The Power of personalisation and timing

Certainly you might have your regular clientele who is coming to your every event, which is good, but how about people who are showing up rarely? How can you attract these people to your event?

Lets first discuss about personalisation in your event-promotion. What kind of chances do you have to attract people with personalised flyers? Probably you could, but that would be very expensive and time consuming way to do personalisation. Therefore you see very rarely any personalisation in printed flyers.

How about Emails? With specific email programs you can do fairly quickly and easily personalised email newsletter and send it cost-efficiently. However, the problem with email is the massive amount of spam email which everybody gets in daily basis. Therefore, the person who rarely comes to your events, probably skips or oversees the email which you have put together with lot of energy and passion.

Then there is facebook. You can invite people through facebook if they have liked your facebook-page but it is hard to do any personalised invitation. Also what to do, if the person who you would like to invite to your event has not liked your facebook page or he/she is not an active facebook user? (believe me, there are many)

Try this

There is one good option to be considered. There are easy possibilities to do a personalised message to everybody, it is cost-efficient and you can do different target groups if you would like to modify your message for example to different age-groups or to female/male audience. Have you thought about it? Have you ever tried it? Certainly you have, but maybe not for your event-invitations. It is called SMS, have you heard about it?

SMS is surprisingly effective tool for event invitations. You get your message definitely heard (practically 100% SMS are read), you get your message easily personalised if you have right tools and it is very fast and easy way to promote your event. Some of you might think that SMS is already old-school and all the messaging has moved to instant-messaging channels. That is far from truth. As majority of person to person messaging has moved to instant messaging, the SMS marketing and SMS notifications from companies to customers is still increasing. SMS as a communication channel has in fact gained importance and courtesy. Everybody notices their received SMS because there might be important information to be read, as for example your event invitation ...

Simple to start and becomes a valuable database

For SMS marketing, only thing you have to have is the phone number of the person and permission (opt-in) from this person to send marketing information. It is recommended that you always ask a phone number from your clients in same way when you ask email contact information. Over time you get a substantial database of names and phone numbers which you can use when notifying about coming events. If you don't have yet your customer contacts saved to a database, start now! Phone numbers and marketing permissions will be valuable asset for you in the future when you promote your future events.

Thoughts about timing

As 90% of SMS are read within 3 minutes of their reception, you can time your marketing activity with SMS very accurately. You know yourself, which time of the day and how long before your event you would like to inform your clientele. There is no other communication channel available where you can time your message so exactly. Just try your event marketing with SMS and you experience if it works for you as it is working for so many promoters all the time. With SMS you can also experiment some ad-hoc marketing. I give you example: you can remind people with personalised message that a star-DJ is starting to play in your club within half an hour. «Hi Katherine, our special guest DJ Luciano starts playing at 23h. First time ever in St.Gallen. Join us and bring your friends. Frontrow Club.» You could just imagine what is the response, if your clientele are at the moment bored in another club. Just try and see what happens!

Choose the right tool

Our SMSBLASTER web edition has been THE tool in SMS marketing for club owners and event promoters since 2006. With SMSBLASTER everybody can easily prepare and send SMS marketing personalised or without personalisation to any size of target groups. You can import your client database to SMSBLASTER and create different groups if you would like to send customised messages to specific target groups. When importing also names of the recipients to your SMSBLASTER Database, you can easily configure personalised message with few clicks and send it to everybody. «Hi [firstname], happy hour today starting at 22h! DJ Luciano starts at 23h! Welcome!»

Just register your SMSBLASTER account on www.smsblaster.com and buy SMS credits. (there are no setup costs or any monthly costs) Then you can already start testing, how SMS can increase your client attendance, whatever event you organizing. I can assure you, whenever you have started to see what kind of SMS marketing works for your audience, it becomes your marketing routine before any event. You see the impact clearly in your event-revenues. P.S. SMSBLASTER has a club-action and adds therefore 45 CHF worth of SMS credits to your first order till end of year 2016. Check details and more usage examples at: aspsms.com/clubaktion (in German)

(ba/ASPSMS)