Posted on: 2023-07-10
Sounds like a dream, right? A business where you can use your creativity to show people an amazing time — and make money? But you’re going to need some help, and the most valuable insights an escape room owner can get come from the experiences of fellow escape room owners.
At vrCAVE, we support entertainment centres all around the world with our VR Escape Room software.
We've learned a thing or two by working with owners new and experienced, so we're sharing three common insights we hear about!
Customers Flock to High Quality Escape Rooms With Challenging Puzzles
This insight might seem like a no-brainer, but over the years, we’ve heard one thing over and over when it comes to success:
Regular customers and repeat business.
Often, escape room owners stress over how to attract new customers. While this strategy feels necessary, repeat customers are cheaper.
Consider what it costs to find a new customer from scratch. You’re probably spending money one way or another. But one of the main ways escape room businesses get traffic is when a customer has a great experience with your rooms and decides they want to come back with more friends and family.
Imagine you’ve just hosted a group of five players who all had an incredible time at your location. They enjoyed their experience and your puzzles so much that some players decide to come back with more friends and family. Next thing you know, you’ve got five more bookings for the following weeks!
What just happened in our example above is called Word of Mouth marketing, which is especially effective for escape rooms because of the social nature of our industry. In our example, you’ve turned one game into five or more new bookings, without spending any more money on advertising.
This is the reason why curating a great experience is so crucial to increasing your escape room’s foot traffic. Each time you gain a repeat customer, the chances of them bringing along a new customer increases.
The truth is that people come back to experiences that make them feel special. As an escape room owner, you should be selling an experience great enough that it gets your guests talking about it to all their friends and family.
Off-Peak Bookings are Hard
It’s no secret that you’ll naturally see your highest amount of customer traffic outside of school and work hours. And because an escape room is a 1-hour commitment, your customers’ easiest option for scheduling a group booking is those Friday-Sunday time slots. Unfortunately, you’re not making the most of your business with this time limit.
What if there was a way to work with your customer’s work schedule?
Consider this:
- Offices want team-building experiences during office hours
- Schools want to expose their students to new technology
- Non-profits want activities for their communities during the day
As an escape room developer, we’ve found that portability of our VR escape rooms have allowed many of our partners to make those bookings outside of non-peak hours. With a single computer and several headsets, escape room owners can now meet their customers at their location. With VR, not only have owners found a way to expand the demographics they target, but off-site bookings help owners make full use of their operations and staff during non-peak hours.
The Room Refresh Cycle Is A Hard Balance To Manage
Finding a space large enough to accommodate your rooms is a common challenge in this industry. Because a group can only do a room once, your repeat business is limited by how many rooms you can offer, and how new and relevant the design of your rooms are.
One strategy to navigate this, is to opt for a location that accommodates 2-3 rooms with plans to pick one to swap one out every year. This might sound like the perfect solution, but changing an escape room is a risky venture:
- Each room update can cost anywhere from $10,000 - $50,000
- Along with construction, you will be spending a lot of resources on the R&D of your escape room
- You’re not making money in that space during the downtime
Remodeling an escape room once every year or so is a significant investment that does not guarantee immediate success or connection with your customers. This is a tricky problem with no easy traditional solution, but it's one of the many reasons why we started our VR Escape Room business.
Working with escape room owners around the world, we’ve been able to provide owners the ability to take one 15’ x 18’ space and offer 7 VR escape rooms to supplement their physical rooms.
Maintenance for VR is minimal and cost effective to install, with no need to remake a room when a new game becomes available each year. VR also allows owners to offer room themes that takes customers to outer space, flooded underwater ruins, a medieval castle plagued by dragons, and many more.
By offering a more flexible option with VR, you can now deliver high quality puzzles and action experiences that will get your customers talking and coming back for more – with minimal risks and costs involved.
If you’re interested in learning more about how vrCAVE has helped businesses around the world, have a read through one of our case studies!
Like this post? Check out our most recent webinar - How to Market Your Escape Room Business in the link here!
