Posted on 29 July 2009 by Hurol No Comments

Integration: a must-have for event marketers

Getting your systems to talk to each other is one of the most sure-fire ways to achieve efficiency and boost business performance. This holds particularly true for marketers.

Following the recent launch of our Events Manager solution, we’ve been rolling up our sleeves and helping clients integrate the solution with their CRM.

Why have we made CRM integration a priority?

It’s simple. Integrating your events registration system with your CRM system gives you more powerful insights into customer interests, attitudes and behaviour. From this, you can create meaningful dialogue that strengthens the relationship, into the long term.

The costs of NOT integrating

When we conducted research for the Event Marketing Whitepaper, a common pain point for the businesses we spoke to was a lack of integration with a CRM. While most event marketing platforms come with a database that enables some level of segmentation and targeting, full integration with all channels (call centre, snail mail, and so on) is sadly non-existent.

This is despite the fact that the costs of not integrating quickly add up:

• Time and resources costs – every time you launch a new event, you have to start again, inputting customer information, updating details, and so on.
• Reputation costs – more significantly, without integration, targeted marketing is virtually impossible. Given that every interaction with a customer is a test of what they think of you, if you send them an invitation to an event similar to one they previously declined interest in, you risk losing their trust and respect. Once lost, it’s pretty hard to get back.

On the flip side, integration of your CRM with other marketing systems like event registration gives you:

• Richer insights into customer preferences and behaviours
• Business intelligence
• Significant cost and time savings.

CRM Adapters make it as easy as plug and play

Every organisation needs the ability to synch information coming from various marketing channels.

To address this in the events space, we have developed CRM Adapters for our Events Manager solution. This plug-and-play approach makes it simple for organisations to start using Events Manager, synching the data collected within this system with their existing CRM.

It means you can start reaping the benefits of having customer information at your fingertips every time you launch an event.

Already, we have integrated Events Manager with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com. Plans are afoot to build CRM Adapters for Interaction and Oracle On Demand shortly.

Do you have another CRM you’d like to see integrated with Events Manager? Talk to Bienalto about it today. Call us on +61 2 8356 3000 or email info@bienalto.com.