NC State, Laylo and the Unrivaled Power of SMS Marketing

In an increasingly fragmented digital landscape, it’s tough to know where you should invest your time, energy and hard-earned dollars to maximize fan engagement on your sales and marketing campaigns. Is Google still king? Are your emails hitting fans’ inboxes? Can social impressions even be trusted? And if they can, which platform is the best fit for your brand and audience? Uncertainty abounds.

But there’s one channel that darn near guarantees you some face time with your fans: SMS (or text messaging if you’re not among the acronymically inclined). It’s intimate, it’s immediate and best of all, it’s a space that’s delightfully uncrowded.

All reasons why the NC State Athletics Department decided to partner with FEVO and  Laylo to build a new channel for sales called the Digital Club. This text-focused initiative offers members priority access to game inventory via a seamless mobile experience.

The Challenge

Before the collaboration, NC State Athletics faced several barriers. Without a powerful engine to handle their SMS marketing, they were limited to onerous, manual, one-to-one texting, severely constraining their ability to drive engagement, capture leads and generate revenue via what was otherwise a very promising marketing channel.

The Solution

Thanks to FEVO’s integration with Laylo, NC State was able to start deploying advanced SMS marketing campaigns to fans at the click of a button (Laylo calls these campaigns  “drops” and NC State deployed the new Laylo “Multidrop”). FEVO, meanwhile, was able to facilitate a seamless transition from the text messages to the actual checkout, effectively closing the consumer journey loop and making the entire process ROI-positive.

The Results

Leveraging an omnichannel strategy involving email, social, and web campaigns, NC State’s Digital Club has grown exponentially. The club has also evolved to include tailored segments based on specific sports, including football as well as women’s and men’s basketball.

Future Expansion

The success of marketing to the Digital Club via Laylo drops has been so impactful that NC State Athletics is planning to extend this strategy to their women’s and men’s basketball segments. They’ve also launched a specialized channel dedicated to facility and staff groups.

Laylo and FEVO were made for each other. The simplicity of the mobile experience, from receiving text messages to landing directly on FEVO’s checkout pages, is unparalleled. This has proven to be the quickest, simplest and one of our top-converting purchase flows for our fans.
-Christopher Flores, NC State Athletics

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Interested in using Laylo's drop technology to serve up FEVO offers with your own SMS marketing campaigns? Just fill out the interest form here and we'll be in touch tout de suite.