Brighton Marathon run with Pure360 email marketing software

Being rather excited locals, we were keen to contribute to this important event and were rather proud and happy to be sponsoring Brighton’s first ever Marathon. A key issue for Brighton Marathon was making sure runners received important information, such as training schedules and health and safety documents. Hello email marketing!

The rest as they say is history and PureResponse is now invaluable to them.

Want to know how they achieved great results? Tom Naylor, Race Director at Grounded Events shares the secrets of their success…

The email marketing solution

With the marathon set for April 18th 2010, Brighton Marathon started using PureResponse in August 2009, when emails were used to confirm registration and send a number of generic updates to runners.

The benefit of using PureResponse was that reporting functions allowed Tom to know to what extent important messages were being read, and automatically schedule resends to non opens (one of the new PureResponse features, very popular).

Email marketing also contributes to keeping the event sponsors happy, as it allows Brighton Marathon to promote sponsors’ relevant products and services inside the email campaigns.

How to get a 50% click through rate

Brighton Marathon has the type of mailing list most marketers wish for - recipients ultimately want the emails, as they are providing information that they need.

Tom is careful to limit sales messages, “We have tried to be a positive information source for our runners and not just use the email campaigns to sell to our runners.  We also maintain regular email contact.”

And the results?

Tom is more than impressed with the outcome of using our email marketing solution “From our perspective, email has been a fantastic success. The numbers speak for themselves!  With an open rate of over 60% on our broadcasts, we have an average click through rate of roughly 50% of the opens.”

Reporting, Reviewing, Improving

Tom constantly reviews campaign performance, with a view to maximising his open rate. Open and click through rates are monitored and the email content, links and layout are restructured and shaped accordingly.

With the assistance of the mighty Google Analytics and the PureResponse reporting tools, the team know that emails are driving web traffic as well.
The benefits of using email marketing software

Tom’s favoured features of PureResponse include:

• Deliverability Checker (to ensure people are getting the information they need, the deliverability checker in PureResponse picks up anything that could flag email as spam)

• Intelligent Time Sending (ensuring they send at a time that’s most convenient to their recipients, which in turn improves their open rate)

•  Multiple Subject Line Selector (Pure360 filters the send down to the most popular subject line)

• Social Share (a tool which allows recipients to connect with Facebook, twitter or share messages on various networking sites – Brighton Marathon has found it a great way to promote their media pages/groups to their runners and have seen an increase in followers on both twitter and Facebook connections).

More than just email marketing software

Tom attributes success down to both software and support “Part of the reason the campaign has been such a success is the support we have received at Pure360, with a team dedicated to our account and a support team for backup we have had our questions answered swiftly and competently.”
Long term strategy

One thing Tom’s sure of is that email marketing is part of their long term strategy “We hope to launch our second event shortly after the first one takes place and want to track emails to our existing runners and all those who sign up for more information on year two.  We are looking to try and send out location specific emails with the use of Pure360’s dynamic content blocks, either in this event’s cycle or next year so we can increase the opening rate of our emails even more and improve the information service for our runners.”