"Red Sox vs. Yankees, tonight at 7 p.m." "Ticket draw being held on October 2. Reply to this text to be entered in the draw for your chance to win!" "Brady injured, placed on IR. Click here for full story." "25% off all team merchandise and clothing today only at the Team Gift Shop."
Text messaging. It's convenient. It's easy. It's inexpensive. It's engaging. And, for sports marketers, it can be highly lucrative. The majority of people in our society now own mobile phones, and text message marketing is already a booming business. According to the Mobile Marketing Review, 97% of text messages are read within just minutes of being received, and coupons that are sent through SMS are 10 times more likely to be redeemed than other forms of coupons (2013).
The time to take advantage of text message marketing is now. With an easy to use, powerful and affordable text marketing solution, like SimplyCast, you can start today. There are four distinct ways that text message marketing can have a huge positive impact for your sports organization. The possibilities and benefits, however, are infinite.
Keep Fans Engaged: In order to ensure that your fans remain connected and interested in your team, you need to keep them up to date. Text messages are a great way to provide game time reminders (to entice fans to watch the game) or tidbits of information (for example, sports news or player updates). You should also include links to your team website in your text messages so fans can click through to see more, and to help drive traffic.
Drive Merchandise and Ticket Sales: How about the aforementioned fact that mobile coupons have a high redemption rate? Send out SMS coupons for discounts on tickets or team merchandise. It costs only a few cents to send a text message, but the ROI can be very high. Text message discounts are a great way to bring fans into your shop or encourage them to visit your online store.
Attract New Fans: Provide simple signup forms on your team's or organization's website that allow visitors to sign up to receive your text messages. Advertise that you text out special deals, fun contests, and player/team/league/industry updates. In addition, promote your text message updates on your social media pages so new fans can easily sign up and friends and followers can share the message with their Twitter and Facebook contacts.
Promote Your Team Brand: Text messaging is an efficient way to promote your team and present a consistent visual brand. Providing informative text messages and special SMS promotions go hand in hand with having a great website, an active social media presence and so on. Text message marketing, however, allows you to offer your fans more than the competition and keep them engaged with your team.
The more value you add to your fans' lives, the more engaged they will be, so reach out in multiple ways. An all-in-one marketing and communication solution, such as SimplyCast 360, allows you to not only send text messages quickly and efficiently to your many fans but also helps you manage your entire online presence and fan communication. It's easy to use, it's automatic, so communication takes no additional time out of your workday, and it is competitively priced.