Posts filed under ‘Loyalty’
Relationship Marketing: Old wine in a new bottle?
The article Relationship Marketing: Old wine in a new bottle? presents a very good discussion that starts with “Why is marketing not working?” and the need for organisations to allign themselves to ensure a customer focus in a changing environment and consumers.
It describes the evolutions from transaction to relationship marketing and from reactive to proactive and even collaborative marketing.
The increasing importance of CRM is put in context:
- “When you lose a customer, you lose his lifetime value.
- A 5% increase in customer loyalty will result in profit increase of more than 25%.
- In nearly every industry, 20% of customers account for 80% of the profit.
- Seven out of ten customers switch to competition due to poor services.
- It takes up to twelve good experiences to overcome one bad experience of a customer.“
“These made marketers realise the advantages of CRM – increased loyalty of consumers, decreased transaction cost, delivery of consistent, high quality customer experience, more repeat business, improved cost management and increase in profit.“
The essential organisational change management required is put in context, as is the role of technology and the fact that CRM is not panacea for ailments.
“CRM as an integrated business strategy that places customer at the centre of a business’s consciousness. The organisation should align all channels and business processes against target customers based on their value to the business and establish an enterprise-wide means for capturing, analysing and shaping customer behaviour. The business objective of CRM should be clearly understood and a consumer-centric culture should be fostered across the organisation. It should be understood that fundamental changes in the way customers are treated cannot happen by some reworking of the sales and marketing departments. The whole company- the way it’s organised and managed, the training imparted to the employees, evaluation and reward schemes for the employees – must be reworked.“
The conclusion summarises well:
“Relationship marketing has evolved from the age-old paradigm practised by the corner shops. The changing consumer behaviour made it imperative that the companies align their processes and practices with the consumer at the centre and not their products. CRM is thus a process to build profitable relationship with customers, thereby fostering repeat business. For successful implementation of CRM, the whole organisation culture – the way people think and behave – needs to be made consumer friendly. Any marketing paradigm, be it relationship or collaboration based, can prove effective only if marketing is seen as a philosophy cutting across the organisation and not as a functional silo performed by marketing department.“
13 July, 2011 at 4:16 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
Are the “new” ticketing models really new, let alone better?
The article GigsWiz Launches at Midem Providing Artists With New Revenue Stream reports that “the landscape of gig promotion is changing rapidly“. So why are the same old models being rolled out and trumpeted as new and innovative?
“By providing the artist a share of the ticket sales revenue, GigsWiz becomes a key factor in increasing ticket sales.” So let me know if I have this correct, the event owner is paying no booking fees and the ticket agent is sharing revenue with the artist. So it sounds like the artist is being paid a split of the additional outside fees charged to consumers to buy tickets.
GigsWiz does appear to assisting artists to go direct to consumers, but it is not cutting out the other middlemen. So you have to ask how efficient this new model is.
“Fans are increasingly linked to bands online and the traditional marketing methods used by promoters are increasingly inefficient at reaching fans.“
Surely the most efficient (and dare I say effective) model is for the artist or event owner to deal directly with the fan or consumer without the need for the interventions (and added margins) of others?
From that sort of foundation, real Customer Relationship Management is possible.
27 January, 2011 at 9:49 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia 1 comment
Mapping The Customer Journey
A Customer Journey Map illustrates the steps your customer/s go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination of these. Think of customer touchpoints and the diversity of ways your organisation reaches the potential audience at different stages of their decision process. That decision can also be ‘No I am not interested“.
Bitner describes six steps in the self-service technology adoption process:
- Awareness
- Investigation
- Evaluation
- Trial
- Repeated use
- Commitment
That sounds like a good framework to consider for online ticketing at the very least. But, actually, I think this is analogous to the loyalty ladder applied often to the arts i.e. a continuum of increasing engagement and commitment.
The Customer Journey Canvas is a clever map that defines a customer journey and in particular the role for CRM in that.
3 December, 2010 at 11:11 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia 1 comment
Audience Development: Focusing on the audience at the core of your organisation
“If all bookers for the arts in a one year period were seated in a single theatre only 54% of the seats would be filled with bo
okers retained from the last two years.“
Encouraging a larger more strategic approach to Audience Development, Audiences NI has released an “Audience Development Manifesto” with the publication of Audience Development: Focusing on the audience at the core of your organisation.
I like the definition of Audience Development from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland:
“Audience development involves the identification, engagement and retention of audiences. It is a planned and strategic management function aimed at delivering organisational objectives. Audience development sets out to affect a change in the attitudes, understanding and behaviour of both existing and potential audiences. It seeks to remove barriers, deepen relationships with audiences and create greater inclusion in the arts.“
The free publication available online includes a precis of what good audience development looks like:
11. “We plan our audience development as an inter-disciplinary organisation; we don’t just leave it to an individual or department.“
… and what bad audience development looks like.
14. ” We see audience development as additional work that is hard to find the time to do, but have to tick the box. “
Like this:
26 November, 2010 at 4:34 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
Turning First-Timers into Life-Timers: Addressing the true drivers of churn
I stumbled on some interesting research today. Box office data analysis that resulted in customer clusters that were explored further to isolate drivers of behaviour and then formulate some appropriate offers.
The research was undertaken by Oliver Wyman for nine orchestras in the US to develop an understanding of the barriers to and motivators of repeat visitation, and to identify ways to stimulate repurchasing, increase frequency, and reduce churn.
Some of the findings were seemingly self-evident, but interesting to see the potential quantified.
“Churn is highly correlated with tenure and frequency of attendance:
- Tenure: 84% of first-timers churn vs. only 20% of those who have
attended performances for ≥4 consecutive years - Frequency: churn of 86% for customers attending one performance vs.
only 11% for customers who attend 8+ performances in a year“
The clustering identified an audience segmentof great potential named Unconverted Trialists that attended once and occupied 12% of the seats in a house, but their potential was evinced by the fact that they equated to 39% of customers.
For unconverted trialists, the most powerful levers for increasing retention rate were discounting, programming, and day of the week. Secondary levers included promotions (free drinks etc.), free exchanges, music information, seat upgrades, and select-your-own seats.
55% of the audience was new in 2006-07 and Oliver Wyman recommended:
“Orchestras should now also focus on retaining these new customers so they can slowly mature into core audience members.“
Two other recomendations were:
“Focus on providing a seamless and social end-to-end experience to unconverted trialists. Use tailored promotional offers to sell another single ticket or two to unconverted trialists before asking for a commitment.” The latter makes a lot of sense with the sequentially increasing engagement of the Loyalty Ladder in mind. It was interesting to see that Product was one of the variables that OliverWyman saw as warranting a tweak.
The nine orchestras that participated were: Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. New York Philharmonic, The Philadelphia Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony.
Turning First-Timers into Life-Timers
24 November, 2010 at 2:08 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
Customer Database = the Key to the Future?
Other industries are always interesting to watch for clues and ideas.
You can imagine my surprise to read the following passage in Databases Key to the Revenue-Streams of the Future:
“audience-development professionals need to focus their work on database management. “This is an essential competitive advantage and a barrier to entry … It’s a 3-D inside-and-outside picture of the audience that our marketers want. Whose job is it to build and maintain this? It’s the audience-development person.“”
Was this an enlightened arts organisations or a visonary venue? No, it was Canon Communication (now UBM Canon) a media products company serving the advanced manufacturing sector focussing on medical devices and electronics engineering.
It then suggests the audience development role is “the audience-development function is out in front of both editorial and sales.” I would moot it is also, or should be , an ambassador for customer service as well. Value is delivered to customers by the appropriate offering at the right time.
The scale is large for a company, with revenue of $106 million with 74 separate databases. “All of our audiences were scattered, and it was not a pretty process to try and merge them,” However, that is a problem that many arts organisations will recognise. Reconciling different sources of truth, let alone standardising subsequent information collection.
22 November, 2010 at 11:11 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
How to offer $10 tickets with no booking fees?
A nice case study from Joe Pug
“Joe wanted to offer his fans the fairest-priced ticket possible, so he sold a batch of tickets direct-to-fan for exactly $10, with no additional fees or charges above the retail price.“ The goal was to “ensure his fans could afford to see his show.“
Hang on isn’t that exactly the way that Pearl Jam had issues (albeit unsuccessfully) with the influence of Ticketmaster on low ticket prices back in 1994?
“In 1994, the rock band Pearl Jam appealed to the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, complaining that Ticketmaster adopted monopolistic practices and refused to lower service fees for the band’s tickets. At the time, Pearl Jam wanted to keep ticket prices under $20 for their fans, with service charges no greater than $1.80.“
Looks like Joe will be able to continue to look after his fans as long as he does not use venues with exclusive ticketing contracts! But, I digress – back to Joe Pug:
Joe Pugg ”mailed out 20,000 free copies of his two-song promo CD with handwritten messages inside. He gave away a full EP (”In The Meantime”) for free in exchange for email addresses.“
17 November, 2010 at 1:04 pm Tim Roberts ARTS Australia 1 comment
Sustainable Growth needs Customer Focus = People and Leadership
An interesting post from Adrian Swinscoe on MyCustomer.com: Customer strategy: How to cure ‘hole in my bucket’ syndrome
It discusses Reichheld and the foundations of his Net Promoter work and then refers to Chris Anderson and the Long Tail and how technology is “fundamentally changing the way companies do business and how they are viewed by their customers.“
However, it is the simple model supported by the stool image (right) that I find most interesting. He suggests that “sustainable and customer focused growth strategies are enabled by two things: people and leadership.
- Customer focus is all about ideas and strategies that will help companies build customer retention, loyalty, service, experience and their brand. I believe that if you do these things correctly, referrals and great word of mouth will flow naturally.
- People is about ways to help build the team and culture, develop innovation, improve communication and increase engagement with employees.
- Leadership is about how to develop the vision, strategy, and leadership style, whilst also cultivating innovation and managing the change that you will need, to create the sustainable business that you want.“
Guess what – there is no mention of technology! This seeming CRM contradiction was put well by Dr Adrian Payne at the NARPACA Ticketing Professionals Conference in Melbourne in 2008.
“About 92% of CRM costs go towards the technology but … only 25% of CRM success is attributable to technology.“
Similarly it is often said that about 2/3 of CRM projects will fail or fail to deliver on expectations, therefore we need to be addressing a lot more than just buying new software. It ain’t a Field of Dreams.
15 November, 2010 at 11:27 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
What is a tweet worth in ticket sales? 43c?
A colleague Steven Roth pointed out this research Social Commerce: A First Look at the Numbers:
“one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through our ”email friends” application equals $2.34. On an aggregate level across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and our email share tool, each share equals $1.78 in ticket sales.“
Eventbrite has taken a similar approach as mentioned in a previous FULL HOUSES post Building “Real World” Relationships Online and offers an integration with Sales Force CRM software. The Eventbrite Connector makes easy work of the API and allows the export of ticket purchasers to Sales Force to build a prospect database. The issue that is not clear is whether full purchase history is taken across to Sales Force and if the API is two- way. But it is FREE and it is a good start and I suggest that we will see more of this sort of integration with existing standards and less reinventing of the wheel.
18 October, 2010 at 9:29 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
Do you like to pick your own package of benefits?
This is beautiful for its simple clear logic and implementation.- Social
- Insider
- Learning
- Family
- Philanthropy
29 September, 2010 at 10:10 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia Leave a comment
