Project goal
We were contracted by Biblica to build a consumer engagement campaign for their project, Community Bible Experiment. To maximize exposure for their campaign we arranged to feature the project to 3800 participants at the 2011 National Youth Workers Convention.
Strategy
We were confident this was a product the audience would respond strongly to if we could frame the message. In working with the event organizers we agreed that we would give each person a sample product, play a short video testimonial, and the MC would make a pitch to get them involved. Key to this strategy was getting the audience to instantly convert. Rather than tell them to go home and check it out we knew that our maximum response rate would occur if participants could join the campaign during the pitch. This made text messaging the obvious choice. 100% of the audience would have a cell phone. And we could easily ask them to text to join the campaign in all of the collateral materials.
Collateral
In the lead-up to the pitch our team developed branding, a stand-alone website, produced a video to be played, arranged for participants to be given a free copy of the book, created a rave card which was placed in the book, and worked with the event MC’s to shape the pitch.
Integrating Tatango
Key to making this seamless was activating Tatango’s new auto-responders. So when participants texted in our short code they were immediate sent a response to finish their registration at the URL provided.Early in the process we connected with Tatango to brainstorm ideas to maximize the audience response. We secured our short code and had it printed on the rave cards, added a call to action to the end of the video, and made sure the MC knew that was the call to action for the verbal pitch.
Results
The results shocked us. In the lead-up to the pitch a few people did the text-to-join option as they saw the rave card around the event. Prior to the pitch beginning 17 people had joined. During the 1 minute video that number spiked to over 100 as people connected the rave card to the video they were watching. But when the MC gave verbal instructions to take out their cell phone and text CBEMINI to 68398 the numbers went from about 100 to over 500 within 90 seconds. Within 5 minutes that number settled on 534. (14% of those in attendance)
14% conversion rate
We don’t see many campaigns quite as fast or as effective as this. While there was a lot of lead-up work the action of getting people from passive listeners of the message to actively engaged with the movement of CBEmini was instantaneous. We were able to shape a message that the audience connected with and give them a simple, fast, and intuitive way to join.
A lot of people ask me why I like using Tatango for my SMS marketing. I just point to their continued innovation. Text-to-join with an auto-responder is effective for converting event participants to campaign conversion, pure and simple.
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