The marketing department at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Athletics is responsible for making sure people know about our games and are excited to come. We want to meet fans where they are, and that’s on their phones texting.
People are checking their emails less, and more emails are getting sent to spam. Everyone also has different TV subscriptions now, so commercials have become a more complicated channel to target our audience with. Our sponsorship team was already working with Text Request, and they suggested we look into using the platform, too. Texting seemed like the perfect channel to further engage our fans.
This past year we decided to use Text Request to engage fans at our Southern Scuffle wrestling tournament. The Southern Scuffle is a tricky market for us, because it’s targeted at wrestling fans who are not only in Chattanooga, but across the entire country as well.
We always do trivia questions every year at the tournament, so instead of using social media this time to collect answers, we used text. 126 people texted us the keyword “SCUFFLE24” to opt in, which is great because now we have their numbers for when the event rolls around next year.
With social media, we didn’t actually get any of our fans’ contact information. It’s now much easier to follow up with them, when they text us with their actual phone numbers instead.
In addition to the Southern Scuffle, we also send mass texts to advertise our other athletic events. Texting links is helpful for selling tickets. We also use graphics to share the list of games that are coming up, themed nights, giveaways, new coach announcements, conference championship announcements, and more.
Text Request has helped us reach a much broader audience, and organize them more efficiently for targeting. The Contact Tags feature makes it easy to identify who is a student vs. who is a donor, because we communicate with both in different ways. We can also track things like if someone is a football season ticket holder vs. a fan of our Southern Scuffle tournament.
We have almost 500 highly engaged SMS subscribers now, and it’s easy to reach all of them in one clean sweep, or segment them for specific events. Other marketing channels take a significantly longer amount of time to pull that off.
I also love that fans can respond back to our mass texts. They’ll say things like “Congratulations!” or “So excited!” when we share news about a team making it to championships. It’s an easy way to make them feel like they’re a part of the team.
