PortaPottyBossPro Blog — Event Rentals & Booking

Tagging Event Porta Potty Customers So You Can Find Them Next Season

Event customers come and go. They book once a year, or once in their lives, and then disappear from your phone. If they live only in a pile of old invoices, you will never find them again when it is time to fill next season's calendar. Tags and custom fields turn a pile of past events into a list you can use.

Event Customers Are Easy to Lose

The customer app, covered in Letting Event Customers Watch the Truck: The Customer App on Delivery Day, keeps customers connected while the event is happening. After it is over, the job of remembering them falls to the office. Construction customers are easy to remember because you see their invoices every month. Event customers are not.

A wedding customer might book once and never need you again, but their sister gets engaged two years later. A race director might skip a year and come back. A church might change volunteers three times. Without a good record, each of these looks like a brand-new customer, and you lose the history that would have made the next booking easy.

Tag Every Event Customer

In PortaPottyBossPro, clients can have tags such as Contractor, Events and Homeowner. Tag every event customer as Events when you create them. If you want more detail, add tags for the kind of event, like Wedding, Festival, Race or Church. A customer can have more than one tag, so a homeowner who rented for a graduation party can be both Homeowner and Events.

Tags make it easy to pull a list of every event customer when it is time to reach out, without scrolling through every client you have.

Custom Fields for the Details

Tags tell you what kind of customer someone is. Custom fields hold details that are specific to your business. For event customers, useful custom fields include:

• Event name, such as "June church picnic" or "September 5K"
• Usual month of the event
• How they found you
• Planner or venue they work with

When winter comes and you want to call every customer with a June event, the custom field tells you who they are.

Keep custom fields short and consistent. If one person types "June" and another types "Jun" or "summer," the list gets messy. Agree on a simple format in the office, and stick to it. A field that is filled in the same way every time is a field you can actually use when you need it.

Bringing In Your Existing List

If you have years of event customers in a spreadsheet, you do not need to start over. CSV import brings an existing customer list into PortaPottyBossPro. Clean up the spreadsheet first, add a column for the tag if you can, and import. Your past event customers are ready for next season's outreach.

Reports

Reports help you see how your event business is doing. How many event customers did you serve this season? How many were new, and how many were repeat? Which months were busiest? Answers to those questions help you plan trucks, drivers and marketing for next year.

Compare your event business with your construction and residential work. Some operators find events are a great addition. Others find they take more effort than they are worth. Knowing your own numbers helps you decide.

Look at where your event customers came from, too. If most found you through your website, keep investing there. If most came through planners and venues, spend time with those relationships. A "how they found you" custom field filled in at booking answers that question at the end of the season.

Using the List

Once your event customers are tagged, put the list to work:

• Reach out to last year's customers a few months before their event
• Remind past wedding customers that you serve other events too
• Ask past festival organizers about new events they are planning
• Follow up with customers who got a quote but did not book

A short text or email is often all it takes. Two-way texting brings replies back to the office, tied to the client.

Keep It Clean

A list is only useful if it is accurate. Fix duplicate clients when the same customer shows up twice. Update phone numbers when they change. Remove tags that no longer fit. A few minutes of cleanup each season keeps the list useful.

Know Your Customers

Tags, custom fields and reports are simple tools, but they turn scattered event jobs into a customer base you can grow. For more on rebooking event customers, see Repeat Event Customers: Rebooking Annual Porta Potty Events Without Starting Over, or visit the event porta potty rental software page for the full picture.