There is one marketing channel where nobody stands between you and your customers, and your venue is already collecting the addresses for it.
Every booking takes a name and an email. Every waiver takes a name and an email. That means that unlike almost every other kind of local business, you get contact details from at least one person in every group that walks through your door, before they arrive.
Turn that into a list and you can reach every person who has already paid you, whenever you want, without paying a platform or guessing at an algorithm.
Getting guests back is the cheap half of marketing, and you are sitting on it
The old line is that acquiring a new customer costs about five times what retaining an existing one does. Argue with the multiplier if you like. The direction is not in dispute.
An email list is your existing customers, in one place, reachable on demand. They already know your brand. They have already found your building. They have already decided you were worth the money once.
Compare that with the work involved in convincing a stranger of all three.
No algorithm, no platform risk, and everyone has an email address
Social platforms change what they show and to whom, and there is nothing you can do about it. Email is the one channel where sending it means it arrives.
Not all your customers use TikTok. Not all of them use Facebook. All of them have an email address, because you cannot function without one.
Yes, promotional email lands in the promotions tab in Gmail. It is still in the inbox, and people go looking in that tab when they are deciding what to do on the weekend. That has become more true over time, not less.
Retail asks for your email at the till and calls it a receipt
Every large retailer now offers to email your receipt. That is not a service, or at least it is not only a service. It is a way of collecting an address at the moment somebody has already bought something.
Most people never open the receipt. They do notice the promotional email three weeks later.
You have a better version of this than retail does, because a booking is a transaction that happens in advance and cannot be completed anonymously.
Getting consent the way Canadian law actually requires
This is where I have to be careful, because the original version of this post gave advice I would not give now.
Canada's anti-spam legislation does not let you send commercial email to somebody just because they booked with you. You need consent, and CASL is stricter than the equivalent rules in the United States. In particular, a pre-checked opt-in box is not a safe basis for express consent. The box has to be one the customer actively ticks, the request has to say what they are signing up for, and every message has to carry your identity and a working unsubscribe.
The good news is that a clearly worded, unchecked opt-in on a booking form converts far better than people expect, because the customer is in a good mood and is about to go do something fun.
If your activity requires a waiver, and axe throwing, VR, escape rooms and golf simulators all typically do, put the same opt-in there. Run the waiver on your website or on tablets on site and it collects itself.
If any of this is more than you want to think about, it is most of what email and SMS work involves.
A list of past customers beats a following
I would take a thousand email addresses from people who have been to my venue over ten thousand social followers, without hesitating.
Followers are people who saw something. A list is people who came, paid, and had a good time. When an escape room launches a new room, or an arcade runs an event, the list is the thing that fills it.
The one rule: do not wear it out
Quality over quantity applies here more than anywhere, because the cost of annoying somebody is that you lose the ability to reach them at all. Unsubscribes do not come back.
Daily emails will empty your list. So will emailing on a Monday morning, when nobody is thinking about their weekend plans. Send when you have something worth their time: a new room, an event, a genuinely good seasonal offer, extended holiday hours.
Use software, and it does not have to cost anything
There are several genuinely free tiers that are fine for a venue-sized list. None of them are paying me, so I am not naming one.
What you get for using any of them rather than a spreadsheet: the list manages itself, the opt-ins and unsubscribes are handled, the emails are built for you, you get open and click data, and it usually connects directly to your booking and waiver systems.
The other thing you get is deliverability. Pasting a hundred addresses into Outlook is the fastest way to be classified as spam permanently, and once that happens the list you spent two years building stops arriving.
Start collecting now. The value of a list is a function of how long you have been building it, which means the worst day to start is any day after today.