How Social CRM Customizes Marketing, Brings New Revenue

CIO — EMI Music seemed as well-positioned as any record company to embrace the digital music age. It launched its first website in 1993, streamed its first complete album over the Internet in 1998, and was the first to release a digital album download in 2001.

In recent years, EMI shifted its marketing focus online as well. But its geographically dispersed and disjointed marketing teams simply took what they had always done--mass marketing of music--and digitized it.

[Related: Social CRM Offers Big Rewards If You're Persistent]

CIO — EMI Music seemed as well-positioned as any record company to embrace the digital music age. It launched its first website in 1993, streamed its first complete album over the Internet in 1998, and was the first to release a digital album download in 2001.

In recent years, EMI shifted its marketing focus online as well. But its geographically dispersed and disjointed marketing teams simply took what they had always done--mass marketing of music--and digitized it.

[Related: Social CRM Offers Big Rewards If You're Persistent]

Company leaders had been so focused on the digital music revolution, says Bertrand Bodson, EMI's executive vice president of global digital, that they failed to anticipate the digital marketing revolution.

[Slideshow: 10 Social CRM Tools to Help You Keep Tabs on Your Customers ]

Faced with declining revenues and lackluster customer demand, EMI decided to get personal, implementing the Neolane CRM system to create a single view of individual fans based on data from various channels, including registration cards, artist websites, mobile apps and social platforms. "We started with the basics," says Bodson. "The music industry has a history of sending out big blast emails to two million people. We changed that mentality to sending out 20 different emails to 10,000 fans each."

Last year, EMI began piloting Neolane's new social listening capabilities to incorporate unstructured data as well. "We know that you bought the Katy Perry CD and that you're talking about Empire of the Sun on Facebook. We have your Spotify playlists," says Bodson. "It's very rich data."

EMI's marketers integrate that individual fan intelligence with customer categories generated by a separate customer-insights tool. The "collector" is into the physical with his vinyl anthology prominently on display. The "pre-cash" group of 13- to 15-year-olds have little money to spend but wield influence over those who do. The "pacemakers" want to be first to discover new artists.

An email to a collector highlights a special physical edition, while one to a pre-cash teen focuses less on purchasing and more on the marketing message. "It takes more effort and more iterations to reach the right fan with the right message at the right time," says Bodson. "But it's very powerful."

EMI can now create targeted products or experiences based on customer attributes. Sales were on the uptick within a year and a half, thanks to new digital revenues. Anemic digital marketing metrics have improved; the 150 email campaigns EMI launches each month now have 30 percent open and response rates. IT has benefited, too, from consolidating various CRM systems into one, cutting licensing costs, says CIO Simon Hollins.

Next, Bodson would like to surprise customers. For example, if someone likes Coldplay on Facebook, she might receive a video of Chris Martin singing "Happy Birthday" to her by name on the appropriate day. "Ten years ago, we didn't control customer loyalty. We were just a content provider with retailers sitting between the artists and the fans," Bodson says. "The more data we get, the closer the artists get to their fans."

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