? 
• Do we have all of our guest data, including both those who booked online and those who walked in, in one centralized view?
• What kind of personalization options can you take advantage of? Can you collect that information for more specific and tailored experiences during booking?

NPS improvement takes a lot of consideration, but many adjustments can be focused on the booking process. For example, AnyRoad’s booking capabilities are hosted directly on a brand home’s site and can be used for walk-ins. Johnnie Walker Princes Street, famed for its Journey of Flavour tour, uses AnyRoad and AI in combination to create personalized guest profiles based on their self-described preferences. 

You can check it out for yourself and see how smooth the process is, from choosing an experience type to booking. 

Marketing Opt-ins

8% of those surveyed marked marketing opt-ins as a key metric for success. Although this is a relatively small percentage, opt-ins still have a place in brand home success and the health of your experiences in sum total. 

A marketing opt-in is a powerful piece of the consumer database puzzle. These consumers tell you that they’re excited about the experience they had or are about to participate in enough to want to build a further relationship with you. 

Operations teams, those who run the brand home experiences, have often expressed how they feel siloed from other teams, like marketing. However, this metric is a direct collaboration between the two teams for their mutual benefit. Marketing emails and ads about new experiences, like hosted concerts or a pop-up at Coachella, keep visitors coming back for more, transforming fans into longtime brand advocates.

How to Improve Marketing Opt-In Rates for Brand Home Experiences 

Marketing opt-ins are often encouraged by consumers excited about a brand home’s experience. Taking advantage of that momentum will raise marketing opt-in rates versus waiting until they’ve had time to cool down. 

Asking for marketing opt-in during the booking process or immediately after the brand home experience through surveys or immediate thank-you emails (between one day and one week) will raise those rates. Making the process as smooth as possible will be key here; any friction can lose the opportunity to start building a long-term relationship with your guests. 

The Takeaway

When it comes to 2023 and beyond, brand home teams are clear; they care about the day-to-day success of the brand home with an emphasis on scalable opportunities. How do we know? Because the metrics they care about reflect the growth mentality. 

Ticket sales, NPS, and marketing opt-ins are the top three metrics that brand home leaders care about. Moving deeper into 2024, we expect to see automation become more and more important for experiential success and optimization. After all, brand homes are values brought to life; we all need to make it easy for consumers to join the community.