The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a golden opportunity for event businesses to gain maximum value from their data.
Event businesses will be able to create targeted marketing and communication strategies that align with their customers interests and preferences. To achieve the most benefit from the regulation, Acrotrend suggests undertaking a modernisation journey which will help create a single view of customers.
GDPR will change the way we arrange, market, attend and follow up events and in turn provide us with a truly holistic view of our customers. By utilising GDPR principles, event businesses are able to communicate transparency and show clean, customer data with all of the transactions, interactions and history at every stage of the marketing life cycle.
Steps to Modernisation
When taking steps to modernise, or make business competitive in the 21st century, the most important thing to understand is the customer journey and what this experience will now look like when incorporating GDPR. By doing this, you achieve GDPR compliant privacy built-in at a company-wide level as the company evolves.
Using the right technologies and processes to keep data current, accurate and compliant increases efficiency by consolidating and simplifying backup and recovery procedures. Implementing a customer information management solution with the capability for data profiling, standardisation of data, advanced data matching and consolidation, will all help to create the single view of the customer.
What is the Single View and Why is it Important?
The single view of the customer incorporates master customer data from all sources, all transactions and all interactions at every stage of the marketing process, along with the full customer history, this is the ‘golden record’ of the customer which provides a fully holistic view.
A single view of the customer gives you greater insight into your customers and helps you get to know them better. This helps you to understand your customer’s past behaviour, past purchases, interaction preferences, history and even their propensity to buy new goods and services.
By matching, merging and cleansing your data, you can identify each single customer, which provides the foundation to link all of the customer interactions from different processes and systems. This will help you to gain a broader understanding of the flow of data through the marketing life cycle.
There is no doubt that GDPR will help the events industry to understand their customers even better. The fundamental principles will aid in undertaking a modernisation journey to create a single view of the customer which will empower event organisers to market more efficiently and effectively and will enable them to provide more useful, relevant and enjoyable experiences for their audiences.
The modernisation journey and single customer view help to make sense of the data that is collected in the events world through multiple channels and interactions with customers – Read our blog on GDPR in Action in the Real World.
The changes needed to modernise your organisation and achieve the single view of the customer may seem like a huge undertaking – but it should be approached in a positive way and if you keep your eyes on the prize, the prize being gaining that single view of your attendees and customers then GDPR is a positive regulation. The outcome will be customer trust, transparent processes and targeted communications – next week our blog outline the reason for why we think GDPR is positive disruption.
Our next blog will explain in more detail how GDPR is a golden opportunity to embark on a modernisation journey and gain a “Single View of the Customer” is and demonstrate how companies can gain a truly holistic view of the customer whilst also being transparent and uncover trends and insights from their data.