Overview
Yoshi's is an independent jazz club and Japanese restaurant in Oakland, California, that hosts over 500 shows a year. With a small marketing team and a decades-in-the-making email list built across multiple ticketing platforms, Yoshi’s needed a better way to reach fans.
In September 2024, Yoshi’s Marketing Director, Marc Zuazua, attended an Etix SMS marketing panel and learned more about how this channel could potentially work for their venue. He then connected with Ruby, their Senior Customer Success Manager at Hive. Although SMS initially felt daunting, Ruby’s practical guidance gave Marc the confidence that texting could be the simple, high-impact channel Yoshi’s needed.
Managing marketing for hundreds of shows a year with a two-person team left Marc with little time to experiment or rethink existing channels. Marc notes that their long-running email list “was never really segmented properly,” which isn’t surprising since targeting matters far more today than it did 30 years ago. Plus, post-pandemic shifts meant slower nights in the restaurant, making it even more important to reach guests with the timely, personalized offers that could drive both ticket sales and restaurant orders.
After connecting with Ruby to help organize their SMS launch with compliance and intentionality, Yoshi's officially kickstarted their SMS program on November 5, 2024. With Hive's automation tools and segmentation capabilities, Yoshi's transformed its SMS marketing approach by:
- Starting fresh with clean, organized data in Hive that allowed precise audience segmentation from day one.
- Automating and strengthening SMS list growth through monthly $250 gift card giveaways, contest sweepstakes with hotel partners, and physical QR codes across the venue and restaurant.
- Building a flash sale cadence that prioritizes SMS subscribers with 50% off offers before email campaigns; which drives sellouts for most promotions without requiring additional sends.
- Running pre-sales exclusively for their Text Club subscribers and offering early access to specific shows, which helps to convert hundreds, if not thousands, of new opt-ins.
By also using Hive's Contest Automations for winner and non-winner notifications, the Yoshi's team has built out a sustainable text program that doesn't require constant hands-on management.
"Ruby’s experience and enthusiasm—she’s very passionate about SMS—helped us get more enthusiastic about it," Marc recalled about his initial conversations with Hive.
After adopting Hive’s full spectrum of SMS tools, Yoshi’s transformed its text channel into a major revenue generator in under a year:
- $150,000+ in attributed SMS revenue, averaging $1,000 in event sales daily and directly from text campaigns.
- Grew SMS list to 15,700+ subscribers, surpassing their initial 2025 goal of 10K subscribers using hotel sweepstakes, ticket giveaways, and restaurant offers.
- Maintained a nearly 0% opt-out rate, an impossible feat thanks to personal messaging that always focuses on value adds.
- Achieved a 2,115% SMS ROI, investing approximately $6,500 in SMS usage fees to fuel one of the venue’s highest performing marketing channels.
.png?width=750&height=471&name=image%20(1).png "image (1)")
“When we were first getting started with SMS, our goal by the end of year was 10,000 subscribers, and here we are, near 16,000. It honestly has been a lot better than I ever thought it could have been, and we’re still in the growing and learning phase.”
Marc Zuazua
Director of Marketing - Yoshi’s
Yoshi's team is developing a text referral program that will incentivize its 15,000+ engaged subscribers to invite friends, creating a viral growth loop. "We made 15,000 people happy and excited to check their phones, so why wouldn't they share our club with their friends?" Marc asks. With an SMS program that matches email revenue week after week, Yoshi’s proves that small teams can achieve massive results with the right growth strategy and partner behind them.
Written under the gentle spell of Laufey’s “Silver Lining” 🌙