Riot Fest builds a loyal audience with SMS marketing

Hannah Tittle was 14 the first time she rocked out to live music at Riot Fest.

She returned as a fan over the years before it occurred to her that someone had to put the whole thing together.

"It was definitely the first experience I had like that at a festival," Hannah says. "That changed the trajectory of what I wanted to do."

Hannah’s been on staff at Riot Fest for about 10 years, working her way to Marketing Director for the Chicago music and arts festival that takes over the city every September. The lineups range from punk to hip-hop to whatever genre a metal band fronted by William Shatner is. Riot Fest also books club shows and community events across Chicago all year long, which means Hannah is marketing something nearly every week.

"There's something for everyone, and not a lot of festivals have that anymore," Hannah says. "It's one of the few independents left."

Staying independent means the audience is the asset. Riot Fest talks to hundreds of thousands of fans directly, and the news it delivers has a short shelf life: lineup reveals, ticket on-sale notifications, single-day announcements, schedule drops, aftershow bookings. Fans expect to hear it the moment it's available, and if they don't hear it from Riot Fest, they'll hear it from a social feed or a friend.

And that's the part that’s gotten harder. Riot Fest’s marketing communications have run on Intuit Mailchimp for more than a decade, and email had always been the way the festival reached its list. Recently, fewer and fewer people were opening those messages, and Hannah needed to find a new way to get her audience’s attention.

The challenge: Announcements that needed a new inbox

Riot Fest's email list is one of the festival's most valuable marketing assets, built over more than a decade of festivals, club shows, and community events. A single send would put an announcement in front of a large share of the fan base at once.

But open rates started sliding.

"We used to be at least in the 20% range, and now we're skating around 5% every time we send one," Hannah says. "So we were like, well, this isn't working as well as it used to."

Nothing about the announcements had changed. The lineups were as strong as ever, and the news was as big as it had always been. But audience habits were adjusting, and promotional emails sometimes landed in a separate tab, often never getting seen—much less opened.

Hannah suspects the age of the list plays a part too. Riot Fest has been collecting addresses for years without a cleanup pass, and some share of those contacts belong to accounts nobody checks anymore.

"I know so many co-workers or friends that have 50,000 unread emails," she says. "They're just not looking at them as much anymore."

The tools: SMS marketing, popup forms, and tags

Riot Fest added SMS marketing to its Mailchimp account in Spring 2026. Email didn't go anywhere, every announcement still gets an e-blast, but SMS became the layer for news that couldn't afford to sit unopened. Fans opt in through popup forms on the Riot Fest website, with separate forms for texts and email newsletters, letting people choose the channel they want.

"I'm trying not to spam people with too many messages," Hannah says. "I want to keep it to stuff that I think is big news, or news that I think somebody would be interested in getting directly to their phone."

That means lineup reveals, ticket on-sale notifications, single-day announcements, the schedule release, and aftershow bookings. A lineup text carries the festival artwork and links to riotfest.org, where the poster is legible and the full bill is listed.

Hannah has also gotten creative in how Riot Fest uses Mailchimp tags. Beyond segmenting audiences for email and SMS, tags have become the system that keeps track of who has bought a ticket to what.

Riot Fest books club shows and community events all year long, and each one produces a buyer list. Those lists come into Mailchimp tagged with the artist, the venue, and the date, so when a comparable band gets booked months later, Hannah already knows who showed up for something similar.

"It is also a place for us to store all of our audiences, which is kind of nice," Hannah says. "If I'm trying to market a show I know I have an audience or a tag for, I can just download it and upload that into Meta."

That last part is where the tags earn a second return. The same audiences built for email and SMS get exported into Meta Business Suite, putting paid social in front of fans with a real purchase history behind them rather than a lookalike guess.

The results: Communication fans aren’t opting out of

Riot Fest sent more than 37,000 SMS campaign messages over a 90-day stretch this summer, and 98.6% of them were delivered successfully. (Automated SMS messages had a 99.9% delivery rate.)

"The delivered rate was so much higher than anticipated," Hannah says of the channel she launched only months earlier.

The number Hannah watches most closely is the one that stayed small. Unsubscribe rates have held at 0.77% on campaigns and 0.44% on automated messages, like the welcome flow. Across tens of thousands of texts sent during the busiest stretch of the festival calendar, well over 99% of fans stayed on the list.

Restraint is paying off. Hannah has kept SMS to a handful of announcements since launch, and the fans who opted in are still there for the next one.

"They want those big announcements directly to their phone," Hannah says. "That's why I've tried not to send a ton out. I don't want to do weekly, I don't want to do daily, I just want to keep it to the big events, so when we do have an announcement we want people to pay attention to, they haven't unsubscribed because we weren’t spamming them with things they don't necessarily need to know about."

Riot Fest happens in late September, and the weeks in front of it are the loudest stretch of Hannah's year. Schedule updates or last-minute additions have to reach hundreds of thousands of people who are already making plans.

Hannah isn't looking to reinvent the approach for it.

"Mailchimp just needs to keep doing what it's been doing for us," Hannah says. "It's the quickest and easiest way for us to get our information out to our fans and to the people who have bought tickets. It's our biggest communication tool between us and our fans, essentially."

The SMS list is still young, and Hannah is deliberate about how she grows it. She’s identifying opportunities to use texts onsite during the festival once enough fans have opted in for it to be helpful, and she'd rather build that audience slowly than push people onto a channel they didn't ask for.

For other festivals looking to improve their customer communication, Hannah says that for her, the choice is simple.

"Mailchimp is definitely the quickest way to get directly to your customer, your fan, your purchaser," she says. "And it's been very easy to use and schedule out if there's announcements, and then not have to worry about it."