Attendee data is your secret weapon – own it

Advanced analytics

There are endless ways to cut and splice your data to find those little nuggets of insight that will help you grow your event. And now thanks to AI, you don’t need to be an Excel whizz to break it down and spot patterns.

What you do need is a platform – like CM – that gives you full control over your data. Because while almost all ticketing sites allow you to natively access analytics, and tout this as a selling point, a large proportion of them also make it difficult to export that data and use it elsewhere. In other words, they let you into the showroom but never actually hand over the keys.

And that’s a problem.

Because, the real value of attendee data comes when it is combined with insights from other channels (e.g. website analytics) and applied to find answers to deeper questions, such as: Which social media channel drove the most sales? What has been the highest-converting event description? What distinguishes repeat attendees from people that come once and never again? Attendee data that is easy to access is the first step towards that.

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Promotion is tough. Long-term success hinges on growing your audience with each event and honing your targeting, messaging and personalisation to better engage attendees. Owning your data makes this much easier, reducing your reliance on algorithms and time-consuming marketing tasks.

At the very least, every event should be seen as an opportunity to expand your database and make the next promo cycle easier. Let’s say 25% of your sales come from your mailing list – grow your database by 15% each time you promote an event (using sign-up incentives during checkout or on-site tactics), and in theory your sales from that one channel will grow exponentially.

The problem is that unlike CM, which offers integrated marketing and ticketing, many platforms lack advanced email marketing features. And yet when promoters attempt to export data across to their platform of choice they are met with an overly restrictive and lengthy process.

This also limits how effectively you can target your audience. Clean, accessible data makes things simpler when it comes to building more sophisticated or personalised campaigns. You can easily segment attendees based on previous purchases, interests, or engagement levels, and create tailored welcome flows for different groups. This kind of targeted marketing generally leads to higher engagement, more ticket sales, and an overall better attendee experience.

More trust, less competition

The other element to consider in all of this is your attendees themselves. Data privacy is a growing concern and your attendees will likely want to know that their personal information is secure and not being passed along to shadowy third parties.

By maintaining control over your data, you can create a privacy policy and give them explicit assurance that their details won’t be sold off or shared with third parties. It’s a small thing, but one that could make you seem a more trustworthy and responsible event promoter as a result.

On the flipside of this, the recycling of attendee data can actually harm your event. As an example of how this might happen, let’s imagine you run a music event in a small town where competition is fierce. You've spent years building an audience, gathering email addresses, and pushing out content. Now, imagine the platform you're using promotes a rival event to your audience based on their demographic markers – which happens. That competitor now stands to benefit from all of your hard work.

With CM your attendee data stays with you. No competing events are marketed to your audience, and due to the integrated nature of the platform you are free to shape your attendee comms as you wish. Which, given the immense hard work and creativity that goes into promoting events, is the way it should be.