As a sports business owner, you wear many hats.
Entrepreneur. Coach. Mentor. Facility Manager. Staff empowerer. Customer Service Specialist. Marketer.
Between managing your operations, coaching athletes, and managing staff or a facility…you’ve got a lot on your plate. Finding the time to plan, create, and execute marketing campaigns can feel like an impossible task.
Or at least one that ends up near the bottom of the to-do list.
But, marketing plays a crucial role in scaling your business and achieving long term success.
That’s why Upper Hand is excited to announce all new Marketing Campaign functionality within its sports management software.
With Marketing Campaigns, you can design and save email templates, send them to a subset of your contacts, and track their statistics – all without leaving the app. This empowers you to continue reaching your contacts, staying top of mind while also highlighting your staff, programs, and clients.
We know you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to all of your marketing efforts. And, a number of your campaigns come around again over the course of a year.
With Upper Hand’s marketing campaigns, you can create templates for your most used campaigns, and reuse those templates for future emails! Once you create and save a master template, you’re able to apply that template to any email campaign and tweak your message as needed for that specific email send.
For example, you can design a birthday email that you send out on the first of every month to your clients with a birthday. Inside, you offer them a $15 coupon that can be used at your pro shop. Each month, you can generate an email starting with your “Happy Birthday” template, update the coupon code or any messaging as needed, and send to your list of clients with a birthday that month!
Similarly, you may want to consistently request feedback from your clients about your services, facility, or experience. You can utilize Upper Hand’s marketing campaigns feature to design a “Feedback Survey” email template that includes a link to a marketing survey, Google Review, or form. Like with the birthday campaign, for each campaign you run using this template, you can tailor your messaging and subject line to fit the campaign goals.
In addition to sending emails, we also know it’s important to see how your sent emails perform. Not only can this help inform future campaigns, but it also validates the content you’re sending and ensures it’s going to the right people.
Inside of the Marketing Campaigns feature, you can toggle to a “Statistics” tab that reveals a list of all of your sent emails. From there, you can view the number of email sends, opens, and unsubscribes.
How can this help?
If you notice an email with a high number of opens, and a low number of unsubscribes, there’s a good chance that your email is resonating with your selected contact groups. You may consider sending similar types of emails (or reusing those email templates for future campaigns), as they appear to be effective. On the contrary, if you notice an email with a low number of opens (compared to the number of sends), or a high unsubscribe count, this email may not be resonating with your athletes. So, you may consider revamping the email template, updating your messaging, or adjusting which Contact Groups you will reach with the email.
Marketing Campaigns are a great option for your recurring marketing efforts, such as celebrating birthdays (your clients, or even your business’s!), monthly newsletters, feedback requests, membership notices, and more. Think of any marketing efforts that you replicate (or would like to replicate).
Related: Here’s a document with a few free templates to get you started!
Additionally, marketing campaigns are useful when targeting Leads. Consider creating a contact group of all of your “Lead” status contacts, and send them a monthly newsletter highlighting your facility, programs, and staff members. Include links to your Upper Hand offerings to encourage them to sign up.
For more information on creating Contact Groups in Upper Hand, click here!
Note: For any one-time, one-off messages to your rosters or quick reminders for an upcoming event, we recommend using our “Send Message” feature.
Just as your clients benefit from your feedback during training sessions, we appreciate your feedback on how we can continue to improve our sports software. This requires all feedback channels to be open at all times. If you have any ideas or feedback for our team, we’d love to hear from you!
Our Product Portal is a visual roadmap of all of our software features, from the “idea” stage to “launch” stage. Here, you can see all of the projects our team has on our radar, submit feature requests and ideas of your own, and upvote your favorite features. You can log in or create your account here.
Ready to change the game for your business? See how Upper Hand is predicting the future of business growth with data-driven software. Get a demo today.
We heard a lot of feedback from both current and prospective customers that they loved the Upper Hand app when it came to managing their lessons, camps, clinics, and other programs. But, they would appreciate an easier way to manage their sports teams. That’s why we combined all of the tasks associated with running a team into one new feature.
We may have had a few tricks up our sleeves last month, but we have a lot of treats to share with you! From new