What’s the Difference Between a CRM and CMS?
First, it’s important to define the difference between a Customer Relationship Management solution, CRM, which enables the collection, management and segmentation of your customers' purchases and interests, and a Content Management System, CMS, which lets you create, manage and publish promotions and marketing assets for your events, update your websites, and can integrate with a CRM to communicate with various audience segments such as donors, patrons, customers and potential new audiences.
In most cases, if you’re not already using CMS and CRM systems, you likely track sales and create your promotions in spreadsheets, word docs or within an email program. Your team may have a loose understanding of who your donors and returning audiences are from their years of engaging with your community (and your spreadsheets). This can be a great temporary approach but it doesn't provide purchase behavior analysis, data security nor the ability to effectively communicate with customers across your owned marketing (i.e. your websites, social media and newsletters).
In other cases, if you are using various CMS and CRM systems, they may be expensive to license, cutting into your event returns and operational costs, and often have limited, if any, integration to each other or to your box office operations software.
In either scenario, your team’s valuable time and resources are then used inefficiently, manually exporting customer data between systems, which leaves lots of room for error, data breaches, duplicating email outreach or missing valuable promotional opportunities.
With the right ticketing CRM, events organisers, promoters, and venues can get more done in less time, and work more efficiently and effectively. Likewise, leveraging a CMS to create and distribute venue, organization, event and donor marketing assets, from one place, frees your team to focus on relationship building and executing exceptional events.
Why your Performing Arts and Culture organization needs a Ticketing CRM?
Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of the Arts program recently wrote an article on its Arts Management & Technology Laboratory blog about the use cases and increasing importance of CRM to Performing Arts and Culture organisations, particularly with regard to better understanding your donor portfolios (and increasing digital giving), as well as event sales and nurturing the interests and development of younger generations of future givers for the health and wellbeing of your organisation.
While creating promotional materials, social media campaigns and updating website copy is generally left to the creative talents of your marketing team and the event’s promoter, the box office team is becoming increasingly responsible for promotions and audience communications, as they generally have more direct insights, and a clearer picture, through their box office software, into who is buying event tickets and why.
In the case of venue bookings, having a greater understanding of the types of events that sell among your venue’s demographics-- by analysing historical and aggregated data from your Google Analytics and Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel, Twitter Conversion and services like Markethype.io-- can better inform event production decisions, “on-sale” promotional strategies and surface the characteristics of an event experience that makes a patron decide to purchase their tickets. This creates new, otherwise untapped marketing opportunities like bundling tickets with other event products or honing in on what they may want out of their event experience in your communication to sell more tickets and products such as merch and concessions.
Further, communicating through unified, integrated software, shared between key event stakeholders, enables more fluid ticket sales and event successes, as well as overall happier donors and customers, even on occasions where an event must be canceled, postponed or seating arrangements must be reconfigured,
Tixly Integrates Ticketing Management with built-in CRM and CMS features
Tix Ticketing prides itself on understanding both the live event customer journey and the operational demands of our customers: the venues and organisations hosting the events. Our team’s extensive backgrounds in ticketing, venue management, event production, Performing Arts, Culture institutions and live event sales & marketing informs how we bring features and services to our software solutions.
Our Ticketing CRM includes
Search for customers using name, phone number or email address.
Ability to segment customers by interest and profiles, whether loyal and returning fans or by additional genres and purchase history.
Integration through powerful APIs to send and receive data between external systems such as PowerBI and Mosaic.
Direct communication to customers from Tix Ticketing or your external newsletter and email systems such as MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Apsis.
Optionally connect payment systems to our CRM to better track customer spends
Secure and GDPR compliance, with everything hosted in Europe using Amazon’s cloud-based platform.
Our Ticketing CMS includes
Automate marketing and social media, when new events go live;
Complete website, social media and email updates with new or amended event information automatically;
Content creation features, enabling direct customer communications from one system, or through 3rd party (API) integrations across your marketing software stack
Integrated tracking data from Google Analytics, Facebook, and other marketing and promotional channels;
Creation of Google (PPC), Facebook Product and other advertising campaigns directly from within Tix Ticketing.
Tixly also puts customers and donors in control, enabling them to create Tix Ticketing profiles within our system to review their ticket purchase history, donation contributions, buy new tickets online, including subscriptions, renewals, membership sales, product sales and gift cards, as well as manage and request refunds, change seating and forward tickets to others where applicable.
