How can Sotic help you?
Sotic's creative email campaign service places emphasis on a tactical approach to your online marketing by giving you powerful, bespoke, impartial and effective email campaigns, which are strategically designed around your business objectives to elevate your existing offering. Whether it is lead generation, revenue optimisation or customer communication, Sotic Digital Sports Agency has the expertise to maximise your current online marketing strategy.
Our team of award winning email design specialists will ensure that you remain on top of what is the most cost effective marketing channel on the web. Better still, we do it all for you.

Benefits of using Sotic's MatchDayMail to assist you with your campaign
AB Testing: AB testing will allow you to test your campaign on a few individuals before sending to the bulk. By changing one single item in your campaign you can go from moderate response to success. Send two versions to a small percentage of your fans and watch the stats to see which one gets the best response. Then send the most successfully received communication to the rest of your target mailing list.
Subscriber Actions: MatchDayMail records a subscriber action such as whether an email was read, links clicked on, not read etc. Based on these actions you can plan follow up campaigns. E.g. if a proportion of your fans clicked on the link to purchase season tickets but didn't complete the transaction you can send a specific email targeting this response group.
Auto Response: Sending follow up emails to thank people for responding/applying/entering etc keeps fans engaged. Auto response emails can be set up based on a subscriber action; going to new subscribers or unsubscribers, sent reminders, or on particular dates such as birthdays.
Data Collection: Specific forms can be created to allow better data collection or specific data collection around an individual campaign. E.g. collecting shirt sizes from people who enter a competition to win a shirt will allow you to market in future to those people specific stock items in that size.

Structure of a campaign
Your campaign can take on various guises but generically it will mirror the following process:

1. Time
Give yourself plenty of time to plan carefully and be confident that your message is concise and will deliver results

2. Objectives
Define your objectives. Work out what you want to achieve from your marketing activities?
• Increase support ahead of the new season
• Generate season ticket sales pre-season
• Generate ticket sales for a specific game
• Increase hospitality sales at matches
• Increase Merchandise sales

3. What is your budget?
Agree a budget and stick to it so you can prevent costs escalating. Work out your campaign budget by considering the return you expect to get from it by undertaking return on investment (ROI) analysis

4. Calendar
Plan your campaign around an event or activityE.g. Early bird season ticket sale

5. Target Audience
Define your target audience. Select your audience dependent on the objective you want to achieve and the needs of the audiences. This will allow you to design an email creative that will engage them and encourage them to respond. You may identify more than one target audience and they may have different requirements. One email creative may not be suitable for all.

6. Using your data
Segment and personalise your data. Use the information you have identified about your customers to send them targeted, relevant messages. Segment your customer lists in MatchDayMail and if possible develop specific offers for each target audience. The better your targeting the more likely your campaign will be to succeed.

7. Delivery Mechanism
Delivery mechanisms for marketing campaigns should encompass multiple channels including:

• Ezines
• Eshots
• Viral emails
• QR codes/campaigns
• Competitions
• Polls
• Promotions
• Website
• Mobile
• Video promotions
• Advertising
• Social Media
• AB ezine testing
• Online calendar
• Splash pages
• Match Day Programmes
• Facebook event communications
• Animated Popup images (such as a lineout appearing from the bottom of a site)

8. Design
Use best practice processes for all marketing campaigns as recommended by Sotic

9. Tone, look and feel
Based on the campaign objective and the event/activity, devise a brief that encompasses the appropriate look and feel. E.g. Early bird season ticket promotion should be a short sharp message which delivers a sense of urgency as well as a clear indication that the fan will benefit by taking action instantly

10. Call to action
Define you call to action and incorporate it within your campaign. E.g. New season shirt revealed - call to action is to go to the eShop to make a purchase

11. Headline and text
Ensure your Ezine headline is short and sweet and snappy and will capture the fans attention. In the body copy make the text light and chatty providing enough information to sell the promotion but not too much that you will lose the interest of the reader

12. Landing page
Direct customers through to a relevant landing page. If you have persuaded your fans to read your email and then click on the call to action ensure you don't lose their interest when sending them to your website. Direct them through to a relevant purpose built landing page designed to convert click throughs into leads and sales.

13. Testing
Test your campaigns on fellow colleagues and through AB testing to ensure that what you perceive will work is transferred to the recipients. Ten additional minutes to send an AB test email could make a significant difference to the success of a campaign.

14. Process
Ensure that the process of the campaign is fully in place before activation.
E.g. once the email has been sent and the fans are encouraged to purchase the early bird tickets ensure the online ticket facility has all the correct details. Ensure you are collecting the correct data you might want to use for future campaigns; ensure you have the auto response follow up emails in place; ensure the fulfilment is professionally managed.

15. Marketing your marketing
Depending on the 'selectiveness' of your campaign, additional marketing of a campaign across other media (multichannel marketing) can help the response rates especially when generating support/signups. E.g. promotion of the season's new shirt can be done be personal email to those who have previously purchased offering them a discount for their loyalty while providing a different promotion to members, general fans and social media fans

16. Reporting
Analysing the success of your campaign will help make future campaigns even more successful. Ensure that all reporting mechanisms are in place before activating a campaign, so that after campaign is completed you can analyse the figures and success based on your original objectives and targets. Ensure you focus on the following:
• The number of emails delivered
• The number of emails opened and read
• The number of click-throughs generated and which call to action links were successful
• Revenue/sign-ups generated

If you need any more advice or assistance with you online marketing campaigns, please do not hesitate to contact Sarah Griffiths. Email: Sarah@sotic.co.uk Tel: +44 20 7691 2459