Guest Blogger Catrina Logan Boisson: Demonstrating the Value of Customer Data
I love Wegmans. In fact, I think I'm one of my local store's top 100 customers. At least that's what they told me when I picked up my thank-you gift certificate and gourmet olive oil last Christmas.
I use my Shopper's Club Card religiously, not just because I like saving on my rather substantial grocery bill (we eat well at Chez Les Boisson) and want to be sure to receive my gift certificate next holiday season. I also swipe because I am waiting to see what they do with all of the information that they're collecting. After all, they know how many pounds of imported cheese and picholine olives I buy in a year, how many cans of SpaghettiO's (with sliced franks, please) my kids consume, and how many cubic yards of scoopable litter my cat goes through. They can surmise that both of my kids are now out of diapers and that at least one member of my household stays at home during the work week. But aside from the yearly acknowledgement of my overall dollar investment, I've never figured out how or if they use the rest of the information they are gathering in a monumental database somewhere in upstate New York. Tesco anyone?
Now don't get me wrong, I am a loyal customer and will sing their praises to anyone who cares to listen. I have to -- my French husband regularly credits Wegmans with saving him when we moved from Brooklyn to the 'burbs 10 years ago. But all this electronic information-gathering does have me thinking about how NJPAC can best demonstrate the value of the customer data we collect.
At the moment our bells and whistles are limited to the insertion of key data points into personalized letters -- references to what our guests last attended or the types of performances they might want to purchase based on their transactional history, acknowledgement of their frequency of attendance or tenure with the organization. We are just beginning to dabble in the collection of more attitudinal data (in the form of a fun, online personality test -- see it in beta) and hope to use those flags in the future to tailor messages. My dream is to create and then market using segmentation that combines what you buy, why you buy, and how you view yourself. But as a nonprofit with pretty limited human and financial resources it will take some time to get there.
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About the Author: Catrina Logan Boisson is Vice President of Marketing for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, and a member of 1to1 Magazine's Editorial Advisory Board.
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