You are completely correct about some of the points you make in the debate over quality vs quantity.

Here at MyGuestlist, we are able to observe which campaigns work best and under which circumstances.

Although we do not disclose personal campaign information, I can say without a doubt, that the size of your database is only one factor in an algorithm of what makes a perfect campaign work.

Here are some more:

- Timing (both date and time of day)
- Source of recipients (did you source this data from a clipboard, the web, your personal contact list etc)
- Date of acquisition (how old is the data? Patrons can move on their lives and fall outside of the barriers of your target crowd)
- Have they been only once, casually, frequently or never to your venue
- Content you have in your promos (this one is by far the biggest)
- Subject Lines in emails
- Presentation of campaign
- Nature/source of campaign (is it pushed to a person, referred to by a friend etc)
- Size of database (there it is)
- HTML vs Image
- Opt out procedure
- Nature of previous promos

There are most likely some that I am missing out on, but have a think about all the above and see whether you may be doing anything wrong.

There is probably enough info that we could share on each one of those points to fill up a blog post for each.

What’s the point of having thousands of entries if they are not people who have heard of your venue, interested in your venue or more importantly never gave you permission to send them info to begin with which makes the whole act illegal!?

I think too many people within hospitality are still stuck in a very old-school way of thinking and don’t embrace social media, clean databases, and segmented marketing the way other industries have.

You see, in one venue, the owner is a little bit tech savvy and understands that you don’t just blast shit out for no reason just so you can say “I’ve sent something out this week.” We do birthday gift vouchers, competitions and all sorts of cool innovative stuff that ties in the patrons that are interested in our venue to their hobbies, likes and behaviours.

On the other hand, at one of my other venues, the owners have specific guidelines on how to do weekly tasks and get me to send out emails and sms to just everyone in their database.

So here are the questions:

Who do you think has more optouts?
Who do you think has a higher open rate?
Who do you think has a better ROI?
Who do you think has a better brand image and reputation?

Yes i’m not denying that quality doesn’t matter, but if you have 80 000 entries in your database over someone who has 800…how can it not matter???

There’s a reason why people sell databases to begin with!!!

But I didnt mean to be a smart ass. Just sayin. There is no need to be all obsessed over how big your database size. Whats that saying about the motion in the ocean? I think it applies here.

I use facebook and myguestlist both but dont actually make it really easy for people to come on to the database so that i keep it full of only people who are really interested in my promos.

It almost feels as if we weeded out all the pests in our garden and left only the nice, colourful roses to work with.