BUSINESS CHALLENGE
I am a ticketing manager for a regional theatre. We have reopened our facility and began our fall season in mid-September. We are so excited to be providing live entertainment for our patrons again, but pandemic related challenges remain and we need to proactively manage these challenges. The two most pressing challenges my theatre will encounter are show cancellations and ensuring compliance with our building entry policy. In previous outreach efforts, we have found that posting information on our website alone is too passive and most patrons will miss information posted there. We also used email alerts in the past and though this channel improved the success rate of communication, we found a majority of patrons still missed messages in their e-mail inbox.
OUR APPROACH
We have chosen to use a secure emergency text message system for ticket holders to effectively communicate our building entry policy and notify patrons regarding show cancellations. I selected the Omnigage platform for my SMS messaging because this emergency text message service provides my team and I an easy-to-use and cost effective platform to create customer distribution lists, compose a message and rapidly distribute the message to the relevant customers. As an added bonus, the platform allows my team and I to view the delivery results in real-time and receive replies from our audience.
RESULTS
Having an emergency text alert system to send out SMS (text) alerts has proved effective and we have received positive feedback from our patrons. The SMS channel is the method of communication most likely to gain the attention of your audience and ensure your message is received. That said, our theatre is careful to use SMS alerts for essential communication only as we do not want to overuse this method for non-essential messages and potentially lose the attention of our audience. Overall, this emergency text message system has significantly improved the success rate of my customer outreach campaigns.