Email marketing has been around for a long time. But it is a marketing tool that many football clubs and academies are not yet using despite the positive impact that good email marketing strategies can have on an organisation.
Email marketing is simply the use of email to communicate with your existing customers (or members) and to grow your customer base for your organisation. Companies such as Brevo.com and Mailchimp.com are examples of email marketing companies used by organisations all around the world.
In this article, we discuss several main benefits that good email marketing can provide to your football academy.
1. It Organises Your Contacts
One of the first steps in email marketing is uploading a list of your existing customers containing your customers’ email addresses and other information about your contacts such as their first name, last name, phone number (and much more is possible too). This creates a sort of organised database where your contacts are stored in a clean way.
Once you have done this, you have an organised view of your customer list and it is the foundation for uncovering interesting questions such as the number of customers (or members) that you have or what other information you are not yet asking from your customers that could help you to serve them better.
Important Note: It goes without saying that you must have asked your customers permission to save their contact information and to send them emails in order to comply with GDPR regulations.
2. It Groups Your Contacts into Practical Lists or Segments
Another major benefit of using email marketing tools is called segmentation. After you have added your contacts list to your chosen email marketing platform, the platform helps you to easily divide your contacts into different groups based on common characteristics.
Remember your customer information such as email address, first name, last name, phone number that you uploaded to the platform? All this information is at your disposal and other characteristics too that can be used to create groups of contacts that make sense for your academy’s objectives.
For example, you can add all your contacts that have previously signed up for your football camps into a specific list called “Football Camp Participants” and send an email to all the contacts in this list.
Or, as an example of segmentation, you can send an email to all contacts that are from a specific geographic region (if you are asking the geographic region for each of your contacts).
This helps you save time and reach out to your customers by email in a more precise and relevant way.
3. You Can Send Personalised Emails
We mentioned that you can send an email to all your contacts in a specific list or to all contacts that have a common characteristic. But email marketing can go even further.
Email marketing tools help you personalise each email you send to each of your contacts. For example, instead of starting your email with simply “Hello,”, you can write “Hello Romelu,” by inserting the first name of each of your contacts in the email’s text automatically.
Or, if you know that your contacts previously attended a specific event of your club, say your last Summer Football Camp event, send an email saying “Thank you for attending our Summer Football Camp“, automatically inserting the event that each contact attended.
As you can imagine, people are more likely to read and respond to a message that is personalised to them.
4. You Can Design Your Emails with Images & Links
Good communication is also about transmitting a message in a compelling way. And email marketing tools help you design emails with captivating images, buttons, links to your website or to YouTube video’s.
You can create emails with your Academy’s logo and your brand colours. You can add images about your club or your events. You can add a button with a link to send your contacts to your website.
The possibilities are endless. And to save yourself time, you can save your email designs and re-use them every time!
Thanks for reading!
We hope this article gave you a better idea of what email marketing is and how you can use it to become an even better football academy. At Oxasport, we help football coaches and academies improve their skills through experiences and educational resources. Check out our Football Education Programs for football coaches and players to discover experiences develop your skills at the best Clubs in the world.
