How do you build ridership? You convince a potential rider to try a particular route.
How do you do that? You market each route individually.
We can help. Contact us today to get a free consultation. More Riders can deliver a route marketing campaign for your agency.
As an example of our route marketing service, check out our work on Go Green Every 15: a route marketing campaign for the Champaign-Urbana MTD’s Green Line.
Web-based platform
The route will get its own website with its own brand and URL. The main function of the site will be to build community among the riders and the partners who agree to promote the route in order to grow ridership. A Google Map of the route that partner businesses and institutions can post to will be a prominent feature of the site. This will be integrated into a community calendar for businesses to market sales and events. Finally, the site will include at least one well-designed pdf of the route map with neighborhood features that partners can download and distribute.
Businesses and institutions along the route can include widgets designed by us on their own websites that show the line’s upcoming arrival times and link to the ridership initiative homepage. This helps partner businesses achieve several goals:
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show their green and local community credentials
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reduce parking around their business and
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attract new customers by highlighting the convenience of their transit access.
This partnership-based link campaign will not only increase ridership for agencies, but will make them more visible as community partners to everyone.
More Riders will provide comprehensive statistics on website visitorship so you will know how how many people are visiting the site, how long they spend on the site, and what websites they come from. This will particularly helpful to track and publicly identify which partner organizations are successfully promoting the route-specific site.
In order to stay in close contact with visitors to encourage more traffic and ridership, visitors can subscribe to an electronic newsletter that features the community calendar, the latest ridership statistics and a forward-to-a-friend feature. More Riders will provide comprehensive statistics on the number of people who subscribe, unsubscribe, open and forward the electronic newsletter.
Recruiting volunteers
People ride because they want to travel to a destination. Thus, we need to recruit the people who own, operate, and work at the destinations along the route of our potential riders and ask them to promote the transit route. Printed media, websites, and communications toolkits are the pieces of a ridership initiative that will allow these people to become effective partners.
We also need to create something of value to them in order to generate their involvement in promoting the route. One way to do that is through an appeal of some kind, either to community pride, fixing climate change, breaking our oil addiction, alleviating parking or traffic congestion or a similar bigger picture motive. Another way to do that is by assisting their bottom line by allowing them to marketing their product or service to riders for free.
A ridership initiative does both, allowing them to market themselves on our site for free in exchange for asking them to market the route-based site to their audiences and constituents. After the site is created, agency staff or consultants should literally walk the route and recruit businesses face-to-face to join the community promoting the transit route.
Here’s how we did it with the Green 15 campaign:
Begin by choosing one of your best-performing routes. It should already have decent ridership (though not beyond capacity), good on-time performance, and be free of operational problems.
The reason to choose a route with good on-time performance, decent ridership and a lack of operational problems is because a communications effort can generate more ridership. There are many potential riders who would take advantage of the good route but they don’t know how it works or they haven’t considered the benefits of riding. A ridership initiative to these potential riders fills that gap.
Our objective is to find the lowest-cost method of communicating both the benefits of riding and the mechanics of riding the route to the largest number of potential riders. We want a high volume of communication to reach as many potential riders as possible with the lowest possible cost-per-communication in order to generate the highest return on investment for the agency.
Thus, our two main tactics for reaching the greatest number of potential riders at the lowest possible cost are to use a web-based platform for distributing most information and to aggressively recruit volunteers to spread the word to their constituents for free.
Funding
Try to secure a special grant, perhaps through CMAQ funding or from your municipality, to secure the funding to launch a specific route marketing campaign.
Municipalities and chambers of commerce can also sponsor their own route marketing initiative for the transit agency.
Our rate for each route campaign ranges from an hourly consulting or production fee to a flat-rate turnkey operation where we are responsible for every aspect of the campaign (including partner recruitment). Our flat-rate annual fee for an entire campaign is $9500.
Consider the lifetime value of each new rider attracted to the route because of the route marketing campaign. If a campaign attracts one new rider with an average fare of $1.00 who rides twice a week, that’s an annual value of around $100. Ten new riders is an annual value of $1,000 to the agency. And 100 new riders is an annual value of $10,000.
Even if a route marketing campaign from More Riders only attracts 50 new riders, that means an investment in a route marketing campaign will pay for itself in two years. That’s a fantastic return on investment.
Contact More Riders today for a free consultation on setting up a route marketing campaign for your agency.
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