Fan support at games is fundamental to the success of a sports team, which is why British soccer club Aston Villa turned to SMS in order to fill seats.

Aston Villa tapped Relay Station to broadcast text messages to the mobile phones of opted-in fans, calling for their support. Aston Villa is pushing hard for a Champions League spot and has hopes of success in this season's UEFA and FA Cup.

"Aston Villa is targeting season-ticket-holders with an easy-to-use system, which lets them buy tickets immediately using their mobile device," said Sharon Maslyn, managing director of Relay Station, Amesbury, Britain. "The goal is to increase the number of people who attend the games."

Relay Station is a communications provider to governments, banks, enterprises, small-to-medium enterprises, charities, professional organizations, sports clubs and other types of operations with large audiences.

Relay Station's new RelayReact service enables reply text messages to trigger a voice message and for fans to be connected immediately with the ticket office.

The Aston Villa SMS campaign isn't offering any incentives -- the goal is to make it simpler for fans to buy tickets.

Aston Villa has used SMS for quite some time to attract sales of tickets and kits, also known as "strips" or uniforms.

However, the soccer club noticed that it was getting a really good response from casual ticket buyers, but struggling to attract their loyal customer base.

"Season-ticket-holders buy their tickets once a year, but their season tickets package doesn't cover all matches, and they're not used to going to a Web site or call in to buy tickets, so this makes it as easy as possible for them to carry out transactions," Ms. Maslyn said.

Aston Villa already had a database of their opted-in fans, including all the mobile numbers of their season-ticket-holders.

"Fans opted in through various marketing campaigns and clubs get their information when they buy season tickets," Ms. Maslyn said. "Over time they have built up a great database of info on their fans."

For the interactive SMS broadcast, Relay Station sends out a text message to all of Aston Villa's fans, which typically reads "Are you interested in buying a ticket for Aston Villa's game againstâ?¦"

The fans can then reply YES via SMS to get a voice message sent to them automatically. They can press a certain key to be transferred to Aston Villa's ticket office immediately.

"It's all automated, so we made it as easy as possible to buy the one-off ticket sales for special matches," Ms. Maslyn said.

Aston Filla
SMS is an accepted technology and many premier and championship clubs such as Blackburn Rovers, Manchester City, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Coventry and Stoke City already use Relay Station's text and voice services to engage with their fans.

Aston Villa issues a mobile call to action on the electronic advertising boards in the club's stadium.

The messages read "For further information on such-and-such, text a certain keyword to a specific short code. Thank you for your interest in Aston Villa."

"That's another way for them to increase their opt-in database," Ms. Maslyn said.

Text and voice broadcasting are now proven communications tools for sports clubs to interact with supporters and to boost ticket sales at key matches.

To use Relay Station's RelayReact service, clubs need to record a message from the manager or a key player on an MP3, copy the mobile phone numbers of fans from a database to a spreadsheet and send both to Relay Station with instructions detailing when to broadcast the clip.

The personalized message is sent to the mobile phones or landlines of all fans simultaneously -- or spread out over a number of hours to avoid overloading ticket office staff -- and they have the option to opt-out from future broadcasts in the event they do not wish to receive personalized messages from their club.

"We know the results of the SMS campaign were very good, but they want to keep the figures confidential," Ms. Maslyn said. "They'll be using it again on a regular basis.

"They only had to spend one [British] pound per customer acquisition, and they got very, very good ticket sales off of it," she said. "SMS works very well for people not used to using the online and electronic systems that are available, and it can be used in lots of other different ways.

"Text messaging is an easy way for sports clubs to contact their customers and make it easy for them to buy tickets."