How to Use Email to Drive 29% of Your Revenue

We love case studies at Vero, so we were thrilled when Ish Fuseini, the database marketing coordinator for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, published a post about a recent email campaign.

The Timberwolves, along with their WBNA partner Minnesota Lynx, hold youth basketball camps each summer. Ish leveraged email to promote the camps with quite a bit of success. Below are some excerpts from his post, which you can read in full here, then a quick Q&A with Ish.

Using our CRM Data, We were able to segment our fan base to members with children under the age of 18. We combined these leads with previous campers from the past two years.

I wanted to make sure the the look and feel of the email matched the experience on the website. Our Digital Media Team and our friends at Morsekode team crafted an experience that would match the experience delivered on the court. I sought to extend that experience to their inbox.

The website:

The email:

The mobile email:

You can view the emails here.

So how did our email do? Let’s take a look at the data.

We made some money!

The buying process for camps, clinics and training is not an impulse buy. Email has generated more revenue than any other source. Its still early to tell but including cart abandonment, camp reminders (maybe a remind me later feature?) via email could generate more revenue for the Academy.

(Lots of) Traffic

We had the most visitors on our site since our launch. The majority of this traffic was via email. We have increased awareness of our Basketball Academy which should help drive visitors.

We caught up with Ish to ask him a few questions about his email marketing strategy.

Can you give us a hard number that represents your success with email?

Ish: Email drove 29.7 percent of total revenue for our basketball academy in first three months of marketing with just ONE send!

How did you achieve such an impressive conversion rate?

Ish: We spend a lot of time perfecting the look and feel of our emails. In this case, we wanted to make sure the message was optimized for every email client and screen size. You can take a closer look at each version here.

How important is email marketing to your business?

Ish: Our sales reps can only make so many calls in a day. With our increasing number of season ticket holders and our dedicated fan base, we need a way to engage with our fans year-round. Email marketing provides an opportunity to interact with fans during the offseason and we are also able to extend experiences to fans that don’t live in the area.

What are you working on next?

Ish: Automated nurture campaigns and deliverability are going to be key for us moving forward. We are about to launch our Pack Profile — an initiative to gather demographic data about our fans — which will help us segment our emails and deliver more targeted content in the future. We are also planning to double down on deliverability to make sure fans that want email get it and those that don’t aren’t bothered.

Check out Ish’s blog to learn more about read his posts about email marketing.