Marketing defines relevance
Agree on the service interest, location and recency that make a message useful. Document exclusions, including communication preferences and customers already in an active conversation.
A field memo / Marketing across locations
Which customers should each location hear from next?
A useful audience starts with more than a contact list. It depends on what your teams know, where that information lives, and whether the next person can act on it.
01 / Shared ownership
An audience is a shared decision.
First-party data is information your organisation collects directly through its own customer interactions. Its value depends on consistent definitions, not simply the number of fields collected.
Locations add context
Ask frontline teams which details distinguish a real opportunity from a poor fit. Establish who records changes when a customer moves, switches location or changes their needs.
Sales closes the loop
Define what happens when a campaign produces an enquiry. Record the outcome in a shared place so the next audience is not built on an outdated assumption.
02 / Evaluation brief
Test the audience before you choose the software.
Bring a real use case to a CRM evaluation: for example, a relevant service reminder for customers of a particular location. Ask the team to trace the data from its source through to follow-up.
01
Customer identity
Explore how duplicate records are found and resolved, especially when a customer has interacted with more than one location. Decide who can correct the record.
02
Audience rules
Check whether teams can build and review groups using meaningful fields such as service history, location and stated interests. Ask how a group changes when a record is updated.
03
Preferences and exclusions
Examine where communication preferences are recorded and how they are applied when an audience is prepared. Include a check for customers who should not receive a particular message.
04
Local visibility
Discuss what central marketing and each location need to see or edit. Evaluate whether access can be shaped around those responsibilities without losing the context of a shared customer.
05
Follow-up context
Trace what a location would see when someone responds. Look for a clear way to identify the audience, understand the enquiry and record its outcome for future planning.
03 / Point of friction
The message can land while the context gets lost.
A central campaign may reach the right person but still create friction if the receiving location does not know why that person was contacted or who should respond.
Before the send
Agree on the audience definition, the intended response and the location responsible for enquiries. Give local teams a concise explanation of the message and its exclusions.
After the response
Review whether enquiries reached the right team and whether the audience matched the offer. Feed recurring misroutes and missing information back into the next audience definition.
04 / Decision takeaway
Choose for the conversation that follows.
The strongest evaluation question is not only “Can we make this audience?” It is also “Can every team understand why someone is in it, act on a response and keep the record useful?” Use that shared test to guide your CRM selection discussion.
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