A “super weapon” hiding in plain sight: How The Night League uses SMS to fill the world's biggest clubs

"It's a bit of a super weapon that's kind of glaring everybody in the face — but it's underutilised."

That's how Adam Wilson, marketer at The Night League, describes SMS. And when you operate the world's #1 club (four years running), the world's #1 beach club, and the world's first ever "hyperclub", you can't ignore an edge like that.

The biggest clubs on the planet, powered by SMS

The Night League owns and operates Hï Ibiza, Ushuaïa Ibiza, and [UNVRS], a venue built for festival-scale production with a club atmosphere. With dozens of special events and headline residencies to launch each season — think David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Fisher, Dom Dolla — there's no quiet period. "We don't sleep for six months of the year," says Adam.

When the pressure is on to fill venues of this scale, night after night, a missed message isn't a minor inconvenience — it's empty dancefloors. And email wasn’t cutting it. Despite a large list, messages were getting buried alongside every other brand fighting for inbox real estate.

"I was looking for direct ways to get to people that wasn't email or that wasn't going to be lost in a quagmire of other messages from brands,” says Adam.

0.47% vs 22% click-through rates: email didn't stand a chance

Adam originally stumbled across ClickSend while running SMS campaigns for a separate business. When he saw how much higher the engagement was compared to email, he brought it across to The Night League — and hasn't looked back.

When Adam ran SMS and email side by side for one campaign, the gap was staggering.

Despite the SMS list being 8x smaller than the email list, SMS generated nearly 6x more clicks — outperforming on the metric that actually matters: people clicking through and buying tickets.

That's roughly 47 x the click-through rate, message for message.

As Adam puts it: "Do you want to invest in email with 300 clicks over 75,000 people — or get way more clicks on SMS for a lot less?"

For him, it’s a no-brainer.

How The Night League uses SMS day-to-day

At its core, The Night League uses ClickSend for event promotion — but on a massive, global scale.

Pre-sale announcements and on-sale drops are the primary use case. The team maintains targeted lists for each venue and sends SMS blasts when tickets go live.

They've also used Zapier to build automated workflows — for example, triggering a message to Ushuaïa daytime guests with drinks packages at Hï Ibiza, which sits directly across the road.

"If I can get an extra thousand people a night to buy a drinks package, cumulatively, that's a lot of money," Adam says.

The team tracks everything with UTM-tagged short links, giving them a clear picture of what's actually driving ticket sales — not just vanity open rates.

Personalisation features like first-name addressing make cold messages feel warmer, which matters when you're competing for attention on someone's lock screen.

"If you're getting a cold message from somebody that you're not expecting, it's a bit weird,” he explains. “But when it says 'Hey Dave' — that's better."

Segmentation is a growing priority. With artists spanning mainstream mega-acts to underground talent, the team knows a one-size-fits-all blast won't cut it.

"If I like David Guetta, I'm probably not so much into the Martinez Brothers, which is kind of cool and underground,” says Adam. "I don't want to be sending messages to those same people when it's not relevant to them."

The ambition extends further: segmenting by language (Spanish vs. English), music preference and buying behaviour to create genuinely personalised communications for a diverse, international audience.

The year of austerity — and why ROI wins

Having just built the world's first hyperclub, The Night League is in what Adam calls "a year of austerity" — laser-focused on ROI and cutting what doesn't perform.

That meant scrutinising every tool in the stack. Adam recently explored Laylo, an SMS platform popular with artists and event professionals that uses Instagram comment-to-DM funnels. But the economics didn't add up.

Because Laylo requires a confirmation message before the actual offer, every communication is effectively two messages for the price of one — a dealbreaker at the scale The Night League operates.

“To me, it's double," Adam explains. "When we're dealing with 80,000 people, that's a lot of messages. I researched and compared different platforms and ClickSend is currently the most cost-effective way of doing it."

The edge that's hiding in plain sight

While competitors battle it out on email and social, all vying for the same crowded space, The Night League has a direct line that most of the industry hasn't tapped into yet. “SMS works really well because not everybody's doing it all the time,” Adam says.

For event operators smart enough to adopt it now, the advantage is real, measurable — and still wide open.