How Hash Ads boosted player trials by 60% for a leading football academy using a WhatsApp chatbot
Stars of Africa is the biggest youth football academy in South Africa. It has groomed more than 15 professional football players representing Europe as well as the South African national football team - Bafana Bafana.
Stars of Africa - a football academy established in 2003 with the mission to develop young football talent by providing players quality skill instruction & coaching.
Johannesburg - South Africa 🇿🇦
Sports and Fitness
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In 2003, a group of passionate football-loving entrepreneurs took the challenge of helping young football players and coaches to evolve and grow professionally. They established the Stars of Africa Football Academy to become a leading force in Africa’s youth development and coach education.
Today, they focus on discovering raw talent and providing quality coaching and skill instruction facilitated by a fully qualified and highly skilled technical team. The academy also offers youth development for the players, who, in many instances, come from disadvantaged communities.
In a similar spirit, the academy is building new development centres in schools and communities across the country to improve the accessibility to quality sports coaching.
With the influx of player inquiries for trials, coaching, and league matches, the academy roped in Hash Ads as its creative agency partner to increase awareness about the program and transform the player trial & coaching experience using an innovative approach.
Creating awareness about animal cruelty and improving engagement with prospective donors to improve leads
Capturing a larger cut of the player pool and the missed revenue potential
The open football trials
Every December for the last four years, the academy has held an open trial for young individuals aspiring to be professional football players. Three months before the trials would start, the academy started receiving close to 500 messages per week on WhatsApp from players and their parents of the players—all of it organically.
A player registration nightmare
The team didn’t have any automation in place. Hence, one person would manually ask each incoming player 7-8 questions and capture the relevant player data, while another person would copy and paste these responses into a Google Sheet one by one.
The existing trial registration process on WhatsApp Business App was painstakingly slow for the players as well as the Academy team. There were too many manual steps, and the process often took a long time with a lot of back and forth to confirm player attendance for the trial. The Academy team faced challenges scaling the process to reach maximum efficiency while also improving the overall player experience.
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Automating academy operations on the most used app in South Africa
In South Africa, WhatsApp chat automation has been growing as an attractive, cheaper alternative to other services like SMS messaging, which is expensive and doesn’t offer a scalable two-way conversational experience with interactive media options.
Faeez Saloojee | Hash Ads - Agency Partner
According to Statista, WhatsApp is the most popular social media app in South Africa, with some 93% of internet users in the country using the messaging app.
Playing on the offensive with WhatsApp
With WhatsApp’s increasing popularity and penetration in South Africa, the team at Hash Ads decided that the best way to get closer to players and their parents was to be where they already are—on WhatsApp.
Building automation with Landbot felt like a no-brainer
Automating a chatbot from scratch can be an uphill task, especially with no prior coding experience. The team wanted a tool that could make the implementation easy, and Landbot checked all these boxes:
Visual, drag & drop bot builder
Intuitive & friendly user interface
Native integration with Google Sheets
Well defined and simple documentation
Sailing through uncharted waters with stellar support
Tackling the basics - A guided trial registration experience
The Hash Ads team started by creating a flow for football trials registration whose primary role was to capture player data like name, location, player position, and birth year to automatically qualify, segment, and then export the data to an internal database using the Google Sheets integration.
Stars of Africa bot - Register for a trial
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Step 4 - Campaign assets submission, review & approval
That’s not all! After completing the trials, players and parents proactively receive information about the selection results via the WhatsApp bot.
Stars of Africa bot - Trial process & Trial results
That’s not all! After completing the trials, players and parents proactively receive information about the selection results via the WhatsApp bot.
Stars of Africa bot - Trial process & Trial results
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That’s not all! After completing the trials, players and parents proactively receive information about the selection results via the WhatsApp bot.
Stars of Africa bot - Trial process & Trial results
| Hash Ads - Agency Partner
Marketing Manager | Conversational Design
Ever since the Academy automated their WhatsApp communications, the recurring revenue from trials has increased over 60%. Over 1300+ football trial applications were received last season via WhatsApp, leading to an all-time high player attendance of 70%.
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A better player onboarding experience
Landbot’s WhatsApp automation solution made it easier for players and their parents to register for football trials. Easy accessibility on mobile via WhatsApp made it possible for more individuals to participate in a trial and allowed them to do so sooner. It enabled the Academy team to easily review more registrations and quickly notify players and parents about trial dates as well as trial results.
Faeez Saloojee | Hash Ads - Agency Partner
Increased player opt-in, attendance & revenue
Stars of Africa has been able to keep players updated and looped in on upcoming trial dates, matches & leagues with Landbot’s proactive messaging feature using HSM templates. The majority of the players who register via WhatsApp opt-in for future communication because of how seamless the interaction has been—resulting in over 70% of registered players attending the trials.
Improved operational efficiency
The academy team manages all communication with the registered players and their parents through WhatsApp, allowing the Stars of Africa team to save time. Football coaches who were earlier involved in player operations now focus on developing the young talent on the playing field.
And that's the goal, to win together
With services reaching the masses on mobile, platforms like WhatsApp have transformed the digital world into a global community without borders. In recent years, the digital evolution of the average internet user has accelerated 10x. Netizens have become savvier in adopting digital technologies and are ready to share opinions, connect or transact via smartphone.
Faeez Saloojee | Hash Ads - Agency Partner
Medium-sized businesses in all industries have understood the need to pivot to digital platforms to align with evolving consumer needs. Amidst this digital transformation, chatbots have become the go-to solution for automating conversations at scale, to improve business operations and boost revenues.
Agencies enable niche businesses like Stars of Africa to become more customer-centric with Landbot’s WhatsApp automation. They simplify a complex process and reduce the time required to complete repetitive tasks—saving time and money while boosting revenue without increasing overheads.
The team at Hash Ads is constantly adding more features to the chatbot. For instance, the chatbot will send educational content like game techniques and coaching tips to non-selected players in the upcoming releases and capture operational data from selected players like jersey numbers, size, etc.
With plans to open multiple academies across South Africa to foster the sporting culture in the country, Stars of Africa is already on a hyper-growth trajectory, and we at Landbot are always here to cheer & support them as they take on new challenges.
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650$
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