Posted in News on 24th June 2022
Customer relationship marketing – automatically
While existing box office data gives us enormous behavioural detail, it misses critical elements of data that enables us to understand the audiences’ needs and motivations for attending and how they feel about your organisation.
Booking behaviour is not a reliable proxy for these factors but, until now, there has been no easy way to get this kind of enhanced data. And no way to integrate it into our systems. This has been the missing link that has stopped our sector doing truly world-class Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The ‘R’ in the acronym has been missing. With the Culture Segments TagTool this rich ‘Relationships’ data is now on tap.
What is the TagTool?
The Culture Segments TagTool is a clever, automated web app that can be seamlessly integrated into your website, database or sign-up form and easily added to the audience’s online booking path.
How does it work?
Your bookers answer a quick series of short ‘Golden Questions’. It takes about two minutes. They press ‘submit’ and are taken to a web page of your choice. That’s where the clever bit starts. Sophisticated algorithms analyse their answers and determine six crucial relationship attributes for each respondent.
Using a secure internet link, the TagTool then automatically writes these six attributes straight into the correct record in your box office system.
Next time you go to your system to get data for planning, to pull a list to prospect for a new campaign, to track current activity or to create a report, all six of these rich relationship attributes will automatically be available to you.
When do we use it?
You can capture the data at point of sale, or periodically send the questions out in bulk to everyone on your system who is not yet tagged.
What does it capture and tag?
You can choose the elements that are most important for your organisation to tag in your records, but with a very small set of elegant questions it will capture the following for each respondent:
- What Culture Segment they are in
- What their wider level of cultural engagement is
- Their emotional brand equity score for your organisation
- Their propensity to join your membership scheme (high, medium, low)
- Their propensity to donate to your organisation (high, medium, low)
- Their willingness to follow and take programming risks on your recommendation (high, medium, low).
How can it help me?
All of this rich relationship data will give you a deeper, more powerful understanding of your audiences – on tap.
For starters, this new insight will enable you to:
- Understand the motivations and core values of different bookers
- Understand the sought outcomes of different audience segments and plan the most appropriate products and services to satisfy these
- Set appropriate and achievable targets – mapping which segments are most likely to respond to which parts of your offer
- Be more effective – crafting different flavours of communications for different segments
- Be more efficient – focus your efforts on those most likely to respond. But instead of just over-serving the most recent or frequent bookers, identifying where real value lies – building and recognising relationships
- Increase the success of your development campaigns – targeting those more likely to join, donate or volunteer – with a message that is likely to motivate this relationship step according to their Culture Segment
- Do less more effectively and increase return on investment – make your budgets work harder
- Provide a common language for talking about audiences that bridges the understanding of marketers, educators, touring companies and front-of-house and box office staff: putting audiences at the centre of discussion and informing strategic choices
Our ThinkingWe knew it was a leap of faith to embrace a new system so readily, but having previously worked with MHM, I trust their approach and rigour of application. As an organisation we are all encouraged and inspired by the work so far; and the understanding of culture segments across the arts sector has created a shared, and specific, language when discussing potential audiences – rather than simply talking about ‘genre’ and ‘age’ – which is genuinely exciting and creative and in time should reap great results.
Sarah Hunt, Executive Programming, Marketing & Media
