How MJH Life Sciences lowers event attrition and builds personal connections with SMS

Melissa Hindle is a marketing director at MJH Life Sciences. She is responsible for the organization’s Cure magazine, which is a publication for patients with cancer. Cure is centered around oncology, urology, and the Hospital Care Plan System. 

As an organization that frequently invites its audience to events, they were looking for a way to keep those events full and gather feedback from attendees.

The challenge: Keeping event attendance high and readers informed

The MJH Life Sciences team sent out a lot of email invitations for their event registrations and followed up with reminder emails to reduce attrition. 

Melissa, however, saw a good opportunity to use texts for those event invitations and reminders to increase response rates. So, she started looking for an easy-to-use SMS platform that offered two-way communication. 

It was also important to the team that both the marketing and events staff were able to access the account and communicate with event attendees.

The solution: Offering two-way texting in an easy-to-use format

Melissa loves that texting is a great way to establish a personal connection with her audience. Two-way messaging has been a big advantage for her team since, let’s be real, even though they add, “Please do not reply to this inbox” to their campaigns, they get replies anyway. 

The MJH staff have also had an easy time getting up and running with SimpleTexting—no training required.

The result: Lower attrition and easy access to audience feedback

The number-one result Melissa and her team have gotten from their SMS strategy is immediate reduced attrition from event text reminders.

When the team exclusively used email, attrition rates averaged 19% and ranged from 0% to 45%. With two text reminders sent on the day of the meeting, the average attrition rate was reduced to 12.75%.  Since then, they’ve reduced the number of text reminders to one, and attrition rates have held steady at around 11%. 

They’ve also begun sending a survey after each event with both open-ended questions and multichoice questions asking if participants appreciate the text reminders. The team also sends out a link to each virtual meeting or a map of their in-person events to help attendees get to where they need to be.

Three words that describe SimpleTexting would be ‘connection’ because it makes a connection possible between a team and a person, simple, and straightforward. The platform is very easy to use for first-timers.

Melissa Hindle

Marketing Director