Updated Communications
Prior to implementing the Listrak email marketing solution, Ken Chertow Wrestling and the merchandise company Wear and Gear manually sent its email campaigns from an in-house mail server. This was no small task as it sent out a weekly “mega blaster” campaign to thousands of recipients and smaller targeted messages as well. Because it was all done manually, Chertow Camps spent a lot of time creating each email blast, maintaining member lists, organizing campaigns, and sending messages.
The manual campaigns had other issues, too. For example, it was nearly impossible to track results accurately as they did not know which recipients were visiting the website as a result of an email campaign. It also did not know which recipients were deleting the messages, reading the messages, or forwarding the messages onto friends. However, a noticeable increase in the number of people signing up for camps in the days immediately following the email sends confirmed that email marketing worked. The company simply needed a better way to create, manage, and track the campaigns.
Gold Medal Wrestling and Wear and Gear implemented Listrak’s award winning email marketing solution in October of 2006. While many of the subscribers are still obtained manually at tournaments, members may now sign up directly through the website as well. More importantly, Listrak offers many automated features that allow Chertow Camps to develop campaigns and track results.
“Listrak has given us the ability to clean up and manage our lists,” says Stephanie Girouard, Merchandise Manager of Wear and Gear. “The built-in deliverability tools and opt-out features give us the peace of mind to know that our messages are being well received by our members. We’re currently segmenting our lists so we can reach our members with an even greater degree of personalization.”
To start, Ken Chertow and Wear and Gear built its own email template using Listrak’s built-in media library feature to store and manage graphics online and saved it in Listrak’s email template directory. The template allows the user to have its branding at the forefront of each message and provides a consistent look and feel to each message. Because the template is stored in the directory, it may be reused without having to be recreated for each new message. This saves Chertow Camps a lot of time when creating new weekly email campaigns.
The deliverability features in Listrak are utilized to ensure that the messages are being received by reducing the bounce rate. These features include list hygiene, a tool that automatically fixes misspellings and common errors, and Spam Scoring, a tool that rates the probability of message delivery before it is sent to the entire list.
Chertow Wrestling is also segmenting its database so messages may be customized based on location, previous camp attendance, program of interest, etc. It will also use the segmenting tool to profile Wear and Gear customers based on past purchases of wrestling merchandise so it can track purchase history and inform customers of availability of items that may be of interest to them. This way, recipients will only receive information that they want, which will greatly increase their satisfaction.
“Our goal is to make our email messages more relevant to our members,” says Girouard. “We offer specialized products and services to different wrestling divisions, age groups, and weight classes. The segmenting tools in Listrak will allow us to reach the audience in each group with customized messages that will be important to them without having to read through irrelevant information.”
