Event CRM and its significance for event marketing

What is a CRM?

The abbreviation CRM comes from English and stands for customer relationship management. Translated, CRM stands for customer relationship management in the sense of a company's continuous focus on its customers or stakeholders. A CRM system serves as a central platform for managing all customer data and interactions.

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What are the goals of a CRM system?

Overall, CRM primarily pursue's three main goals:

• Acquisition of new customers
• customer loyalty
• Improving customer experience
   

Therefore, a CRM system should support these three essential activities of a company through a central database and automated processes.

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What is the importance of a CRM system in event marketing?

Events are often held to attract new customers and retain customers. In addition, events can involve a variety of interactions between the target group and the event organisation. For these two reasons, a CRM system is of great importance in the context of event marketing. A CRM system can be seen as a central platform for supporting event marketing. The CRM system is used for the following:

• Central Data Management of Contacts
• Historisation of event activities per contact
• Categorisation of contact characteristics such as interests
• Recording of potential new customer contacts

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What are the benefits of an event CRM?

If a company already has a CRM system, it can also offer many benefits for event marketing and initially simplify event organisation as follows:

• Holistic customer view with all interactions — even outside event marketing — to measure the entire customer experience chain
• Historisation of event activities per contact
• Categorisation of contact characteristics such as interests
• Recording of potential new customer contacts

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What needs to be considered for event marketing?

If the contacts of the target group to be addressed are available in the CRM system for an event, the CRM initial is used to select the corresponding contacts. The following, non-exhaustive points must be considered:

• Data selection: Are the necessary characteristics or categories of my target group available in the CRM system? Do the features or categories match the subject area of my event?
• Data quality: Is the necessary data quality available so that the target group can be addressed personally for the initial invitation? Is the data complete?
• Data basis: Has it been defined which data from event marketing should flow back into the CRM system?
• Data consistency: Can the necessary data consistency (for example using a unique customer ID) be ensured so that the respective event activities can be assigned to the correct contact data set?
• Data Protection: Is the necessary consent from CRM contact available for the intended use of data?

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The limits of a CRM system in event marketing?

Often, a CRM system does not offer specialised functions in event execution to support event managers. In particular, the following functionalities are generally not covered by a CRM system:

• Send automatic email campaigns based on participant status
• Create event websites with agenda & speakers
• Implement booking logics with capacities and participant groups
• Comment or chat functions before or during the event
• Integrated online payment options for selling tickets
• Integrated virtual and hybrid event logics
• Combination of physical and virtual event experiences (hybrid events)
• Personalised e-tickets with QR codes
• Integrated badge function
• Event check-in function
• Detailed event reports
  

On the one hand, the lack of functions means that relevant information for event managers cannot be collected in the first place and, on the other hand, that event organisation requires a lot of effort due to a lack of automation.

Conclusion

A CRM system can support event marketing in terms of a higher-level and holistic customer view and increase marketing efficiency. If event marketing is an essential part of a company, it is recommended, however, to use professional event management software such as Oniva. This gives event managers overview and control, saves time and thus simplifies the entire event organisation.