Conversational Commerce: Unlock 70% Conversion Rate For Ticketing Sales with Two-way Messaging

Are you leveraging conversational commerce as part of your mobile marketing strategy to surprise and delight millennial fans? You can utilize SMS commerce solutions to create a frictionless line of communication with millennial fans. This enables them to spontaneously purchase live-event tickets - and act in the moment - from the comfort of their own phones.

Our guide will explore how conversational SMS helps sports teams and live-entertainment venues adapt to changing consumer behaviors – building optionality and fan flexibility into existing sales processes. With the uncertainty surrounding COVID-19, fans desire turnkey booking solutions that present the ability to purchase event tickets at the very last minute.

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What are the key benefits of conversational SMS?
While website-based chatbots can certainly engage inbound leads through conversational commerce, you can use conversational SMS to nurture leads in your CRM that have opted-in to receive regular SMS updates from their favorite professional sports team. Let’s consider some of the core benefits of SMS marketing for sports teams compared to other channels.

Interact with prospective ticket-holders using two-way messaging
Unlike one-way text messaging, two-way messaging is perfect for transactional communication. When it comes to moving fans toward a conclusion and closing ticket sales, two-way solutions create opportunities to interact with prospective ticketholders and answer their questions.

98% of recipients open SMS messages within the first three minutes - and leads to an overwhelming conversion rate. One-way text messaging often resembles ‘link-to-buy’ - which is rarely intuitive and creates hurdles for fans to jump through to complete ticket purchases. Conversational SMS, however, keeps everything under one roof and enables fans to purchase tickets from inside the SMS conversation rather than getting directed to a website to complete the transaction.

Engage hard-to-reach fan segments via a new marketing channel
‍According to MediaPost, 75% of millennials would rather lose their voice calls than the ability to text. The study also found that 76% of millennials feel texts are “more convenient” as the communication is on their schedule. 63% of participants believe texts are less disruptive than a voice call. With the right channel, the notoriously hard-to-reach generation is easier to engage. Forward-thinking brands, particularly in the sporting world, are actively embracing two-way messaging as a new marketing channel for communication with millennials, last-minute buyers, and students. Despite the maturity of SMS as a marketing channel and growing interest from marketing teams, these fan segments are not currently saturated or bombarded with promotional texts.

Tailor ticketing products to the right fans, at the right time
Millennials may not have much interest in traditional ticketing products. With this in mind, your marketing team can tailor ticketing products to the right fan segments, at the right time using two-way SMS communication. Once fans opt-in to receive last-minute ticket notifications via SMS, you can segment your CRM data and send the right offers, at the right time. For instance, you can split test different ticket price points and offer tickets for different seating areas of your sports stadium. By throwing different variables into the equation, you can see how different fan segments respond. While it’s certainly possible to run a similar campaign via email marketing, you are unlikely to engage those hard-to-reach fan segments in the same way.‍‍

Unlock more ticket revenue and accelerate your sales funnel
SMS marketing will help to engage those who were previously unreceptive to other marketing channels and move these fan segments further down the sales funnel through the use of two-way personalized messaging at scale. This will enable your team to unlock more ticket revenue without dedicating human resources to power the new marketing channel. Oh, and the best bit? Using the right SMS marketing solution, you can collect payments with text messages through a smooth customer checkout experience. To purchase tickets for an event, prospective ticket-holders do not need to leave their text conversation. No apps, no links, no websites. When executed correctly, conversational SMS is truly seamless.‍‍

Does SMS commerce align with millennial buying behavior?
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Millennials require instant and last-minute solutions with flexibility
Having the freedom to make decisions at the click of a button is important to millennials. They are used to receiving instant gratification from making on-the-fly decisions. With this in mind, conversational SMS commerce is the ideal marketing channel for facilitating last-minute ticket sales to events such as sports matches, festivals, and music concerts. Conversational SMS also offers a gateway to personalization. Millennials are actively looking to try new experiences and often want to find ways to customize these experiences. A two-way conversation via SMS can help prospective ticketholders to find the right ticketing products and personalize the ticketing products to meet their unique requirements.

Millennials are experience-seekers who desire access
In general, millennials are more interested in enjoying experiences over products and prefer access over ownership. This fan segment cares more about the thrill of experiences than acquiring products. Conversational SMS communication can engage these experience-seekers and ensure they receive SMS notifications for live-event ticketing products at opportune times.‍‍

Why use Pogoseat’s Text-to-Buy solution?
‍Pogoseat’s Text-to-Buy solution is a game-changer for professional sports teams looking to engage millennials - and other hard-to-reach fan segments - using the power of conversational commerce. With an integrated payment gateway and no shortage of text message templates, Pogoseat will ensure you are well-equipped to unlock more ticket revenue using this tool.

In just a few seconds, you can send SMS text messages to fans and notify fan segments of new ticket offers. Due to the sky-high open rates offered by SMS, within the space of a minute, some eager fans will complete transactions inside the text exchange and purchase tickets. At scale, this will rapidly accelerate the speed at which fans move through your sales funnel.

Are you ready to take Pogoseat’s Text-to-Buy solution for a spin? You can integrate Pogoseat into your platform (with all of your existing CRM data) in under a week.  

Still have questions?
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