Customer relationship management (CRM) is currently the big marketing trend at larger institutions, including the Museum of London where it has been a central plant of its strategy for the past two years.
According to Wikipedia, the CRM approach collects data from many different sources and analyses this in order to improve relationships with customers.
Rooted in the Museum of London’s strategic plan to grow its footfall and become better known, CRM is the biggest development in its marketing strategy and has received a “large” capital investment. This has led to a new CRM system and two new members of the team.
“With the pressure for the sector to be more commercial, CRM offers the chance to cross- and up-sell, and allows you to make more assumptions about your visitors,” says Andrew Marcus, the director of communications at the museum.
Its CRM strategy is fundamentally driven by email and it has a number of ways of collecting addresses, including through ticketing to events and paid-for exhibitions; Wi-Fi sign-up, which requires an email address; and via visitor questionnaires that give an option to sign up to an e-newsletter. The latter is incentivised with entry to a competition for signing up.
“Once we have an email address we can contact visitors to ask for more information and that helps to build up our knowledge of them, and inform our wider strategy,” Marcus says. “For example, the postcodes we collect from pre-ticketed events influences where we buy our offline media, such as posters.”
Facebook also plays a key role in lead generation and email capture. The museum has invested money in its video content, which is made by an outside agency. The content is then “boosted” on Facebook via a paid-for campaign.
“A small spend goes a long way on Facebook, and it is easy to build a Facebook audience very quickly,” Marcus says.
The museum created video content to promote last summer’s Tattoo London exhibition. It spent £1,000 to boost the content via sponsored posts and promotion on Facebook news feeds, and the content quickly garnered 100,000 views.
Marcus says the museum has also used Facebook for “look-alike marketing”. Using the email address of existing visitors, Facebook will find people with a similar profile and promote content to them.
“This helps us to get new likes for a budget of around £500,” Marcus says. “It is where CRM and social media come together.”
The Museum of London’s strategy is all about segmentation and targeting. Investing in a CRM system and employing a dedicated CRM manager with expertise in how to read the data has been essential to making it work.
“Everything has to be relevant and heavily targeted,” Marcus says. “If someone books a ticket for Mudlarks children’s gallery, we know they are likely to be a family visitor, and if someone comes to a debate on punk then they are probably an adult with an interest in music. We don’t bombard people with irrelevant information.”
The museum continues to use traditional marketing such as PR, print, including ads in Time Out magazine, and posters to continue growing its brand awareness. CRM supports this by encouraging repeat sales and visits.
“I think it’s really important to get the mix right and that is in a campaign-by-campaign basis,” Marcus says.
“We believe the strategy is working as we expect to have attracted 1.5 million visitors at both of our sites by the end of the financial year in April. This at a time when footfall across London museums in general is falling.”
According to Wikipedia, the CRM approach collects data from many different sources and analyses this in order to improve relationships with customers.
Rooted in the Museum of London’s strategic plan to grow its footfall and become better known, CRM is the biggest development in its marketing strategy and has received a “large” capital investment. This has led to a new CRM system and two new members of the team.
“With the pressure for the sector to be more commercial, CRM offers the chance to cross- and up-sell, and allows you to make more assumptions about your visitors,” says Andrew Marcus, the director of communications at the museum.
Its CRM strategy is fundamentally driven by email and it has a number of ways of collecting addresses, including through ticketing to events and paid-for exhibitions; Wi-Fi sign-up, which requires an email address; and via visitor questionnaires that give an option to sign up to an e-newsletter. The latter is incentivised with entry to a competition for signing up.
“Once we have an email address we can contact visitors to ask for more information and that helps to build up our knowledge of them, and inform our wider strategy,” Marcus says. “For example, the postcodes we collect from pre-ticketed events influences where we buy our offline media, such as posters.”
Facebook also plays a key role in lead generation and email capture. The museum has invested money in its video content, which is made by an outside agency. The content is then “boosted” on Facebook via a paid-for campaign.
“A small spend goes a long way on Facebook, and it is easy to build a Facebook audience very quickly,” Marcus says.
The museum created video content to promote last summer’s Tattoo London exhibition. It spent £1,000 to boost the content via sponsored posts and promotion on Facebook news feeds, and the content quickly garnered 100,000 views.
Marcus says the museum has also used Facebook for “look-alike marketing”. Using the email address of existing visitors, Facebook will find people with a similar profile and promote content to them.
“This helps us to get new likes for a budget of around £500,” Marcus says. “It is where CRM and social media come together.”
The Museum of London’s strategy is all about segmentation and targeting. Investing in a CRM system and employing a dedicated CRM manager with expertise in how to read the data has been essential to making it work.
“Everything has to be relevant and heavily targeted,” Marcus says. “If someone books a ticket for Mudlarks children’s gallery, we know they are likely to be a family visitor, and if someone comes to a debate on punk then they are probably an adult with an interest in music. We don’t bombard people with irrelevant information.”
The museum continues to use traditional marketing such as PR, print, including ads in Time Out magazine, and posters to continue growing its brand awareness. CRM supports this by encouraging repeat sales and visits.
“I think it’s really important to get the mix right and that is in a campaign-by-campaign basis,” Marcus says.
“We believe the strategy is working as we expect to have attracted 1.5 million visitors at both of our sites by the end of the financial year in April. This at a time when footfall across London museums in general is falling.”