On a slow night when Yoshi's restaurant needed traffic, Marc sent a text to his SMS subscribers offering $25 off a $100 dinner tab, with an OpenTable link and no mention of a show anywhere in the message. Barely anyone used the discount that evening, but when Marc pulled the attribution on the send the next morning, he found over $2,000 in ticket sales tied back to the same text, none of which had anything to do with dinner.
"It was a strictly food text, strictly with an open table link. We saw something like over $2,000 in ticket sales that were contributed to this text that went out that had no link or no mention of any show whatsoever."
The discovery is the kind of thing that happens to operators paying close attention. Marc is the marketing director at Yoshi's in Oakland, a 50-year-old venue that puts on more than 360 shows a year with a marketing team of two. Before Oakland, he was in Austin throwing his own hip-hop shows in the MySpace era, learning marketing the way independent operators do, on the fly. He came to the Bay Area more than a decade ago to escape triple-digit Texas summers, saw that Yoshi's was hiring a graphic designer, figured he could do that in his sleep, and has been there ever since.
When Yoshi's started running SMS last November, Marc had never built a text program, and the first message went out on November 5 paired with a sweepstakes for a Sheila E show. Six months in the list was approaching 14,000 subscribers with a 0.07 percent opt-out rate. It has since pushed past 25,000 and is still adding about 1,000 subscribers a month. What follows is how he and his team got there.
Yoshi's email list has been collecting names since email was new, and across 50 years and an unknown number of ticketing platforms, the segmentation never got cleaned up properly.
"The segmenting has never really been done properly. We've been through who knows how many ticketing companies in the last 50 years. So that data doesn't really move, and it probably wasn't as important 30 years ago as it is now."
SMS started clean, with no legacy data to inherit and no generic welcome flow carried over from a previous vendor. That's why Marc says he can target an SMS send the way he never could an email send.
"It was kind of cool because I got started with a clean slate on text, and so I am able to get a lot more in the weeds on targeting and build it on more successful in doing so."
Yoshi's sends roughly three emails a week, two segmented sends and one to the full list, and the weekly flash sale, typically 50 percent off a single show, runs primarily through SMS.
"I'll time our flash shows about a day or two before an email would send. That way, if that text doesn't sell out our limited discounted tickets, then I could lean on the email and give the email people a chance at some discount also."
Out of roughly ten discounted shows, Marc has only had to fall back to email once or twice, with SMS doing the work the rest of the time.
"I always like to say this a dance. The emails and the text, they work so well together."
Marc and his team write every text to read like a message from a friend, not a brand.
"We try to keep things very friendly. We want you to read that text like a friend would have written it to you. So we always try to keep that top line or that first line very conversational, and if it deals with an artist, which it usually does, I'm a fan of puns. If I could find an artist song that maybe makes sense to throw in there, that hits a little bit more when it gets to the guest. Because if it's their favorite artist, they're going to relate to that lyric or that song."
Marc writes the first pass in Hive, then he and his marketing manager riff on it together to shave it down to a single SMS segment before it goes out. The catalog research happens before the writing: pulling old videos of the artist, finding hit songs or lyric references, looking for anything a real fan would recognize.
"The more product knowledge we have, the better, and we're able to take that into emails and the conversations."
List growth at Yoshi's runs on a few tactics layered together. Every new subscriber is auto-entered to win a $250 gift card awarded monthly. QR codes on flyers, posters, table cards, and the venue's in-house TVs all link to a deep-link signup flow that makes joining a one-tap action.
Sweepstakes run almost continuously now, usually tied to a specific show with a few hundred dollars of social ad spend behind them, and Marc is deliberate about which show he picks for each one.
"I'm kind of playing with, do I want to give a show that maybe needs promotion, and part of it will be the social media ads will help promote this show? Or am I picking a show that chances are is going to be sold out and doesn't need the promotion, but that name is going to get a lot more people to subscribe?"
The biggest single growth moment was Black Friday. Yoshi's offered SMS subscribers early access to 25 percent off a block of 20 to 25 shows before the general on-sale opened, backed by a site pop-up for the week leading in.
"Essentially, if you were part of the text club, you would get first dibs because with these discounts, we only run them for a set number of tickets per show. So once they're gone, they're gone. With the popular ones, maybe there were a few of them that were gone by the time we went for the general on sale."
The list took a big jump that week, and fans who signed up got real value the day they joined.
The original goal at end of last year was 10,000 subscribers. The list cleared that and kept growing, and now sits at roughly 25,000 and still adds about 1,000 subscribers a month.
He and Ruby from Hive's CX team are also building out a referral mechanic, designed to let current subscribers invite friends into the list.
"We made these people happy, we made them excited to check their phones. So why wouldn't they share with their friends? Especially if we can make it fun to do."
The bigger ambition behind the cadence is to free up time for the work Marc finds most rewarding.
"I'd like to focus on the fun creative stuff."
Join the conversation with event marketers figuring this out together.
Join the Backstage community.