SMS Marketing for Community & Amateur Sports Clubs

With the weather improving, many amateur sports clubs will be coming back to life and begin to meet again over the next few weeks and months. This will mean getting existing members back together, reaching out to new members, attracting new sponsors and supporters and arranging events. SMS Marketing is the perfect tool for managing all of this and more. In this article, we look at how community and amateur sports clubs and groups can make the most of SMS Marketing.

1. Contacting existing members

The chances are that as a sports club with a limited budget, your main form of communication has been email until now, mostly because it is free to send messages. Unfortunately, with more and more people turning to their smartphone for almost all of their communication and many email inboxes increasingly filled with spam, there is an ever greater likelihood that emails will go unseen. This could mean that keen members miss out on meets, reducing your numbers and also risking the occasional upset. A highly effective alternative that is almost guaranteed to reach the recipient is SMS Marketing. It is extremely low cost and couldn’t be simpler to use, whilst at the same time has a read rate of close to 100%. Imagine how easy it would be to round up your members by sending a message such as:

“Shropshire Cyclists first meet is on Sunday 4th March at 14:30, meeting at the Crow Inn, Shrewsbury. We look forward to seeing you again and warmly invite you to introduce new members.”

As well as getting the message out, SMS is very personal and instils a sense of urgency that simply doesn’t exist in other channels such as email.

2. Inviting new members

If you have a website for your club, then no doubt you have a sign-up form where prospective members can either sign up or register an interest. With the addition of a field for potential members to add their mobile phone number, you could easily reach out to them in the same way as existing members to help boost numbers for the first meet of the year, and of course subsequent gatherings.

It is important to note that in the case of both existing and new members, it is a requirement to ensure you have express prior permission to send SMS Messages – be sure to read our article here to learn more about this.

3. Arranging and managing events

Whether you are arranging a regular meet, a special charity event or a competition, SMS Marketing offers many ways to help things go smoothly. As well as using it to inform and invite participants as in the previous examples, it can also be used to reach out to potential sponsors/donors for the event or inform as many people as possible that your organisation will be collecting cash donations for charity on the day. It can also be a great way for organisers, stewards, medics and other individuals involved in running the event to be informed of essential information such as the correct times, places and special arrangements. Finally, SMS marketing can form part of a contingency plan in the case of events causing sudden changes to the planned schedule such as inclement weather.

4. News updates

Members of the club will be keen to keep up to date with all the latest news. Although you may update the organisation’s website or blog on a regular basis, members may not always remember to check in to find out what’s new – unless of course, you encourage them with the help of a text message. This can help ensure that your news and updates are seen by as many people as possible – especially if timely reading is of the essence. In a similar way, it can also be used to encourage members to get more involved and engaged in any social media activities you conduct.

5. Member polls/surveys

Whether you are canvassing ideas or opinions for new events, looking for input on ways to develop the club or simply interested in discovering what members thought about the most recent event, SMS Marketing can easily be used as a tool for conducting surveys and collecting feedback. There are different ways this can be done, with one of the most popular being to ask a set of question that can be ranked on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10. The key is to keep the survey as simple as possible to encourage maximum participation.

To get started with low cost, bulk SMS messaging from one of the UK’s leading suppliers, give our award winning team a call now on 0800 954 5305. Our friendly experts are always on hand to answer your questions and provide support to help you and your organisation get the very best out of SMS Marketing.