Event Management & Data

How Text Marketing Can Improve Event Management

Victoria Rudi
March 30, 2020

Table of Contents

Texting is an ideal communication method for event management. It enables you to quickly and discreetly send messages to attendees and staff when they can’t make a call and also has a number of uses to organize and market your event as you plan it. Text messaging makes events easier to organize and keep on schedule, and can also improve the event experience for guests. 78% of consumers wish they could communicate with more businesses by text. As a result, it has many potential uses in event management:

  • Increasing ticket sales and attendance
  • Following up with attendees
  • Confirming attendance and guest information
  • Providing event information
  • Co-ordinating event teams
  • Responding to last-minute changes

Marketing Events Using Text

Text marketing can help increase attendance at your events, and keep guests engaged before and after the event itself. For example, texting attendees with extra information about speakers and presentations they are interested in before the show, or providing last-minute schedule updates to make sure they don’t miss it. You could even text subscribers promo videos with clips from previous events. Text messages have a click-through rate of 17%, which is 15% higher than email, making them an effective way to engage your audience.

Higher Ticket Sales

Text competitions and giveaways offering tickets or related products can help generate more attention for your event, giving your audience more reasons to engage and raising awareness of your event through word-of-mouth.

Text marketing is a useful tool for getting last-minute ticket sales, helping you reduce unsold tickets by sending out discount ticket offers to subscribers. Thanks to text marketing’s almost instant open rates, this can generate additional sales even just a few hours before the event. According to TextMagic, 82% of texts are opened within 5 minutes. By scheduling these texts in advance, you can reduce the amount of busy work you need to focus on in the run-up to opening your event.

The Royal Exchange Theatre used this tactic to increase their SMS subscribers by 50% while reducing the number of empty seats. Additionally, adopting a text-based marketing strategy resulted in the theatre attracting more guests from a younger demographic

Increase Subscribers

Text marketing can also be used to give your subscribers and attendee discounted tickets and invitations they can share via text. To incentivize attendees to opt into your text marketing, you can offer exclusive benefits to text subscribers such as sending out an SMS ticket that lets them skip the line.

Follow-Up

After a show or event, text marketing also helps you to follow up with guests and leads, either by sending a welcome message to your new leads or by providing a number they can text for more information. For example, you could provide codes attendees can text for automated responses about parking or ticket options, or start a direct conversation with you about the event.

Planning Events with Text Marketing

Text messaging can help you make event arrangements efficiently. If your clients are too busy to take phone calls for most of the day it can be difficult to get their approval for venue suggestions and other details that need their attention. This can cost a lot of your time and may result in clients losing out on an ideal venue because they couldn’t answer their phone or didn’t check their emails. The instant nature of text messaging helps solve this issue.

  • Text messaging can also be used to send and track event invitations, automatically updating you on which responses you have received or are still waiting for.
  • Additionally, a text confirmation for bookings and ticket purchases can serve as a ticket at the venue.
  • Ticket confirmation texts can also help reduce unnecessary calls to your customer support to check the status of tickets.
  • Customer contacts can increase in the days leading up to your event, potentially causing bad press for your event, so providing self-service support via text marketing to reduce your call queues can help tackle this issue.

While invitation by text might not be appropriate for some formal events, text messaging can still be useful for easily collecting other important information. For example, a quick text that guests can reply to makes it easier for them to let you know about dietary requirements or other special arrangements.

Managing Events with Text Marketing

There are numerous last-minute issues you can face when running an event, and you need to be able to react quickly and communicate with your team to handle them. These can include:

  • Schedule or location changes
  • Speakers running late or not showing up
  • Incorrect catering orders
  • Short-staffed event teams
  • Audiovisual equipment failures

Events and trade shows are often noisy environments that keep your staff and teams very busy. This makes it difficult for them to communicate via phone calls, and it can be a challenge to find specific staff members and team leaders in person at a busy event. An easy communication channel is vital for collaboration between event teams.

The Superbowl XLVII Host Committee put this technology to use in order to communicate with their 8,000 volunteers across the stadium. Texting enabled volunteers to keep in touch and report on situations throughout the event, ensuring rapid responses from headquarters.

Text messages are usually read almost immediately, making them an ideal way to tell teams about urgent updates and changes. This can be very useful for keeping an event running smoothly despite last-minute changes, and ensures your staff have the latest information to keep attendees in the loop. By creating mailing lists for each team working on the event, you can quickly send important updates to the relevant people in any situation.

In addition to updating event teams, this can also benefit guests by texting them schedule and location changes to make sure they don’t miss presentations due to a lack of communication. By getting information about each attendee’s interests through your online form, you can send the most relevant reminders to make sure each guest is able to attend each of the shows they wanted to see.

Enhancing Events with Text Marketing

Text marketing can make your events more engaging by enabling attendees to participate and interact with presentations.

  1. For example, speakers can use SMS to run live polls and surveys and discuss the results as part of their demonstration. Automatically tracking survey results through a text marketing app means visualizations such as charts and graphs to show the data can be created during the show itself.
  2. This can also enable audience members to text their questions to speakers, making it easier to pick the best questions and display them without disrupting the flow of a presentation. This makes Q and A sessions run more smoothly and encourages more of the audience to take part.
  3. After the event, text marketing also provides a great way to ask attendees for feedback. While guests might not see your email for a few days after the event, text lets you get their comments while it is still fresh in their minds.
  4. Individual speakers can also use this at the end of their presentations to get helpful feedback and to help interested attendees get in touch. This provides a fast and easy way for speakers to share slides, case studies and other documents to their audience without responding to hundreds of separate email requests.

Text Marketing Templates for Event Management

Using text marketing templates can save you a lot of time while still sending personalized messages to your leads. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Marketing New Events

60 speakers and 200 businesses will be attending Europe’s biggest [industry] event! The conference will begin on [date] and close on [date] at [time]. Book your tickets now: [link]

Subscriber Ticket Offers

We are offering our SMS subscribers the exclusive opportunity to get their tickets for [event] at a 30% discount until [date]! Only 500 tickets are up for grabs at [link]

Referrals

Bring two friends to [event] and get 30% off your ticket. Find out more about our referral scheme at: [link]

Order Confirmation

Your payment for the 3-day [event] was successful. The event starts at [date and time], you can find your digital ticket here: [link] and a full schedule for the event here: [link].

Schedule Reminders

[presentation] is starting in 20 minutes at 3 pm. Head over to [location] to get there on time! Check the full schedule at:  [link]

Lead Follow-Ups

[Speaker] is giving a 30-minute presentation at [event] on [time and date]. Don’t miss it! Have you got your ticket? Click to buy now or find out more: [link]

Conclusion

Text marketing can help you boost attendance and get in touch with potential customers after an event. In addition to helping you manage your teams and plan the event, it can also improve the experience for attendees by providing useful information and enabling them to participate in presentations.

About the author

Alexa Lemzy is the customer service manager and content editor at TextMagic. She is passionate about excellent customer support, mobile technologies, and business communication. You can reach her on Twitter.
 

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Discover how Eventtia helps world-leading brands digitize and scale their events

Victoria Rudi
Senior Content Specialist
With a Master’s degree in Event Management and a keen follower of SaaS technologies, Victoria is an event content master, producing insightful and valuable for Eventtia’s blog and beyond

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