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Using data for marketing & communicating to your visitors
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I think the value that you would be able to measure, is probably how you spend your marketing budgets going forward. So yes, so the direct communications that we can do with our customers, you know we can track the success of those. We can track how many people are reading it, opening up and going through to the purchasing, sort of a ticket. So we can measure the success of the each and individual communication. We now spend a lot more time on that and we give a longer window for communicating to our database, than we probably did before and as a result, we then have a smaller window, where we go to a sort of wider audience.
Hopefully having secured a certain percentage of our total sales with our own database and increasing those retention figures. The, when people want to buy, is now better and better informed about that. So we can book our radio, book our outdoor activity, within the window that we think is going to be most effective. Making sure that our money is, we’re getting the best value we can for that spend and then in time what we should find, is that we’re spending less and less with that outdoor and radio. Because obviously, as our retention grows and our ability to communicate via the digital platforms, which is much easier to measure.
We would probably invest in that and you know there is a lot of small budget, digital activity, that you can do, that you can measure and give you the confidence to know if it’s working or not, before you go to the more expensive week-long campaigns, with maybe more traditional forms of media. I think they’re both important. I don’t think that we would ever be able to grow our business without them. But possibly the shift changes, in terms of the weighting of where we spend the money, more in favour of where we can we can measure it and and get the results from. So something that we started to do, is look at the operational feedback.
I mean we have always had post race day questionnaires, but obviously the more people buy in advance, the more people we can speak to after the event, to find out what their thoughts are. The questions that we ask and the information that we get back, grows and grows every year. So really starting with that feedback, when we look at our events and how to improve them. I think that, that’s going to be a continuous journey. Looking at the operations, we, our fixtures change a little bit each year, so we’re always looking for new opportunities. We’re also looking for what customers really want. Whether that is packages that they’re prepared to pay a little bit more for, for comfort and experience.
Versus maybe families, who are looking for, you know for even better value, they might be on a smaller budget, but they still like a day out. So we can really tailor our experience to certain days. I think in the short to medium term, that’s that’s the kind of, the vision, that we have and I think long term, the opportunities are endless. But I don’t think you can think ten years down the line with data, because technology will have moved on. Customer trends, experiences, expectations, will have moved on as well. So staying staying at least up-to-date, if not slightly ahead of that, would be you know the ambition. The questions we ask of the data is, who are our customers?
and what do they want? How can we build that into our future plans? and then how can we communicate it back to the race goers? To say we listen to you and this is what we’ve done. You know so, so we obviously get, you know if we get a lovely sunny day, everybody’s in a happy mood. But it might bring more people than we expected and so have our bars coped? and and so we we ask customers to rate their experience across the whole customer journey and that information is really important, to make sure that we in basically deliver for them.
A great way in which customer data can be used to increase your productivity is to inform your marketing strategy and how you communicate to your visitors.
In this video you will hear from the Musselburgh Racecourse again, but this time in more detail about how their sales in advance strategy has improved the way in which they communicate with their loyal customers but also how they manage to reach a wider audience. While watching the video, focus on what Sarah says about:
- How they use their loyal customer profile to build on and expand to a wider audience.
- How they use data to create relevant and focused visitor communication and grow their sales.
- Why they recommend experimenting with small samples.
This article is from the online course:
Understanding Data in the Tourism Industry
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