Secret Cinemas Text Message Marketing Case Study

Objectives:
Master Entertainment provides special event entertainment services. They opened for business in 1996 as a disc jockey company and have added a handful of different service offerings over the years. They are using Club Texting with their latest service offering, Secret Cinemas. Secret Cinemas is a mobile outdoor movie company (think a moving drive-in). They provide outdoor movies in parks, schools, at companies, and even backyards for groups of 100 to 1000 people. They bring the screen, projector, and sound system to any location with electricity and open space. Once darkness falls, the show begins!

Secret Cinemas was looking to find a way to both capture contact info for those in attendance for future marketing as well as setting up a notification list so they could let people know where and when their upcoming shows are. This is one of the problems with a moving theater (you never know where we will be next!).

Solution:
Secret Cinemas discovered Club Texting via online searches. With some background in the nightclub world, they knew that solutions like this were being implemented in nightclub marketing efforts and would be "awesome" for their company. Once they found Club Texting, the service and pricing were a perfect match for what they wanted to achieve on a pretty tight budget.

They also use the system for emergency situations such as cancellations due to inclement weather. On the lighter side, sometimes they will text things like concession discounts or free popcorn when they show their phone. These go out during the movie. There is no way they could interrupt the movie with an announcement but a text seems to be acceptable to everyone.

Implementation:
Secret Cinemas has implemented several capture methods to gather opt-ins. By far their best one is a simple banner placed at each show location by the road stating text their keyword to be notified about upcoming shows and entered to win a free movie night. This is "one heck of a prize" that they draw for once a year and it is a good incentive to sign-up. Every day the banner is up they get several new signups during peak drive times.

They also have forms on their website and Facebook page that gather people. In addition, before their shows they have several slides with basically the same wording as their banners to get people in attendance to sign up. That, teamed up with some announcements, usually creates a flood of new entries before every show.

Outcome:
Secret Cinemas has successfully built quite a list of outdoor movie attendees. This serves as a benefit for everyone. The attendees benefit by being better informed of upcoming events. Their sponsors benefit from improved attendance. Above all, they have become the movie provider of choice because they have built their own following - "Everyone loves it."

They plan in the future to roll out text marketing to some of their other divisions and are currently working on strategy to use it at tradeshows to gather booth attention.