WHAT IS CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)?

Customer Relationship Management is the process of regular on-going communication with your customers to offer products and services that they are interested in.

The essential tool for CRM is a database with at least the names and emails of your customers or potential customers. You may also want to collect other information including their interests and their purchase history/attendance at your events.

CRM requires researching your customers and finding out who they are, where they come from, their needs and behaviours. It’s about finding out how they prefer to be communicated with, making it easy for them to communicate with you, and developing ways to communicate with them that will keep them ‘hooked’ and interested.

Finding out about their needs and behaviours involves things like customer satisfaction surveys to keep up with their likes, dislikes, opinions and lifestyles.

And using offers and incentives helps your customers to feel their needs are being recognised, builds up their loyalty, and helps you form a clear picture of their profiles and behaviour patterns.Think of Amazon who, following a first order, form an initial profile of a customer and then send a personalised e-news tempting the customer with products ‘they may like’ based on what their first order was. This profile is built up over time with subsequent orders.

Protecting customers’ data is an important part of CRM, and familiarisation with the Data Protection Act (1998) is a must for anyone who collects, stores, and uses customer data.

WHAT IS E-MARKETING?

E-marketing is also known as online marketing, e-mail marketing and internet marketing. It is the way in which organisations communicate with customers online and market their products and services over the internet.The benefits of e-marketing are: Being able to communicate with customers

far and wide

Low cost – once set up, regular communications can be sent at a much lower cost than traditional methods

One-to-one marketing – you can communicate instantly with people who want to know about your events and activities wherever they are. More and more people are using their mobile phones and portable devices to download information and ‘stay in touch’.

It’s more interactive – e-marketing allows you to create interactive campaigns using music, graphics and videos.

Trackable and measurable results – you can measure customer response in a variety of ways such as whether they’re ‘subscribing’ or

‘unsubscribing’ to your communications, whether they’re ‘opening’ up your e-news, and whether they ‘click through’ to your website for further information, to take up an offer, enter a competition, book a ticket etc.

EVENTfulCUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) AND E-MARKETING

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TEN EASY WAYS TO START USING CRM IN YOUR MARKETING ACTIVITIES

1. Understand data protection

The Data Protection Act 1998 is there to protect misuse of customer data. By law, all customer communications must include an ‘opt in or out’ tick box that allows customers to chose whether or not they want to submit their data to be used in further communications.

Even if you are building a straightforward excel spreadsheet of customer contacts for future e-communications, it’s important to keep this data secure until you are ready to launch a communication that then allows the contact to opt ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the list.

Find out more about Data Protection on www.ico.gov.uk

2. Start collecting customer data

There are many different ways to collect customer data:

ask people to sign-up to an e-newsletter from a website

ask people to enter a competition (on a website) or to sign-up to receive special offers – you can add a couple of extra questions about their interests, etc

ask people to leave their contact details when they attend an event, a function, join a club or a society, or try out a new product or experience

leave a feedback form at arts venues, community centres, and libraries, following exhibitions, shows, etc.

‘forward to a friend’ options in e-communications that enable you to capture a friend’s data as well

You need to think about what data you will collect. Ideally you will want

Name

Email

Postcode and address

Age (range)

Sex

Interests (give them a choice which will be useful to you)

Previous attendance at your events.

3. Storing customer data

Do you operate your own data lists, do you tap into a department-wide database, or do you have the resources to outsource the management of your customer data?

Does your data system allow you to streamline customer data, analyse customer behaviour, identify patterns, measure results, and coordinate e-communications?

Ask yourself what you need from a data capture system e.g. simply sorting customer data by postcode, or asking it to sort all customers who are interested in music events, or a more complex sorting of customers across a range of profiles?

The most effective databases are those that are centralised, that can be shared across different people or departments, and that are updated at a central source ensuring that everyone uses up-to-date information. And some data management systems capture new customer detail automatically as it’s fed through from a sign-up form.

Data goes out of date quickly, so if you’re maintaining your own database, ask yourself whether you have enough resource to keep it updated.

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4. Building customer profiles

As you capture and collect your customer data, you can sort customers according to your chosen ‘fields’ – for example where they live, their age groups, their occupations, their interests, lifestyle choices, and their communication preferences.

This information forms the backbone of your online and offline communications. It should determine the method of communication, how often customers receive communications, the things you tell them about, and the tone of voice you use. This is the first step towards building customer loyalty and trust.

5. Interaction with your web pages

The best e-communications give a flavour of what’s to be found when customers click through to read more or interact on your web pages. Are your web pages set up so that you can amend and update content easily, incorporate special offers and competition pages, and engage customers with imagery, social media channels, download options, and event highlights, once they land on the pages?

6. Developing an e-marketing plan

Build a profile of your audience so you know who you’re talking to, the tone of voice to use in your e-communications, and how they like to interact with your events and activities. You can segment your audience into different types and send them different communications.

What do you want to achieve? i.e. launching an event, raising awareness of your event, finding out more about your customers

What is your budget? Are you starting from scratch and starting to compile your own customer data lists with budget to spend on setting up a simple e-communication that links back to your web pages? Or is there a shared customer database in operation with potential for a more sophisticated e-news?

Plan your e-marketing activities, i.e. how often will you communicate with your customers, what topics will you include, who will write the communications, how will you analyse the responses, how will you evaluate your activity?

Measure your success – decide how you are going to evaluate the success of your e-communications, i.e. things like ‘click throughs’ to your web pages, ‘opt-ins and opt-outs’, responses to competitions, responses to online surveys, more followers to your twitter feed or comments on your blog post, more ticket sales (if this is relevant)

7. Getting customers to open your e-communications

There are lots of organisations out there hoping to win people over as loyal customers. What are the words and messages you will use in the subject lines of your e-communications that will tempt people to open them up, interact with your web pages, and ultimately visit your event or festival and take part in your activities?

Look at the e-communications that work for you. What makes you want to ‘find out more’? Keep subject lines short and simple, include an offer, use words that inspire an emotion such as ‘jump into action’, ‘fabulous feasts’, ‘inspiring ideas’, ‘gardening delights’, and give customers a real flavour of ‘more to come’ within the content of your subject line.

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8. Communicating with your customers

Make sure you are consistent with your branding and ‘tone of voice’ so customers will recognise who the e-news is from. And make sure this is consistent with your offline marketing (leaflets, posters etc).

Include inspirational imagery so customers can visualise your events and activities, and keep content vibrant and lively, using short sentences that clearly guide readers to what you want them to do next, i.e. ‘find out more about the event’, ‘book tickets’, ‘enter a prize draw’, etc.

People want quick and easy content that guides them to the key information they need, i.e. more about your events and activities and what they need to do to attend them.

9. Keeping your customers interested and loyal

Think about how you can keep your customers coming back for more and attending your events and activities year-on-year. Send timed communications for that ‘feel good’ factor, e.g. Easter, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day. Encourage them to interact by asking them in your e-news to:

Click through to follow you on Twitter

Click through to enter a photo competition for them to upload images taken at your events onto Flickr

Click through to enter a visitor survey with the chance to be entered into a prize draw

Personalise your communications as much as possible and make customers feel ‘special’ by ‘thanking them’ for responses, comments, suggestions, etc, and keep asking them to feed through their comments via your social media

channels. And make sure you respond to, and if possible solve, negative feedback quickly.

10. Monitoring and evaluating

Evaluating the effectiveness of your e-communications will provide a measurement of results, will help you build a loyal customer database, and gives you an opportunity to identify how customers like to interact and the communication channels that work best for them. Evaluate your online communications by: Monitoring the number of ‘opt-ins and opt-

outs’

Monitoring the number of customers who ‘open’ your e-news

Measuring the ‘click throughs’ to your web pages

Measuring the number of new ‘sign-ups’ to your e-communications

Measuring the effectiveness of competitions and take-up of offers

Measuring the increase in twitter followers, facebook fans, and comments to your blog

Measure the numbers of tickets you sell or attendances you encourage

FURTHER INFORMATION

The Benefits of e-marketing – Business Gateway - www.business.scotland.gov.uk

E-Mail Marketing for Dummies

Scottish Borders COUNCIL www.scotborders.gov.uk