So, you’ve organised an event, and you want to know who your visitors are. Logically speaking, knowledge about your target group helps you to tailor your event to what your visitors want. You can download information about your visitors as a customer database and use it to your advantage. In our blog, we’ll use the example of a beer tasting to show you what you can do with a customer database.

Imagine, you and I start organising beer tastings near Tilburg. You’re the beer taster, and me? Well, I just love beer.

Over the past few months, we've passionately been working with hops, yeast and a range of different flavours, and have now we've finally organised our first beer tasting.

After the first edition, we put our heads together and discuss what to do next. We plan to:

1. Send our (future) visitors’ emails with updates;
2. Find sponsors to invest in our taste sensation;
3. Use our customer database as our foundation when we advertise on Facebook.

You might see it coming, but we’re going to use our customer database to tackle each of these issues.

A customer database to send emails with updates:

First of all, it’s important that we download our customer database. We’ve never done this before, so we read this manual first.

Eventix's system allows us to download a customer database in different ways, as we see in the picture. Because we want to send mails with updates, we select 'Direct Mail'.

If we open the file, it’ll look something like this:

In addition to the email address provided, the last column is significant. The reason for this is that it has to do with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Since May 25th 2018, we’re no longer allowed to send e-mails willy-nilly; visitors indicate whether we’re allowed to send emails with updates. If you see a ‘1’ the visitor wants to be kept informed, there is a ‘0’ the visitor would rather not.

Also, we see that most mails have the same domain, which allows us to conclude that the visit to our beer tasting was probably a company outing. If we see this pattern more often in our customer database, we may want to consider offering a 'company outing package'.

2. Using a customer database to find sponsors.

The second point of attention is finding sponsors and, believe it or not; our customer database is invaluable in this respect. You can expect any potential sponsor to ask the question ''What's in it for me?”.

The answer: ''Your target group will be at the tasting and are potential buyers of your product or service, after all''.

To discover our target group, we’ll go back to downloading our customer database. When we were sending emails, we selected 'Direct Mail' from the dropdown menu, but now that we’re looking for sponsors, we’ll choose 'Orders'.

After downloading the file, we’ll open it and see something similar to this:

(This screenshot has been edited a bit. A 'real' customer database contains a number of additional columns, such as trackers and promotional codes.)

EVENTIX TIP: Lost your ticket(s)? If you have a visitor at your entrance who has lost their ticket(s), you can use the order_id in the first column to find them

Only the metadata in your customer database is relevant to a sponsor; in our example, these are the last three columns, which represent your visitors’ cities, gender and age.

These columns reveal three things:

1. The tasters are all men;
2. They are between 24 and 35 years old;
3. Except for one, all of them live in the triangle Tilburg-Den Bosch-Eindhoven.

This is valuable to know before if we start to approach sponsors. You can imagine the owner of a nail salon may burst out laughing if we ask them to sponsor an event aimed at men between 24 and 35. You might have slightly better odds approaching a barber; seeing as your visitors are all men who may very well want their hair cut and styled.

3. A customer base, Facebook and similar target groups.

In addition to sending emails and approaching sponsors, a customer database is useful if we’re going to use Facebook as a tool.

We have an idea of our target group and want to use this knowledge, such as where our visitors are from, to advertise on Facebook.

When creating a Custom Audience, we can choose to advertise in the Groningen region, but we want to reach as many beer lovers as possible who’ll actually drop by. It doesn’t matter how good our beer is, the chance that beer lovers will come to us from Groningen is quite slim. It’s much more logical to set up the triangle of Tilburg-Den Bosch-Eindhoven as an advertising area.

Would you like to know more about how to use a customer database? Send an email to info@eventix.io or use the chat on the right side of your screen!