6 Email Marketing Tips for Sports Academies
Dhwani Shah
October 4, 2024
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4 min read
Running a sports academy involves juggling numerous responsibilities. From coaching and administration to marketing and community engagement - there's certainly a lot on the plate. And in today’s competitive landscape, establishing strong connections with all the stakeholders of your academy is crucial. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through email marketing, an affordable, easy, and powerful tool for building meaningful relationships. In fact, according to Hubspot, 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email marketing. However, to leverage the full potential of sports email marketing and run successful email marketing campaigns, it's important to employ the right email marketing tools and strategies.
Here are six email marketing tips specifically tailored for sports academies:
Segmentation is the process of grouping together contacts with certain common attributes in order to deliver personalized emails. You can segment your email lists into different groups based on suitable parameters. You may start, for example, by dividing all your contacts into 2 broad lists - students and staff. Each list can now be segmented further, say, the list of students into prospective students, existing students and alumni. These in turn can be dissected deeper into age group, gender, courses enrolled in and so on. Your emails can thus be customized accordingly before being sent out.
Segmenting your contacts allows you to send sports emails that are relevant, meaningful and unique to each section of your client base, and the more relevant your content is, the more your audience will engage with it. In fact, marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
Let's face it, we all LOVE being made to feel special. A “Thank you, Peter” can be so much more impactful than a simple “Thank you”. Personalizing your sports emails makes it more likely for them to be opened and goes a long way in enhancing customer experience. However, personalization is more than just addressing your audience by first name; while that is important and works well, customizing emails involves creating tailor-made material that a client can resonate and thus engage with.
Personalizing subject lines and senders makes the client feel like the email is addressed to and written specifically for them. You'd probably open an email that says - ‘Peter, are you ready for your first football class?’ than one that says, ‘Are you ready for your first football class?’
Similarly, personalizing senders humanizes the technical elements of your email for the reader. A message from ‘Sara from the Admin Team’ is much more likely to be opened than an email from ‘admin@abcoaching.com’.
So once you’ve collected the requisite information from your clients, the data can be used to send more targeted emails and enjoy improved open rates, click-through rates, sales and conversions.
In the words of Bill Gates, ‘Automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.’
Automating your email workflow is a smart way of minimizing effort and maximizing efficiency, helping you to scale freely and increase conversion rates while the operations run themselves in the background, giving you more time to focus on the other valuable tasks of your coaching business.
With automation, you can send personalized emails for each individual. From personalized onboarding mails for new enrollments (Tom, we're all set to make you a tennis champ!) to personalized birthday and anniversary emails and offers for existing customers (Happy birthday David! Let's celebrate together with a 20% off on your next coaching session!), automating messages keeps leads engaged and converts them into sales, while helping you build a loyal client base.
Automation software also ensures that your clients are not being flooded by a large volume of emails day after day. It's always a good idea to create a well-timed email workflow with well-spaced intervals to give customers some time to open and read the first email, before immediately bombarding them with another one. In this game, it helps to remember that slow but steady wins the race.
It takes only a few simple steps to automate your entire workflow—from personalizing emails to scheduling them to tracking client activity—but the benefits it reaps are invaluable.
Try, try till you succeed. Sports email marketing has no ‘one fit for all’ strategy; it's crucial to identify what works best with your customers. You have to test and analyze, time and again, your email marketing campaigns to see how different customers are responding to the messages you are sending out, and modify them in light of these responses.
A/B testing campaigns involve sending out different variants (variant A and variant B) of a single email to see which one is more successful.
The variations might be something small—a coupon for 20% off v/s one for $50 off on the purchase of your next one-on-one tennis coaching session. Or they may be substantial—like a complete change in the design and layout of the email. You can also try resending an unopened email with a different subject line. By measuring the open rates, click rates and conversion rates on the different variants, you can gather clearer insights into consumer behavior and can make more informed calls about what fits best with your clients. This allows you to tailor-make your future sports email campaigns accordingly.
‘Unsubscribe’ is not always a bad thing. Most of us have an inbox overflowing with emails that we are struggling to keep pace with, and being constantly pestered by irrelevant emails can be annoying. Removing people that are not interested in receiving your messages clears not only their inboxes, but your mailing lists as well. Moreover, unsubscribes enable us to maintain a good sender reputation and to devote more time and effort to improving the user experience for our active subscribers.
It would be advisable to remove people from a workflow when they have failed to open 5 emails; they probably have no interest in what you are offering them and are unlikely to open and read those or any other emails. After a number of unopened emails, you can create a separate workflow that leads to an end where they politely stop receiving any future emails.
So while it can be painful to see people unsubscribing from your email list, you've got to remember that every dark cloud has a silver lining.
In today's fast-paced world, everyone is always on the go, and their mobiles are the one device accompanying them literally everywhere! That, coupled with this generation’s obsession with their smartphones, suggests that most emails are likely to be read on the mobile device. In fact, according to Mailchimp, launching a mobile-responsive email design can increase unique mobile clicks by 15%. This makes optimizing your emails for mobile phones very important.
While optimizing for mobile, it's important to keep in mind to -
These effective and practical email marketing tips can assist you in designing and implementing successful email marketing campaigns, and in turn, foster relationships with existing students, facilitate the onboarding of new students, and communicate effectively with your staff. Email marketing tools like MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, and HubSpot, to name a few, allow you to work smarter while they do all the hard work for you. The ball is in your court, it's time to win the game!
Optimizing your sports academy's email marketing efforts is crucial for building strong connections and driving engagement. With Classcard, you can leverage advanced segmentation to group your students by various criteria such as age, course enrollment, and more. This allows you to send tailored, relevant messages to each segment, ensuring higher engagement and effectiveness. Additionally, Classcard's automation can streamline your email workflows, enabling you to send personalized messages and timely updates with minimal manual effort. From onboarding new students to sending birthday offers, automation helps you stay connected and save time. Our sports academy management software also allows you to schedule classes, manage bookings, track attendance and payments, and much more.