Partner Article

An Olympic email campaign

It was a summer of sporting achievements and many thousands of us fell in love with sports we might never have heard of before (who knew handball was so much fun?). But what many of us don’t think about are the organisations behind sports and what businesses might be able to learn from them.

ASA/British Swimming, the UK’s national organisation for swimming, water polo, diving and other water sports, had an amazing opportunity in the summer of 2012, but to achieve it, ASA had to dramatically improve how it communicated with members.

What it did was improve pre-event sales for the Olympic Swimming Trials by 50 per cent with a well-coordinated email marketing campaign in March of 2012. Those are results any business would be proud of!

But to understand that success, let’s turn back the clock.

ASA’s goal is to encourage people to support swimmers and swimming organisations across the country and traditionally it had kept in touch with expensive printed mailers, but for 2012 the focus switched to email.

The national organisation had no problem collecting email addresses. When new members sign up or customers buy an ASA product, they’re prompted to join the organisation’s email list. There’s also a “Join My Mailing List” button on the website for anyone who wants to receive the newsletter. This all resulted in a list of over 108,600 contacts, but as Barry Wade, the web manager at ASA, says, with great reach comes great responsibility.

“If you’re doing email marketing, you need to look at the needs of the various groups and target newsletters around them,” Barry explains. “Our teachers and coaches get career advice or jobs. Volunteers see new initiatives. Swimmers and families receive emails about programmes that teach health and swimming tips.”

This year, the target was promoting the pre-Olympics trials, an event which normally results in very low pre-sale tickets as people tend to turn up on the day. For 2012, Barry tried something different by starting a very gradual email campaign. ASA sent out emails about the trials very far in advance, and had people signing up six months before they happened.

The ASA emails promised email recipients that they would find out when the tickets went on sale before anyone else. Every month, there was a count-down email that showcased a little more detail about the trials.

“That kind of whipped everyone into a frenzy,” Barry laughs. “We sent our email readers a special code, so that they could get their tickets first and they shared it with their friends through social media, too. As a result, when the sale first went live, the whole site crashed, because the traffic was so high.”

That’s not all – ASA exceeded all of the sales goals for pre-event tickets.

“We busted through all of our targets. The vast majority of our tickets were sold way before the trials… we were 50% above our target on tickets sold,” Barry says. When he thinks about what has made the ASA’s email marketing so successful, Barry promptly responds that it’s one thing above all others: good content.

“For email marketing, you need to understand the content that will engage your target audience. You can’t just take a blind list and then email people, because they’ll report it as spam,” he explains. “Not only that, you won’t get anything from it. It’s a careful growing process.”

The second part of that strategy is sending out the right content to the right people. The ASA has 69 different contact lists altogether, from international swimmers to media contacts to regional swimming clubs. The team goes to great lengths to ensure each group gets content that’s suitable for them. I think there are a lot of clear best practices here which small business can incorporate into their marketing strategy to try and emulate ASA’s incredible success.

Four key things to remember that ASA did really well:

• Make it easy to sign up – ASA has about five different touch points where the public can easily sign up for newsletters• Segmentation – your email list is never too small or too big to consider who gets what from your company

• Exclusivity – offering your email list something they couldn’t get anywhere else, in this case first dibs on tickets

• Timing – crucially ASA started sharing information about the event early and continued to follow up regularly in the months preceding it

If you want to find out more about how you can use online marketing to grow your business you can follow Constant Contact UK on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest and you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook, too.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tamsin Fox-Davies .