You know why acquiring new customers is critical, but how to attract them isn’t as clear.
Melissa Fourness, manager of Dreamers Vault in Minneapolis, MN, shares the strategies that have lifted her store to the top of the WPN in new player growth.
I have a lot of players that consider us family. And that is the best feedback I’ve gotten from any of my players, is that they feel like this is their store.
The key is having the right attitude. If you have the mindset that, "This is a great place and a fun place," then our customers have fun as well.
We are a newer store and I, myself, was a new player to Magic coming into this place and so I relate really well to the overwhelming sense of Magic is this big complicated game that I’m never going to be able to learn how to play. I make sure that people understand it’s not that scary.
"And he has doublestrike. What’s doublestrike? That means they attack, they deal their damage twice."
We have a plethora of tools on hand at all times. The Welcome Decks are an incredible resource. I often will give out Welcome Decks to schools and libraries that are running clubs and build relationships with them to make sure that they understand that they can come and use me as a resource.
Planeswalker Decks are fabulous for new players. As well as having plenty of opportunities for players to come in and play for free, casual experiences, good entry points. Things like our kid’s league. The Magic League is wonderful because players can come in any day of the week and play.
We do multiplayer Commander. We have our own point scoring system. Players can score points for doing awesome things and maybe lose a few points for doing less than awesome things, which keeps it very fun and balanced.
The Magic Open House is a fantastic entry point any new player. I start advertising immediately following up the last one and we find that those programs work really well for new players.
My best recommendation to other stores is to think outside the box. We have branched out into the Renaissance Festival here. We run drafts and then we also run D&D.
This last summer we went to Warped Tour which is an unusual place to get new customers but I stood outside the tent and yelled out, "Magic!" and had all kinds of heads turn.
One of my biggest things is doing like a Prerelease pre-party. We run all kinds of fun side events that is a great to get foot traffic into the store and interested about our Magic events.
When I came into this store two and a half years ago, we didn’t have much. I didn’t know if FNM was going to fire. And seeing it grow and expand and now running into the problem of, "How do I fit everybody into the store on a Saturday afternoon?" It just takes my breath away.
