3 email marketing ideas for companies that love sports

So, what type of emails should companies in the sports sector consider?

Companies across the business landscape work hard to develop creative, engaging content. However, there’s a critical difference between these companies and those who work in sports: The sports audience doesn’t need to be convinced to receive notifications regarding their favorite athletes or sports teams.

Now let’s explore the different types of emails you should send to engage with your audience.

1. Marketing emails

Marketing emails, often created as part of an email marketing campaign, are a form of digital correspondence designed to bring audiences up to speed on your latest products and services.

Sports marketers use marketing emails to successfully engage repeat or new customers to reach key performance indicators (KPIs), like customer attrition, subscription rates, sales, etc.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for email marketing. Fortunately, they’re customizable. By tweaking variables and attributes, including personalization, templates, and interactive components, today’s sports marketers can achieve precise goals.

If you’re still on the fence, consider sports email marketing’s low barrier to entry. This is a wallet-friendly method to market your content. Now let’s look at the three types of marketing emails you should use.

Newsletters

Email newsletter marketing is a subtle art. It’s the practice of packaging feature content according to consistent brand assets, including templates, imagery, and copy written in a brand’s voice to share with an audience. Companies allow readers to opt in to receive this content and manage audience expectations by releasing it on a regular schedule.

The best email newsletters have a dependable structure that audiences become used to experiencing. If you don’t know where to start, just keep things simple.

Best practices for email newsletters include:

• Leading with the most exciting information

• Keeping sentences short and easily scannable

• Optimizing for mobile devices

For more on optimizing your newsletter content, we’ve got plenty of articles on the subject.

Important announcements

When you have an exciting announcement or critical news, you need to share it with your audience. You can do this with a perfectly branded email.

Consider the following examples:

• A unique, limited-time offer

• The launch of a new product or product line

• Pre-order registration

• A flash sale

Schedule your announcement email deliveries so they’re received at a consistent cadence. This will be far more successful at driving up sales than a single email blast.

Event-related promotions 

The sports marketing industry is irrefutably tied to actual sporting events. There’s a treasure trove of peripheral events in sports, from celebratory parades to fun giveaways, opportunities to meet current or retired athletes, and more. Your event-related promotional emails can be just the nudge your audience needs to participate in an event they might be unaware of or interested in.

Bonus tip: By informing or reminding someone of an event they want to attend, you’re solidifying your reputation as a trusted source of knowledge. This email recipient will likely welcome your content the next time it lands in their inbox.

2. Transactional emails 

At their core, transactional emails are real-time updates activated by something your audience does. As a sports email marketer, you leverage your digital techniques to increase your audience’s loyalty. One of the best ways to do just that is through transactional emails.

When a customer makes a purchase or subscribes to your newsletter, sports email marketers can trigger automated emails when events occur.

For instance, if you’re a sports club jersey manufacturer and someone buys a jersey from you, a transactional email with their digital receipt can be automated to promptly land in that customer’s inbox.

Let’s look at three examples of commonly used transactional emails.

Confirmation

Confirmations are usually used for order or shipping confirmations after someone makes a purchase. But ecommerce B2Cs can also use them to encourage customers to make a supplementary purchase.

Password reset

When someone resets their password, a simple password reset email signals that everything is in order from your end. This ensures that the customer trusts you with their information.

Double opt-in email messages

One way to end up on the internet service provider (ISP) blocklist is when too many recipients label your content as spam. Thankfully, double opt-in emails exist to prevent that from happening.

We recommend including conspicuous opt-in widgets, so your audience understands that they’ve chosen to receive content from you. Because if they don’t, they might unsubscribe or mark you as spam. However, the double opt-in forces the user to confirm their subscription to receive your content for a second time.

So think of these as a digital pinky swear. That way, you know your audience isn’t lying when they say they want to hear from you.

3. Email automation

Fans are loyal souls and may stick with a team or brand for the rest of their lives. But you shouldn’t assume the relationship will remain consistent if you stick to the status quo.

You can further connect with your fans using the right message at the right time. A suitable email template can help you appeal to your customers’ wants and needs.

Whether you’re welcoming new customers or subscribers, sending a personal note on their birthday, or rewarding brand loyalty with vouchers and promotions, executing the perfect email automation helps nurture your relationship with your audience. Thanks to all your existing user data, emails can be customized for target groups and individual customers.

Here are some of our favorite email automation templates.

Welcome series 

A welcome email series is one of the best ways to interact with your fans. Create different campaigns to greet your users after signing up for your newsletter, becoming new members, or creating an account.

Welcome emails are a great way to introduce your company and drive traffic towards the next step in the customer journey. You might want to use these to promote club membership and your online fan shop, introduce other team-related products, and drive social media engagement.

Reactivation campaigns 

For some inexplicable reason, your customer has forgotten about you. Maybe they’re not following through with their tailored fitness program, not opening your emails, or missed a game even though they had a season ticket.

Lure them back with an offer they can’t reject. If there was a purchase cancellation or a missed game, remind your email recipients about the next one. If they aren’t logging into your sports app, attract them with a challenge to spark their competitive side.

Wrapping up 

Email offers many opportunities to create a lasting relationship with your customers. A well-planned strategy and stunning email campaigns will help you do just that.

But where to begin? Thankfully, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel with your sports email marketing exploits. Our platform is full of tools to help boost your engagement, drive up your KPIs, and build more brand loyalty.

By using Mailjet’s platform, you can access our templates for your emails and newsletter content, automate triggered emails in response to engagement, launch a newsletter, and so much more.