How SMS Marketing Increased Attendee Engagement at the USIndoor Sports Association Annual Conference.
About USIndoor Sports Association
Founded in 1998, the United States Indoor Sports Association (USISA) is dedicated to serving the interests of its diverse membership primarily consisting of multi-sport facilities, startups and the providers that serve them. USISA is built of roughly 200 facilities, 20 providers and over 2,000 total members across the United States, Canada and more.
USIndoor Sports Association hosted it’s 23rd annual conference in Las Vegas to over 300 executives, owners, managers, exhibitors and attendees. The conference ran from May 17th – May 19th in Las Vegas Nevada.
We were really impressed with the results of using CloudContactAI for our 23rd Annual Conference. We were able to communicate effectively with attendees throughout the entire conference, and they were able to stay-up-to-date on the latest conference information in real time. We received positive feedback from attendees about the use of CCAI, and we plan to use it again for future events.
The Challenge
In the past, USIndoor Sports Association had difficulty communicating with the attendees at its annual conference. The USISA had previously been using a variety of methods, including email, social media, as well as printed materials in order to communicate with its attendees. However, these methods were not always effective. Emails often went unread or unanswered, social media posts were not always seen by the attendees, and printed materials were difficult to distribute and often lost or misplaced.
Event communication is a complex challenge. For 22 years, USIndoor Sports Association faced hurdles with how to effectively reach hundreds of attendee’s before, during and after the event.
Solution
USIndoor Sports Association used CloudContactAI’s SMS platform to communicate invitations to the event, event reminders, general session reminders, breakout session reminders, and invitations to attendees for exclusive social gatherings outside of the event.
The solution was split into four groups:
Keywords
USISA utilized multiple keywords to segment campaigns for it’s attendees in order to differentiate between executives, managers, vendors, and general attendees. These keywords were activated by attendees texting in their exclusive keyword to a phone number curated by CloudContactAI. Once the keywords are received, the attendees phone number is automatically added to a designated contact list and will receive the appropriate text message reminders, invitations etc.
Bidirectional Communication
CloudContactAI’s SMS Platform allowed for USIndoor to communicate in real time with attendees of the event, enhancing their communication channel without the need of a team just to answer phone calls and respond to emails.
Automated Responses
In order to alleviate the need to constantly check the inbox for inbound message, USISA created automated responses for common inbound messages. From automated ‘thank you’ messages to attendees who opted-in to receiving updates via SMS to automated messages for common questions about the event. These automated messages gave USISA the freedom to focus on the event as it unfolded, instead of having to check their inbox and manually respond to every recieved message.
Scheduled Texts
USIndoor Sports Association utilized campaign scheduling, alleviating the need for USISA employees to have to manually send out thousands of texts or emails throughout the conference. The pre-scheduled text message campaigns were curated with custom templates and personalized for each recipient.
Conclusion
From sign up to the very last event, they leveraged a keyword opt-in strategy in the CloudContactAI dashboard to quide attendees through daily classes, events and much more. The keyword opt-ins were created and customized to specific tracks for the educational sessions held at the convention.
Results
The use of CloudContactAI’s SMS Platform for the USISA Annual Conference was a huge success. The USISA was able to communicate effectively with attendees from the initial event reminders, to the daily classes and sessions, social events, as well as a post-conference thank you for attending message.
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