I have long wondered with all the advancements in digital marketing capabilities, why most Australian businesses lack a true CRM program of any form. A true CRM program will always be a businesses best ROI marketing program and at conference after conference you hear of marketing teams saying ‘this is the year’ that they really get some structure around their program.

So what is stopping businesses and why does Australia seem so far behind?

There is obviously the capex requirement from a business to put in place a solid platform to run the program, and given the struggling retail environment, this could well be a struggle for a lot of businesses, however its other industries that I constantly look at and wonder why they aren’t the first to jump on board and really set the standard.

An example of this, I believe to be professional sporting clubs across various codes. Across the country, there seems to be sporting clubs that are significantly better off than most businesses with seemingly stable bank balances. They also have audiences / databases that are engaged to levels only dreamed about in other sectors, yet these clubs fail to truly implement a real CRM strategy and engage their audience in new ways. This ultra engaged audience also means they are in a position with the most to gain from implementing a CRM program.

Now take any AFL club as an example. Each club is going about building a big social media following, many of them measuring fans in the hundreds of thousands, and most clubs running a weekly EDM program that sees them blast out a newsletter, with the latest happenings inside the club. But what is the true value to the club in any of these campaigns?

What if a club decided to really get their act together and treat their database as their biggest money making tool? They no doubt have the information available too them, so its just a case of getting the same and systems to start marketing effectively.

They know who is a member, they know which fans have failed to renew membership and they know every game that every member attends. The club also knows which games they need to boost attendance to in order to receive a higher dollar return for each member through the gate, so instead of simply sending out a weekly newsletter and continuing to post the normal content on social media, why not play the numbers game.

Implement a simple set and forget campaign that targets members based on attendance to specific games. Don’t necessarily target the blockbusters, instead target the games that are falling just short of a higher per head threshold (note: clubs generally receive a specific dollar return, per head, for home games, with the dollar value being tiered based on attendance to the game). Run campaigns across a variety of channels including email and SMS and base the communications on the attendance of previous games by each member with the goal of getting each targeted game into the next per head threshold. Through simple campaigns, surely the club could grab an additional game a year from each member, not to mention the non-members increased attendance.

While only just the tip of the iceberg of what could be a highly profitable CRM program, surely it has to be a much more efficient program compared to a spray and pray email newsletter. Through simply putting some numbers behind the campaigns and content they create, the returns would skyrocket!

Just my two cents anyway…