Jurassic Quest is a traveling dinosaur exhibit that holds over 100 life-size dinosaurs. Here’s how it uses texting to ensure visitors have a dino-mite time.
Jurassic Quest (JQ) is the largest exhibition of life-size, moving, museum-quality dinosaurs in North America.
JQ typically brings its dinosaurs to convention centers and arenas. Due to COVID, it transitioned to a new drive-thru format.
JQ is able to send time-sensitive weather alerts, share its audio guide, and answer visitors’ dinosaur questions, all from SimpleTexting.
Like many other businesses, COVID-19 forced Jurassic Quest to adapt to social distancing requirements. Of course, most don’t have 100 or so life-sized dinosaurs in tow.
Instead of bringing its animatronic creatures to convention centers and arenas, it decided to offer a drive-thru version. And with the live events industry mostly shuttered since March 2020, JQ is a rare bright spot.
The prehistoric safari has welcomed over half a million people this year alone and plans to continue with the format until mid-2021. With sold-out shows and rave reviews, it’s clearly onto a winning formula.
We spoke with Kimberly Stoilis, JQ’s marketing director, to learn more about the role texting plays in supporting its new drive-thru experience.
JQ started using SimpleTexting a year ago when the company was hosting its events indoors. It sent text alerts notifying people of hurricane closures and other extreme weather events.
Now that Jurassic Quest has moved to drive-thrus, the ability to inform visitors about weather alerts is even more important.
Since guests buy tickets attached to specific time slots, people appreciate knowing that they need to delay their arrival for 30 minutes because of a thunderstorm.
“Given that people drive upwards of an hour or more to visit our show, it’s very much appreciated that we let them know about any weather updates.”
On top of this, guests receive a text with a link to download an audio tour several days before they arrive.
The real star of the show, though, is Marty the park ranger. Marty is a dinosaur expert available during the tour for visitors to text their questions.
“We’ve always been a very hands-on experience. But due to COVID, we needed to figure out a way to still interact with visitors. Allowing people to text their dinosaur questions to our vanity toll-free number, 844-DINO-411, is a great way to do that and differentiate ourselves.”
In the last 90 days, JQ has received close to 4,000 questions. That’s a lot of texts for just one person to answer. That’s why Kimberly is thankful for the ability to add multiple teammates to the account.
“We can add our customer service team and our PR team members, and anyone can just pop in and answer questions.”
The fact that everyone’s been able to use SimpleTexting is a significant bonus.
So far this year, the majority of JQ’s drive-thru visitors have received text messages. That’s over half a million people.
While JQ’s social media accounts have typically been where it connects with its audience, Kimberly believes that texting is an excellent complement.
With click-through rates on its text messages as high as 98%, it’s no surprise that its SMS program is here to stay.
Most text messaging services don’t enable you to text both large groups of subscribers and engage in 1-on-1 conversations with customers.
If you need to do both, then sign up for a 14-day, risk-free trial of SimpleTexting. And, if you have questions about getting set up, email us at support@simpletexting.net.
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