Euphoria found: The conversion rate went crazy when they danced with SMS

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By using SMS, Austin's Euphoria Fest sold 230 event tickets and saw a conversion rate 10x higher than email. All it took was three text messages.


DJ's view from stage with pyrotechnics and a crowd bathed in orangish light

“SMS marketing outperformed our expectations and other marketing channels, and we’re definitely excited to learn how to apply it even better moving forward.”

Goal: Sell tickets during the last few days leading up to the 2017 Euphoria Fest.

Tactic: Send out text messages with a 25% off promo code.

Result: Euphoria Fest sold a whopping 230 tickets with just three text messages. Their conversion rate was about 2%—which is 10 times higher than their typical email CR.

Every once in a while you stumble across a business solution so unusually cool it makes you scratch your head and say “Hey, why didn’t we try this a long time ago?”

That’s what happened recently to the marketing team at Austin’s annual Euphoria Fest, an energetic outdoor party of art and sound that brings families and friends and total strangers together for an immersive experience of listening, creating, feeling, and living in the moment.

In this case, the unusually cool solution was SMS marketing with SimpleTexting.

#FindYourEuphoria

Euphoria Fest takes place every April at Carson Creek Ranch, an old Spanish land grant on the Colorado River with pastures and pecan trees, and good views of the city skyline over in sunset direction. If you stop by you’ll find everything from an art village with yoga and silent disco to RV camping and beach volleyball.

The music lineup leans pretty heavily in the EDM direction, with dance rock, dubstep, and house mixed up with rap, funktronica, and a whole lot more.

Euphoria Fest + SMS

Outdoor Euphoria Fest stage at dusk with clouds in the sky and crowds of people

Euphoria Fest has been around for several years, but up till now their marketing strategy hasn’t included SMS. There’s a first time for everything, though, and 2017 was their year for experimenting with text message marketing.

We wanted to hear how things went, so we hopped on the phone with Jameson Pitts, our marketing contact over at Euphoria Fest headquarters, who was more than happy to share details with us.

A rogue hard drive did run off with all of our notes shortly after the chat, but we still managed to remember enough for this story to see the light of day. 🙂 Nice try, rogue hard drive.

Building the list

You can’t launch an SMS marketing campaign without a list of subscribers, of course. Fortunately, building such a list isn’t difficult. Many businesses use keywords to pull people in, but you can also create web sign-up forms or just import existing contacts.

Euphoria Fest built their list by piggybacking on web sales and post-event surveys. All they had to do was add a box customers could check agreeing to be contacted by phone for marketing purposes. Simple and smart.

And with those checkboxes in place, Euphoria Fest was able to put together a sizeable list of curious creatures looking for some springtime fun at a little riverside ranch in Texas.

Selling the tickets

Euphoria Fest used SMS at the eleventh hour, but it wasn’t for lack of planning. Rather, it was because they simply weren’t quite sure if it would work.

A few days before the event kicked off they decided it was time to give it a shot, so they texted a promo code for 25% off to see what would happen. The response was good, so they texted twice more.

Here are the three messages Euphoria Fest sent out:

iPhone screenshot of 3 text messages from Euphoria Fest

Turns out SMS marketing was worth a shot, because those three texts sold 230 tickets! And although Euphoria Fest’s email list is well over four times the size of their SMS list, the SMS conversion rate was 10 times higher than email.

You know what people say: “If you text it, they will come.”

Or something like that. 😉

Euphoria found

Graphic featuring totem-style hawks with the Euphoria Fest logo and text: "I'm finding my #Euphoria2017"

Toward the end of our conversation with Jameson, he shared a few thoughts about his experience with SimpleTexting and SMS. It sure is a lot easier than email, he told us. There’s no more suffering over a subject line to get people to open your message, which is a big plus.

And speaking of pluses, the SMS list is an opt-in list—so people actually want to hear from you. How often does that happen with email?

Euphoria Fest plans to implement texting in other ways in the upcoming years. How that will look is still unclear—for now, they’re still in brainstorming mode. The main takeaway here is that it worked well, and there’s hope that it will continue to work well in other ways moving forward.

Jameson left us with some kind words to that end:

“SimpleTexting’s great customer support allowed us to get set up and migrate our list in quickly, and the pricing structure made it cost-effective to send even more messages than we had originally planned after seeing the great response. We’re excited to work together in the future.”

So are we. 🙂

Thanks for reading our story about Euphoria Fest! If you enjoyed this one, go check out a few more and see how others have been using our platform to engage customers and make a difference.

And if you’ve got your own story to share, just give a shout and tell us all about it.

You never know who you might inspire!

#FindYourEuphoria

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