Need a little inspiration on how to market upcoming events? Discover how you can use SMS marketing to significantly improve your upcoming events and future services.
According to Eventbrite, there are 1.3 million events in the UK every year and the industry itself is worth a staggering total of £42.3bn. Yet, despite these glowing figures, there are always further opportunities to improve.
In the latest Pulse Report by Eventbrite, 32.9% of businesses labelled ‘new technology’ as the biggest trend positively impacting their growth. However, when it came to rank the most effective event marketing channels, text messaging didn’t even feature on the list, with email (29%) and social media (24%) coming out on top.
A view supported by The State of SMS which found only 10% of companies in the event and entertainment industries were utilising text messaging.
So, how can you operate SMS marketing at the optimum level to increase revenue and improve your customers’ experience?
Last-minute sales
If you have tickets left over for a show or event, sending out a bulk SMS campaign could help eradicate this problem. With an average 98% open rate and 32% response rate, there’s a high probability that your offer will be seen and acted on.
Recently, the Royal Exchange Theatre sent a bulk SMS campaign out to the youth market to entice them into purchasing the remaining tickets to show. As a direct result, the Royal Exchange enjoyed an average 14% response rate from people taking up the offers and promotions at the box office, as well as a 50% rise in the number of people subscribing to receive text alerts.
Customer re-engagement
Have you not heard from your customers in a while? Sending a text message online could turn a dormant customer into a returning one. Once their membership runs out, or they haven’t visited you in a certain amount of days, schedule in an automated text to put your brand back on their radar. Unlike email marketing and social media posts, you can feel happy in the knowledge that 90% of your audience, on average, will read your message within the first three minutes of receiving it.
Discount card giants, tastecard, used text messaging to promote their ‘£1 for 90 days membership’ offer to lapsed customers. By including a short link in their bulk SMS campaign, they saw a 10% click-through rate to the mobile sign-up form and an increase in memberships.
Upsell
Once a customer has made a booking, there are still ample ways to make additional revenue. For instance, you could send an SMS online offering a festival goer a premium upgrade to luxury camping, or a football season ticket holder priority access to cup match tickets. Or if you’re a leisure holiday camp, you could make your guests’ visit even more special by including an offer to add a hamper to their booking. While a theatre could send an SMS voucher days before the show offering a half-price discount on food and drinks.
These types of ideas let customers know that you’re always looking for ways to positively engage with them across the customer journey, improving the experience and developing advocacy.
Attach important documents
Like email, you can attach picture messages, videos, PDFs and doc files to your text messages at no extra cost. So, if you want to inform your customers about upcoming shows, cinema times, a new gym class timetable or send a supporting image, you can include these and benefit from the high-performance rates of SMS marketing.
Confirmation
When it comes to making a booking, customers like to receive confirmation. With 18% of consumers receiving over 51 emails per week from businesses and brands (The State of SMS), it’s easy to misplace or delete an important booking confirmation.
Remove the stress of finding it and inundating your customer service team with phone calls by sending it directly to their phone via SMS. The customer also reaps the rewards of being able to store and retrieve this information to hand, when required.
Try SMS marketing today
When it comes to SMS marketing in the events and entertainment industries, this post is just a taster of what you can do. For more information on how to build a mobile opt-in list or guidance on ways to utilise the Textlocal online platform, simply sign up for a free account and we’ll be in touch.
