Text Reminders Increase Sports 1 Marketing’s Response Rate by 30%

A Story of Sports Marketing and SMS Messaging

They’ve done all the right things, they’ve seen all the right people, and they know how to leverage that for profit in a major way. When it comes to monetizing relationships and experience, well, Sports 1 Marketing is a top competitor in the game.

Sports 1 Marketing, or S1M for short and sweet, is a California sports and entertainment marketing company founded by veteran sports/tech exec David Meltzer and Warren Moon of the NFL Hall of Fame:

^^ That’s Meltzer on the left and Moon on the right.

S1M partners with brands, sponsors, and charities at high-profile events like the Super Bowl, The Masters, the Sundance Film Festival, and the ESPYS. They’ve lent their video expertise to films like Ocean’s Eleven and Air Bud. They’ve maximized return on investment (and return on influence) for 24 Hour Fitness, the Dew Tour, and Rose Bowl sponsors. When humans go back to the moon, there’s a pretty good chance S1M will find a way to be involved.

Speaking of pretty good, S1M has a pretty great motto: “Make a lot of money, help a lot of people, have a lot of fun!” We like to have fun, help people, and make money, too, so we called up Mike Allen, S1M’s Digital Account Manager, to chat about what’s been going on in the land of S1M. Fast forward to right now, and bam, you’re reading a pretty darn fantastic story about sports marketing and SMS messaging. 🙂

AMP—The Aggregated Marketing Platform

Text messaging is the direction everyone’s going right now. We wanted to leverage SMS features to coincide with our aggregated marketing platform, so we analyzed a bunch of different companies and found SimpleTexting to be the most reasonable price. It offered the most features for that price, too.

– Mike Allen

Among S1M’s various core offerings is the Aggregated Marketing Platform (AMP), a web-based service that streamlines partnerships between event producers and sponsors. With AMP, producers can manage all of their event marketing—digital gifting, lead generation, product placement, sponsorship sales, data collection, and charitable donations—in one convenient e-place.

On the user side, AMP provides a custom app that looks something like this:

People who attend an AMP event are going to see sponsor ads and hear sponsor announcements that point them at an app like the one above. Once they gain access to the app, they can claim gifts, shop special offers, enter to win prizes, and donate to charity.

So, the event producer gets paid by the sponsor, the sponsor gets sales and user data, the charity gets donations, and the attendees get free stuff. Everyone gets to go home happy … with the possible exception of whichever team loses the big game.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what texting has to do with any of this.

Simple—it’s the front door for AMP.

Texting at the Tournament of Champions

There are several methods of giving customers access to AMP, including QR codes, email links, and text message links. During a recent campaign for the LA Galaxy, S1M ran with the texting method.

The LA Galaxy is a Major League Soccer club based in Carson, California. At the end of every season, the Galaxy hosts the Orange County Tournament of Champions, a U9-U15 youth soccer tournament that consistently attracts the best of the best from all across Southern California and parts of Nevada.

This year, S1M helped the Galaxy offer attendees a free digital gift bag through AMP. Tournament ads contained a keyword short code and call to action inviting people into the Galaxy’s custom app. Here’s what the call to action looked like:

Text LAGALAXY to [number] to claim your digital gift bag!

Anyone who texted LAGALAXY got a response with a link …

Thank you for attending today’s LA Galaxy Orange County event! Click the link to redeem your digital gift bag with offers from our sponsors! https://s1m.gift/Galaxy

… and that link went right to the custom app’s landing page, where people could enter their email to get started:

Well, that completes our front door metaphor. And it brings us to the main point of this whole story:

Response rates go up when text reminders go out.

When S1M used SimpleTexting’s analytics to review the Galaxy campaign, they noticed that the number of keyword opt-ins was higher than the number of gift redemptions. Clearly, some of those people who originally texted LAGALAXY never ended up in the app to claim their digital gift bag.

Some problems have rather simple solutions, and this is one of them.

S1M simply sent a follow-up text to all attendees who hadn’t converted on the gift offer:

Thank you for supporting LA Galaxy Orange County! Don’t forget to redeem your digital gift bag by clicking the link: https://s1m.gift/Galaxy

With that one reminder, the response rate increased by 30%. 😀 All S1M had to do was change a few words and target the right subscribers.

That’s the beauty of text message marketing—it’s simple to set up, simple to analyze, and simple to follow up with people. And, in this case, it’s another win for S1M!

We’ve had some huge success with SimpleTexting, and we’re quite happy with the level of the metrics we’re getting and how responsive everything has been. There’s a variety of different applications that we haven’t had the opportunity to dive into yet, but we’re really excited to try them out in the future.

– Mike Allen

---

And now here you are at the end of our story about Sports 1 Marketing. Thanks for reading—we hope you found it fun and helpful! If you enjoyed this one, you might also enjoy some of the other success stories we’ve written.

Want to try text messaging for free? Sign up for a 14-day trial with SimpleTexting. There’s no credit card, no contract, and no monkey business involved. Just a simple, powerful platform full of cool features.

If you have any questions, just contact us—we’re always happy to help!