As venues across the UK get ready for reopening, now’s the time to make sure you hit the ground running – competition will be fierce.
The market and consumers have changed during lockdown – so here are our top tips for staying ahead of the pack:
Welcome your visitors safely
The wellbeing of your staff and event attendees is a massive concern for the near future.
You need robust procedures for making sure visitors are going to be safe, that their flow through your venue is fast and that you can easily collect any necessary data for track and trace.
You want the process of gaining entry to your venue to be fast and efficient for attendees, with the minimum of touch – ideally with a QR code emailed to the attendee so they can gain fast access.
Visitor management software makes it easy to:
- Send pre-screening questionnaires
- Manage questionnaire responses
- Control venue access
- Record visitor data
- Send out the QR codes and confirmation emails
- Create touch-free visitor management
See how to keep clients safe and manage them efficiently:
Digging deep into your data
It’s probably some time since you’ve had live events , so think about identifying high-quality client data – it means you can drive marketing campaigns a lot more effectively.
So check your data to see:
- Is the company still in business?
- Is the personal data up to date?
- Have the client contacts changed?
- Is the data complete or missing key information?
- Do you have an effective mechanism for collecting data?
- Are you holding data in multiple places?
- Have you got a strategy for de-duplicating data?
- Are you holding client data that is old?
- Is the data actionable? Can you identify your most profitable clients?
- What are the sources of your sales enquiries and which are working best?
Review your internal processes for collecting and storing data and ensure you can take action using it.
6 ways venue management software powers up the way you use data:
- It keeps all your client data in one place
- You can easily de-duplicate data
- You can quickly export data to Excel for analysis
- It’s simple to anonymise and purge client data
- It provides an easy-to-use interface for updating client data
- You can easily identify your top clients by revenue
Creating a great marketing machine
With a few weeks to go, now is the optimum time to be sending out marketing messages to customers old and new.
Rather than sending out a scattershot email blast, take a more sophisticated and nuanced approach. With so many marketeers vying for attention in your prospects’ inboxes you need to be engaging with potential customers intelligently.
This is where marketing automation comes into play. Setting up multiple campaigns based on prospects’ behaviour such as revisiting the website, can trigger a whole series of follow up emails – automatically.
To create the right balance of creating multiple campaigns while identifying and targeting engaged prospects, a CRM system integrated with the venue management software is the perfect combination.
This approach gives you:
- Actionable data for client retention campaigns
- Attractive email templates
- Scheduling for effective social media campaigns
- Automated lead nurture campaigns for engaged email prospects
- Lead scoring to identify warm prospects for the sales team to follow up
- A joined-up process from initial web enquiry to event to client retention
Integration – the key to unlocking more deals
Once the marketing is up to speed, it’s the turn of sales. The reopening of events is a fantastic opportunity to engage anew with prospects.
The sales processes needs to be fit to capitalise on all that marketing effort so you can maximise revenues. With so much client interaction happening digitally via email and web you need to be able to manage client interactions effortlessly.
With a CRM solution the majority of the admin can be automated so your sales team can focus on revenue generation. Leading CRMs, such as Microsoft Dynamics, combine automation and Office integration with artificial intelligence for an added advantage.
Utilising the combined power of venue management software and CRM you can achieve:
- A streamlined client engagement process – all client communication is captured
- A better enquiry management process
- A better client experience – stunning proposals created with ease
- Improved pipeline reporting – unlock those “stuck” opportunities with ease
- Better client retention and account management
- 24/7 selling thanks to online booking integration
Conclusion
Venues have had the toughest time in their history – but opportunity lies ahead.
Getting the processes in place now and developing an integrated technology stack for visitors, data, sales and marketing will future-proof your business.
Plan now, and you’ll be in a good position to prosper, thanks to:
- Improved visitor safety and satisfaction
- Actionable and responsive data
- Laser-targeted marketing
- Increased client revenue
If all goes to plan a happy Summer lies ahead as event attendees flock back joyously to their favourite venues and live events. And with the right planning now, the benefits will go on long after the initial novelty of hosting attendees becomes successful business as usual.
Discover more about how technology can power you process improvement strategy – get in touch for a discussion with one of our experts.
