How to Promote Your Event Effectively with SMS Campaigns?

Leverage the power of SMS for event promotion.

Events play a crucial role in the reputation of brands and their customer loyalty. When you communicate with your audience face-to-face, they feel more involved and will highly likely continue their partnership with your business.

The question is how you can encourage your audience to attend your event. Of course, you might have some channels like calls, social media posts, stories, and emails on your mind.

However, in this blog post, we want to introduce the capabilities of SMS marketing to promote your event. We’ll also explain how you can integrate your SMS campaign with your WordPress website using a versatile plugin: WP SMS.

So if you want to hold an event, you’ve come to the right place. Read the following article and contact us if you need more information about running an SMS campaign using WP SMS.

Why Use SMS for Event Promotion?

You might think SMS marketing is no longer effective when we have new channels like Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. In this section, we’ll explain why this is not correct. 

Here are the benefits of SMS marketing for your event campaigns:

1. High Open Rates

Many people, unless they are professionals, don’t constantly use email and social chats. On the contrary, most people try to read their incoming text messages within minutes. 

That’s why the open rate of SMS marketing campaigns is usually way higher than other channels. So you can expect a higher engagement rate for your event promotion when you use SMS marketing.

2. Direct and Personalized Communication

SMS is the most direct and personal means of communication. It allows you to send personalized SMS invitations for your event and make recipients believe you’re personally inviting them. This can greatly impact the engagement rate of your campaign. 

3. Simplicity

To use SMS, your audience doesn’t need to have a smartphone, any application, or an Internet connection. So you can reach out to almost everyone and easily run a bulk event promotion campaign. 

4. Instant Delivery and Response

If you put an advertisement on your social media profiles, many followers might not see it soon. This way, they might lose your event.

SMS, on the other hand, has an immediate nature and you can be sure about a fast delivery and response.

This is great for last-minute updates about your event. It also allows you to ask attendees to reply to confirm attendance or ask questions.

5. Works Well with Other Marketing Channels

Thanks to SMS tools, you can easily integrate it with other channels like email, social media, and platforms like WordPress and WooCommerce.

This makes cross-promotion easy, which means you can promote your event across all channels and make the most out of your last hours leading to your deadline.

Event SMS Marketing Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide

To ensure a successful SMS campaign for your event, follow these steps:

Step 1: Define Your Event SMS Promotion Goals

Before launching your SMS campaign, you need to clearly outline your objectives. You must know what exactly you want to achieve from your SMS campaign and what impact it should have on your event.

Try to make your goals SMART so that you can devise your marketing plan accordingly. Without knowing your goals, you might waste your money, time, and energy.

You can ask the questions below before your SMS promotion:

• Do I want to increase ticket sales using SMS?
• Do I need to boost event attendance?
• Should I generate leads with SMS marketing?
• Can SMS enhance audience engagement?

Write down your goals and stick to them to focus all of your energy on them and reach the best result.

Step 2: Choose the Right SMS Tool for Event Promotion

Nowadays, there is a tool for everything, and SMS marketing is no exception.

The question is which SMS tool is suitable for your event promotion strategy. We’re going to answer this question.

To find the best SMS tool, you have to consider many factors, especially the following features:

• User-Friendly Interface: First and foremost, you have to look for simplicity, especially if you’re a beginner in SMS marketing.

• Integration Capabilities: You must make sure that the SMS tool is compatible with your existing platforms. Otherwise, you can’t manage your SMS marketing campaigns effectively. 

• Segmentation and Personalization: You need to send bulk personalized messages using your SMS tool. So it should offer an effective segmentation and personalization feature.

• Automation Features: Last but not least, automation is a must in your bulk messaging campaign to promote your event. Without automation, you can’t reach high efficiency in your SMS campaign.

There are lots of tools out there that offer these features and you need to choose an SMS tool based on your requirements and resources.

For example, if you have a WordPress website, your best choice is WP SMS as it can easily be integrated with your website.

As a result, you can combine your digital marketing strategies with your SMS marketing to make the most of your event promotion campaign.

WP SMS supports over 300 SMS gateways and APIs and allows you to integrate any other tools like WooCommerce, Booking, and FluentCRM in your SMS campaign.

So why wait? Try the demo of WP SMS to get familiar with its capabilities and start your event promotion campaign right now!

Step 3: Build a Quality SMS List

WP SMS lets you use your website’s user data to build a list of relevant subscribers. Remember that a successful event promotion campaign is not dependent on the number of messages you send. You have to focus on the quality and relevance of your subscribers to get the best result.

Here’s how to build a subscriber list to send event promotion SMS messages:

• Leverage Sign-ups: Use different channels like your website’s forms, social media, or registration forms.
• Use Incentives: Offer perks like early-bird discounts, freebies, or VIP seats in the event in exchange for sign-ups.

Step 4: Segment Your Audience

Although you try to choose relevant subscribers, not all of them are the same. So you need to segment your audience based on various factors like age, gender, location, language, job, previous interactions, etc. This way, you can run a more targeted event SMS campaign with a higher engagement rate.

Step 5: Prepare SMS Templates for Each Stage of the Event Campaign

You need to be prepared for the event long before holding it. Try to create compelling SMS templates for different stages of your SMS campaign to be able to automate it and reach a high ROI. 

Try to pay special attention to some important items like personalization, urgency, CTA, and an opt-out option in your event SMS templates.

Thanks to the dynamic content feature of WP SMS, you can include variables like names and dates.

This way, you can personalize the SMS template according to the specific details of each audience without manual intervention.

Remember that timing is everything! So after preparing your SMS templates, you can schedule them accordingly. 

Here are some common event campaign stages to consider when creating SMS templates:

• Pre-Event Promotion: 4-6 weeks before the event
• Registration Confirmation: Immediately after registration
• Reminder SMS: 1 week before and 1 day before the event
• Last-Minute Ticket Push: 1-3 days before the event
• Day-Of Reminder: 3-4 hours before the event starts
• Thank You & Feedback Request: 1-2 days after the event

Step 6: Run A/B Tests

If you’re not sure about the effectiveness of your SMS campaign, you can run some A/B tests to optimize it.

It’s good to consider items like personalization, offer, CTA, and timing and conduct separate split tests for them. This way, you can find the best version of your event SMS campaign and reach the highest ROI.

Step 7: Track the Metrics and Optimize the Strategy

Last but not least, you have to constantly monitor key metrics to be able to analyze the performance of your event SMS strategy.

Here are some tips in this regard

1. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate.
2. Analyze the data and identify the trends, weaknesses, and strengths
3. Gather feedback from attendees through surveys.
4. Optimize the strategy to use in your future campaigns.

8 Top SMS Samples to Promote Your Event

Now, it’s good to review some SMS templates that you can use in your event promotion to reach success. 

1. Event Invitation SMS

The most common type of SMS template for event promotion is the invitation. You have to clearly invite your audience to your event.

Look at the following event invitation SMS sample:

As you can see, the SMS includes the recipient’s name to personalize the message. The SMS also highlights event value to encourage the recipient to participate. A direct CTA that creates a sense of urgency is also a necessary item in this SMS.

2. Early Bird Ticket Offer

The Early Bird approach is a great SMS idea for event promotion. Using this type of SMS, you can make your recipients believe that they’re losing something so they will highly likely buy the ticket before the deadline.

Here is a successful SMS sample of early bird promotion for an event:

3. VIP/Exclusive Invitation

Creating a sense of exclusivity is also a great idea to boost engagement in event marketing. You can offer VIP invitations to your loyal customers and make them feel special.

This way, you kill two birds with a single stone. First, you can help your loyalty program using your event campaign. Second, you can ensure your event attendance by offering something special to your existing customers.

The following SMS sample shows how to promote your event using a VIP invitation:

4. Event Reminder (1 Week Before)

Even if you’ve received enough registrations, you can be sure about their attendance. SMS reminders are the best tool to reduce no-shows in your event.

Thanks to the scheduling feature of WP SMS, you can easily send SMS reminders to attendees at an appropriate time.

Here is an example of an SMS reminder 1 week before the event:

5. Event Day Instructions

Each event has its own procedures that many people might not be aware of. Sometimes attendees might get confused about the procedures, leading to annoyance.

To avoid misunderstandings, you’d better send an event instruction SMS with essential details and give them a call option to answer their questions.

Here is a sample SMS of this kind:

6. Event Referral Promotion

The majority of people decide based on the recommendations of their friends and family members.

You can use this word-of-mouth marketing technique in your event SMS campaign to encourage participation. 

Of course, you can offer a perk like a discount to incentivize the referral program. Here is an example:

7. Social Media Engagement SMS

Use cross-promotional SMS messages to boost social media engagement around your event. 

Look at the following messages and try to come up with other ideas to promote your event on all channels:

Make sure that you have a unique and consistent style and tone across all channels.

8. Thank You & Post-Event Follow-Up

You must continue your communication with your audience after the event. You can ask for their feedback and use their points to improve your event strategy in the future. Also, you can use this opportunity to promote other campaigns like flash sales.

Of course, try to avoid being too promotional in the post-follow-up message. Look at the following SMS sample to see how it works:

Conclusion

SMS marketing is one of the best channels to promote your events. Of course, it’s not as easy as sending some text messages. 

You need to build a strong strategy and prepare compelling SMS templates long before the event. 

Also, you have to leverage the power of SMS marketing tools to automate the campaign and reach a high ROI. 

WP SMS is one of the best SMS plugins for WordPress and is compatible with many other platforms. If you want to combine your digital marketing efforts with SMS marketing and run an effective SMS campaign for event promotion, it’s the best choice for you. You can start with its demo version to see its capabilities and then go for WP SMS Pro to run your campaign.

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