CRM Software for Event Planners: Everything You Need To Know

Are you looking for efficient CRM software for events? Event Management CRM software offers a great way to build and maintain a steady relationship with your customers or attendees.

An event planner needs to look after multiple areas of work to create a successful event. Starting from managing event schedules and marketing to accepting registrations and ticket sales everything needs proper planning and execution and that too within the deadline.

In such situations, it becomes challenging for an event planner to manage attendee data and spend time on building relationships with them. Here comes the role of CRM software.

Read this article thoroughly to learn about CRM software for event planners and how CRM software can improve event planning efficiency.

What is CRM software for event planning?

The term CRM software stands for customer relationship management. It helps you handle your customer relationship with ease. Generally, it stores all your clients and prospects' data so that you understand their needs and offer services accordingly.

When it comes to CRM software in event management, it enables you to manage your attendee and potential attendee data and strengthen your event marketing strategies.

CRM software undoubtedly simplifies the challenging task of data management for event planners. This ultimately saves a lot of time that they can utilize on other important event management activities.

How to Streamline Event Planning with CRM Tools?

Event Management CRM software provides a centralized platform to event managers to manage attendee and potential attendee data and run personalized email marketing campaigns. There are different types of CRM software available in the market and each of them has different roles to play in event planning.

Here is a brief description of each of type of CRM software:

• Operational CRM: It is mostly suitable for sales activities and optimizing repetitive tasks related to business operations. 
• Collaborative CRM: This is an ideal choice for event sales and marketing that bridges the gap between event organizers and attendees. It also helps connect people from different departments of an event. 
• Analytical CRM: It analyzes customer data to offer you useful information about your customer or attendee behavior and preferences which helps you make data-driven marketing decisions.

Here are the ways CRM software helps in event management: 

• Maintaining relationships with customers through personalized emails. 
• Automating the task of email marketing. 
• Keeping in touch with attendees after an event for feedback and more through email. 
• Improving attendee experience in events. 

If you as an event planner know your target audiences and attendees, it becomes easier for you to create the type of event content that they want. This guarantees attendee satisfaction in every way.

Essential features of CRM software for event planners

If you are planning to purchase CRM software for event planners, then you must know the features that it must have.

1. Event marketing: CRM software for event management, automates email marketing campaigns. You can send emails to your audiences, including push notifications, registration confirmation, and more. It also allows you to personalize your emails. With marketing automation, event planners can avoid the additional expenses that they probably would spend on hiring a team to handle their email messages, regular event notifications to attendees, and related things.
2. Registration: The details that event participants add while filling up the registration form are the data that CRM software with registration feature stores. This also makes the ticket-selling process simple and easy as you can track your ticket sales along with the nature of the attendees who purchased them.
3. Customization: Good CRM software will always be flexible enough to offer you certain customization abilities. With a CRM dashboard, you can easily sort your important information to efficiently manage them. Some event management CRM software also offers advanced customization for better data management.
4. Third-party integration: It is important for event management CRM software to have the capability to easily integrate with third-party platforms. Why? This is because event planners often rely on various event management platforms to simplify the process of event management. So it is important for CRM software to be compatible with the platform you use on your system.

Which is the best CRM software for events?

Good CRM software can simply be a game changer for your events. However, you need to ensure that the CRM you choose can be integrated with multiple event management platforms.

Some of the best CRM software for event management are listed below:

• Hubspot. 
• Mailchimp. 
• Salesforce.
• Sendinblue. 
• Zoho.

Currently, they are being used in the event industry as the best CRM software for event management. However, if you are picking any of the above-mentioned CRM software, you need to ensure that it works well with your existing or the event management platform you are planning to use.

Don't worry, if this seems challenging for you as we are here with the perfect solution to this confusion. Use the WP Event Manager plugin for your event business that offers a set of CRM plugins by integrating the above-mentioned CRM software.

Let's find them out in our upcoming segment.

Use WP Event Manager CRM plugins for event management

WP Event Manager is an eminent WordPress event management plugin that provides users with a huge list of event add-ons for specific event requirements.

These addons also cover some feature-packed CRM plugins that are worth every penny. They are developed with a lot of features to empower your attendee data management system.

Here is a list of the CRM plugins that the platform offers:

• Hubspot CRM.
• Mailchimp.
• Sendinblue.
• Salesforce CRM.
• Zoho CRM.
• Constant Contact.
• Active Campaign.

All of these add-ons help you store attendee and potential attendee data are collected from the following areas:

• Registration: All the information that a person shares with you during the registration process is the information that your CRM will store. You need to have the registration addon from WP Event Manager to add the facility. 
• Contact Organizer: This signifies the data that a person adds to the form which is required to contact an event organizer for any queries through your website. To collect this specific data, you must have the Contact Organizer plugin. 
• Guest list: This is the data of your guests that you use to manage them with the Guest List addon. This also works with a separate plugin that you can add to your system.

You can purchase any of the additional plugins to manage and sync your preferred data to your CRM system as per your requirement.

Some of the common features that the WP Event Manager CRM plugins have include the following:

• Sync customer data automatically and manually.  
• Automate email marketing. 
• Personalized emails. 
• Event-specific data syncing. 
• Easy user data management. 
• Convenient field mapping. 
• Easy attendee data transfer.
• Add data from both frontend and backend.

To know more about the WP Event Manager CRMs, check out this webinar on the same.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What are CRM tools?

CRM tools signify software applications that allows business to handle customer data, interaction and manage relations with them. This ultimately strengthens customer relationship, improves services and increases sales.

2. Is Salesforce a CRM?

Yes, Salesforce is one of the best CRM for events that provides a wide range of tools to enable businesses to easily manage their sales, customer relationships, sales and marketing etc.

3. What are the 4 types of CRM?

The four main types of CRM software include: 

• Operational 
• Analytical 
• Collaborative 
• Strategic 

Wrapping up

Whether you have a small events business or an established ones, CRMs can be extremely useful for the overall management. However, to fully utilize its benefits, you need to find the right one for your business to manage your attendee data and automate the process of email marketing. Make sure that you consider all the features that are mentioned in this article to get the most suitable CRMs for your events.