Strategies: Love Connection

When you think of big tennis competitive centers, you open up your mental atlas and flip to Wimbledon, Paris, Melbourne and New York. You may not necessarily think Indianapolis.

But that heartland capital has been serving up a U.S. tennis championship in one form or another since 1920, and in fact the event — now dubbed the Indianapolis Tennis Championships Presented by Lilly and held this year July 18-26 — has become a notable warm-up for the U.S. Open, held around Labor Day.

Still, Indiana in high summer is no Paris, and drawing crowds has been a continual challenge. In recent years organizers have relied on e-mail and newsletter sign-ups to fire up ticket sales in advance of the tournament. But this year they did something different, opening up a mobile channel to Midwestern racket fans, including text messaging during the event and voice messaging from tennis superstars in the run-up.

Sarah Brelage, executive director of staff operations for the Indianapolis Championships, says that while pitching tickets to fans via e-mail was the best option a few years ago, times, and crowds, have changed.

“The e-newsletter was very effective two years ago in terms of communication, but as our demographic starts to skew a little bit younger, mobile is the route we need,” she says. “The newsletter is for general information, but some of the promotional stuff needs to be done real time.”

And for that, Brelage and her team worked with integrated messaging platform ExactTarget to set up interactive communications systems that could reach fans both before and during the eight-day event.

The campaign started last March when the tournament’s existing e-mail registrants were encouraged to opt in to mobile messaging. In June past fans who had opted in but had not yet purchased tickets received recorded voice calls from the likes of U.S. Open winner Andy Roddick reminding them to come watch him compete and perhaps reach his 500th career win.

As it happened, Roddick was forced to bow out of competition in Indianapolis at the last minute by an ongoing injury. But organizers had another draw in the form of Sam Querrey, ranked 4th among American players and 34th in the world, and Brelage had plans to use him in spot promotions during the games, sending text messages to join Querrey and his “Sam’s Samurai” entourage at a local restaurant for autographs and prizes.

Fans will also be able to compete for prizes by texting in answers to tennis trivia questions posted on the video message boards between sets.

Brelage’s strategy called for a number of on-the-fly promotions during the matches. “In the past, it’s been hard to get the word out about events like on-site autograph sessions,” she says. “So much of what we do has got to be very fluid, with the players’ schedules. Texting allows us almost to say, ‘Hey, this is going to happen in half an hour.’”

DID YOU KNOW?

• Users succeed at just 59% of tasks on the mobile Web, compared to 80% over PCs. The reasons, other than network dropouts: small screens, awkward input, download delays and Web sites not optimized for mobile.
  Source: Nielsen Norman Group