What type of cake’s do your attendees like? You might not have this fine grain of information about your customers yet (or really need it) but these days ignoring your data is effectively the same as ignoring your customers. However this data on it’s own means very little unless you use it to make decisions that have measurable results and work toward reaching your event objectives.

In our experience gaining value from your data is a matter of turning it into customer insights (the human behaviour that contributed to the data) and then into actions for change that are measurable and inline with your event objectives.

Here are our top 3 tips for event marketers looking to use customer insight to effect change:

1. Know what you want to achieve

Before you start you should have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and what success looks like for your event. It might be that you want to use customer insight to increase ticket sales by 10%, this is a great goal and gives you your end game so to speak.

What we then like to help our clients do is break the larger goal into smaller bite-size chunks.

For example let’s say your drive 5000 visitors into your ticket buying process but the abandonment rate is 80% resulting in 1000 ticket sales. To sell 2000 tickets you could either drive twice as many visitors into the ticket buying process or improve the abandonment rate to 60%.

Now this is a fairly simplistic example but it gives you the idea around setting smaller short term goals such as improving conversion rate, lowering abandonment rate or increasing visits to give specific areas of focus and help you reach a bigger long term goal like increase ticket sales.

2. Data is the cake but insight is the icing

Now you have identified long and short-term goals, the process of knowing what data is important to you is much clearer but it is still very easy to become lost in and obsessive over irrelevant information (I have been there, countless hours looking for an answer to a question that wasn’t even asked), so when you delve into the data, stop, take a step back and ask this simple question:

How does this data relate to our goals and what does it tell us about our customers behaviour?

The value is not in the actual data but the insight gained around the customer behaviour that created the data in the first place. It is this that allows you to make decisions, effect change and influence this customer behaviour to achieve your goals.

It may sound like common sense BUT do not eat too much cake, it is all about the topping!

3. Don’t be afraid to fail

It can be painful to admit, but not all of your decisions will work out and you may never feel like you have enough data or customer insight to effect change, but the worse thing you can do in the age of big data is to do nothing, as mentioned at the start of the post this is as good as ignoring your customers.

Even armed with great data from which you generated some fantastic customer insights it is still not a guarantee that the changes you make will have a positive effect, however you will be presented with new data, new insights which may highlight the reasons why the changes didn’t have the impact you thought they would enabling you to revise these or it could possibly give light to new solutions to help you reach your goals that weren’t at the forefront in the previous data.

Your customers are talking to you all the time you just have to delve into the data to see what they are saying and then use this to help reach your event goals.