Capture the customer

Christmas and New Year is a time when many organisations attract a lot of new attenders. Putting some good rules in place for collecting data about them will put you in a much better position to understand and engage with them beyond the festive season. A step-by-step approach works better than jumping in the deep end. Here are ten to get you going:

1. Get your house in order

Before you can do anything clever with your data, make sure that you are using your ticketing system correctly. If you don’t properly categorise sales for car parking tickets, ice cream sales, programmes and any other miscellaneous items, then they can give you a very misleading picture of your audience. A new customer who happens to book car park and a programme can look like someone who has visited three times or more!

2. Audit, do and review

Know your end goal. Set out your marketing objectives and think how your data will help you get there. Your database can give you the insight to enable you to get customers to make another visit. So before you implement any marketing plan, try to understand how previous activity has influenced your database as a whole. By focusing on the outcome of individual events it is hard to see the overall effects on your business.

Use your database in the right way, be relevant and repeat visits will grow

3. Think like a customer

Your organisation is part of a bigger customer journey – one venue out of many that your customers could choose to engage with. Seeing it from a customer’s perspective will help you make better decisions. So look at your data in comparison to the rest of the sector. Understanding how your audiences engage with the arts as a whole will provide greater clarity on how they engage with you.

4. Customer focused KPIs

To ensure your customer is king, set key performance indicators that refer you back to the customer and not the success of each event. Your focus could be on reducing the time between visits, or the frequency of visits, or on growing the number of first-timer attenders who make a second booking. And make sure that everyone in your organisation is aiming for the same thing.

5. Achievable sales targets for all shows

On the flipside to our last point, it is still important to give each event a goal. If you put a target on every event you’ll be able to focus on whatever needs your help. How does this relate to your data? It ensures you only mail customers when appropriate and keeps the message relevant.

6. Capture the customer

Faced with a queue of people who turn up on the night for an event, you need to get them in the auditorium quickly. But it’s still worth collecting data about them – even a minimum amount – else you won’t be able to include them in future marketing campaigns. Recording all sales to a ‘Mr Doors’ is a no no! You go to great lengths to collect data on advance bookers, but information about those who turn up without a ticket is no less valuable. Knowing who is coming is your goal.

7. It’s a team effort

Ensure your box office staff understand the importance of good data collection – using just one customer account for each customer, ensuring the data protection question is asked each time, and checking that email addresses are correct. Quick checks can have a huge overall impact on your data hygiene. Making marketing and sales a team effort will give everyone an incentive to do it right.

8. Survey your customers

Discovering transactional trends from box office data is only half the story. Surveying your customers to find out what they really think provides much deeper insight. If someone emails you the day after an event with some negatives comments, you might wrongly assume that their views are shared. So don’t deny yourself access to the positive feedback that can help your marketing, front of house and production teams make positive changes, however small. You will find that your customers are great ambassadors and huge numbers will respond when you ask them for their opinions.

9. Keep it clean

Duplication of customer records is going to happen so it is crucial to keep on top of it. Every month or so, run the ticketing system duplication report and merge records together. It may feel like a thankless task, but it means your data will be clean and can provide you with the best possible insights. It will also put an end to those occasions when your best customers get three brochures in the post, saving you money on marketing to spend elsewhere.

10. Loyalty follows relevance

Finally, remember that everything you do has an impact on your effectiveness. Sending out a last minute mailer to get sales up may tick a box, but is the message relevant to the customer? Will it be effective in making them go on to purchase? If not, you’ll soon become one of a bunch of marketing emails in your customer’s inbox that is ignored. Stick to this golden rule and you will in turn drive visits, ticket sales and your return on marketing investment, as well as having a positive impact on fundraising. Use your database in the right way, be relevant and repeat visits will grow.

Hannah Mitchell is Client Services Manager at Purple Seven. This article is part of a series of articles on the theme ‘Insight into Audiences’, sponsored and contributed by Purple Seven.
www.purpleseven.co.uk