Hello,
For the last couple of years, we've been capturing customer email addresses for those people who wish to use our wifi whilst on site. We are then sending marketing emails to those people. At the moment, we're managing those email addresses outside of Tessitura and importing them as a separate list into Wordfly but it's starting to become an issue as the numbers grow.
Is anyone else capturing email addresses via wifi, and if so, are you importing those into Tessitura and creating accounts for them?
We have a concern that by creating accounts for people who have not gone through the full sign up process may be a barrier for ticket sales as they won't realise they have an account and will try to set up a new account with the same email address and then get an error to say that an account with that email address already exists.
Many thanksGemma
What you are describing is what I tend to think of as a "micro identity". I think that the wifi captured email address is just one part of a much bigger issue. What do we do with information about an identifiable individual, but ones that do not provide all of the typical fields we would capture to create a fully formed tessitura constituent account. And maybe ones that our customers don't recognize that we are capturing. There are several types of these identities that we might capture.
The reasons to capture these are many. Marketing, measuring impact, security, looking for untapped patrons / participants, I'm sure the list here goes on and on.
You are correctly pointing to one of the potential challenges of having these micro identities in our tessitura systems. What is the experience of a customer connecting to a website for a first purchase after having identified themselves either remembered or not . If we don't say we have identified them and just move forward during the online sales experience, The next challenge is one of record linkage (merges) issues. When we actually get sales and enough to create full featured identities. How do we gather up these micro identities and create an even more fully formed customer records with all of that past contact insight.
Then what can we do to identify similar micro customer identities for engagement.
The ethics / legality of capturing these identities may be questionable. Do some of these practices cross the creepy threshold? In the EU are some of these practices illegal?
In the IT department at BAM we have considered some of these issues. However we have not actively started to capture most of these micro identities.
We are capturing email addresses out of a non tessitura web point of sales system and storing this in Tessitura. This is technically similar to what you are describing. This is going ok for us technically. However these email addresses are coming in through a sales channel that looks just like our web site. So the creepy factor is minimized.
I would enjoy working with others to create best practices in this important area for our use of Tessitura as a CRM system. And then look at the kind of analytics that we can and should persue.
It's good to know we're not the only ones thinking about these things! :-)
We already have a procedure for creating temp logins for any primary eaddress that doesn't have a login attached and we run that nightly (happy to share if you're interested). We've also completed work on the website so that if there is just the default address in the constituent record, then it will force them to enter their full address if they book tickets so I think we technically wouldn't have any issues.
As you mentioned Tom, I think the biggest thing for us would be the creepy factor although even if they only sign up with their email address through the wifi, we do still send them newsletter, etc. so they must realise that they are on our system somewhere which I'd hope would reduce the confusion.
I think another chat with our marketing department and Head of Compliance is in order - may be we can just improve the wording on the wifi sign up to make it clear that we will create an account for them.
Thanks for all your thoughts. I'll let you know if we progress anything from this side.
ThanksGemma
I would like to highlight what Tom mentioned, since this is always my stance. "The ethics / legality of capturing these identities may be questionable." Not may be, but is questionable. I personally feel to market, you must have ethics.I am not a fan of just doing because I can.
Example, you now have my email. You start emailing me materials. Since you have not asked me to opt-in or have not had clear literature explaining your intentions, you are now just another spammer and it is almost impossible to know if the org has now over step the boundaries basically losing all impact and relevancy.
These are the areas that you should just capture what you need for liability sake and that is it. If someone wants an account, they will call or create one. If you plan to offer free wifi, offer it with no strings. Just my opinion for what it is worth.
Travis
Apologies Travis, I failed to mention the important bit!
As part of our wifi sign up, our guests have the option to tick a box to sign up for marketing emails from us. It would be illegal for us to just start emailing them with no agreement by them and we definitely don't do that.
We follow up their sign up with an email inviting them to register an account online but hardly anyone does so we're then left with a list of people who have signed up to receive marketing emails via wifi, but don't go online and create an account which means we're left with a spreadsheet of people that has to be managed outside of Tessitura.
Hi Gemma,
I would be very interested! Save me starting from scratch.
Kelly