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Company: Interlinked Media Ltd
Project: Sunderland Empire
Dates: May 2007 to Jun 2007
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How did the project start?
The Sunderland Empire theatre in the North East of England, wanted to increase awareness of the theatre and its facilities to a local market and increase ticket sales in 2007, their centenary year.
What options did you consider?
Interlinked Media were approached by the theatre’s marketing agency, Mike Lynch Advertising, to propose a solution to this brief. Interlinked Media suggested that the best way to generate a new and up to date database would be to operate an instant win mechanic using SMS, offering the public a chance to win one of a wide range of prizes related directly to the theatre. It was believed that the result of this campaign could provide the Sunderland Empire with a new database. This database would then be used in future marketing campaigns, including special shows and the upcoming winter Pantomime season.
What help and expertise did you receive?
Interlinked Media together with Sunderland Empire and their marketing agency Mike Lynch Advertising were confident this mechanic would work as Interlinked Media had operated similar such campaigns increasing POS presence and brand awareness.
Did you face any challenges or learn any lessons?
The main challenge was to make the promotion attractive to the public to increase the likelihood of respones. By offering a wide range of prizes rather than just one or two major prizes, and also making everyone a winner, greatly increased the probability of response.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
The response to the 6 week campaign was very successful with 32,474 texts sent from over 22,516 unique users.
This provided a response rate of over 15%. On average 773 texts entries were received daily. During one 10 day period this average was over 2400 daily entries with the most entries on one day being 4840. On several days the amount of responses resulted in long queues at the theatre box office with people validating their winning offers.
What are your plans for the future?
The theatre had now achieved their primary goal and used this database together with Interlinked Media's wide range of solutions and ideas to push new campaigns with the confidence that they were targeting an audience who will provide increased response probability.
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