The situation
FOG Technologies, based in Surat, India, sells HyperGrid worldwide. HyperGrid is an unmanned LED arena where up to six people play together, and the buyers are bowling alleys, karting tracks, escape rooms, trampoline parks and soft play centers. Most of these venues have 1 to 5 sites and are run by the owner. They don't sit in Apollo or LinkedIn, and across Europe they work in a dozen languages.
What we built
We scraped Google Maps ourselves. Europe returned 950,103 venues in 44 countries. Free rules removed 94% before any AI cost, then an AI read each remaining website and kept the venues where entertainment is the business, not a side line: 56,957 made the cut. The full database now holds 2,879,712 venues in 83 countries. The rest-of-world run alone found 1,618,218 venues for $35.
Early UK sends showed the venue's enquiries inbox out-replying the named contact, so we split every campaign by contact type and let the data settle it. Enquiries inboxes ran at 0.556% positive per email. Named contacts ran at 0.296%.
Each venue's language came from its own website, not its country. 12,710 emails were written natively in 8 languages, one per venue, 99.8% with a unique opener, for $337 in AI cost. Every send was rendered and scanned for English leaking into the wrong language and for broken merge fields. 44 legal-form suffixes (GmbH, Kft, s.r.o.) were normalized so duplicates collapsed.
A spreadsheet of weekly plays and revenue from venues already running the arena. 69% of the hottest replies asked for exactly that.
Recipients on Google Workspace converted at 2.83% and on Microsoft 365 at 0.74%, and Microsoft recipients said no 4x less often. That's placement, not persuasion. We added 30 Microsoft mailboxes and matched sender to recipient. 24,853 addresses were verified before send and 2,986 dead ones (12%) never got an email.
The email
Graham, with tenpin bowling in the mix, venue already gives families a reason to dwell and spend longer on site.
HyperGrid is an immersive LED arena for groups of up to six, a useful extra earner alongside the bowling. A Newcastle FEC does 900+ plays a week at £3, unmanned.
Worth me quickly sending the excel with weekly plays and takings?
A real email from the UK campaign. The first line was written from the venue's own website.
Results by campaign
| Campaign | Sent | Positive | Per email |
|---|---|---|---|
| French, enquiries inboxes | 1,502 | 17 | 1.132% |
| Spanish, enquiries inboxes | 2,287 | 23 | 1.006% |
| German, enquiries inboxes | 4,405 | 43 | 0.976% |
| Polish, enquiries inboxes | 2,100 | 16 | 0.762% |
| UK, enquiries inboxes | 9,214 | 60 | 0.651% |
| UK, named contacts | 15,567 | 55 | 0.353% |
| All 41 campaigns | 100,105 | 411 | 0.411% |
What changed because of it
Email 1 produced 71% of the positive replies and the third follow-up produced none, so sequences were cut short. Before the client's trade show, we rebuilt 38 live campaigns across 19 language versions in 25 minutes, so the invite landed 2 days into the sequence instead of 8.
