Event Participation Jumps 45% with additon of Text Marketing to ads

Background

Each year government department Child, Youth & Family (CYF) organises Children’s Day. It’s a day in March where people from around the country organise and register fun free events in their area for children. In its tenth year the agency decided to advertise on radio using a TXT2GET SMS marketing keyword as a response mechanism alongside its usual free call number and web site options.

Campaign Strategy

CYF marketed across radio, newspapers and through posters from November 2009 through to March 2010. The November marketing was to attract people to organise events; December and January was mainly to remind people of the event and February/March was to encourage participation in those events.

Most marketing was through radio, with 2 ads; one that promoted the text marketing response (text fun to 244) and one that promoted the free call number and the web site. They were run roughly 50:50.

CYF secured the text marketing keyword ‘fun’ through TXT2GET’s site and set up the text reply to tell people CFYs would call them to tell them more. However, in the first 2 weeks the number of text enquiries was so high they logged into TXT2GET and changed their campaign to an ‘SMS & Email’ response type. This allowed the system to automatically ask for the email address and send the email. The reply used was:

Thanks for texting 'fun'. Pls reply with your email address 2 fulfil yr request (20c) or visit our website www.childrensday.org.nz or call 0800 10 33 22.

Because people hearing the radio are not often ready to take action there and then, the text message allowed them to follow-up when it suited, or when they were in front of their computer. Crucial to this year’s success, it also allowed CYF to ring back all people that texted to get them involved.

Results

A total of 2,888 people enquired via SMS. Of those approximately 1,100 replied with their email address. The rest either went to the web site or called the 0800 number.

540 people called the 0800 number, but because the same number was used on the radio ads as the text message, it was impossible to know what percent came from the text message.

In total there were nearly 500 events organised – a jump of 45 percent on the previous year’s 322 events.

In their own words...

“By far the biggest difference between this year and last year was the fact that we got to talk to more people, and that’s because we added the text response to our advertising”, explains CYF project manager Kaleti Moala-Mafi .

“The radio advertising drove web site traffic also, but there is no guarantee people will do anything on websites. There’s nothing like talking to people and answering the questions they can’t get answered on the site. That’s what TXT2GET facilitated and why he had a 45% jump in our tenth year.

“It’s a very good technology interface, and we will be using it wherever possible in future”, he adds.

Conclusions

Although CYF is a government agency, there is no reason why businesses won’t experience the same results from adding an SMS mobile marketing keyword alongside free calling and web addresses.

Website visits don’t facilitate personal conversations and this was the difference in this year’s 45% jump in participation.