7+ Sports Email Marketing Ideas to Create More Raving Fans

With 74 trillion emails being sent every year, email is still a major form of communication that you can use to engage your team’s fans and create a meaningful connection with them by sharing valuable content.

Today, I’m going to share some dynamic sports email marketing ideas to help invite new fans to join the community as well as help keep your fans connected, excited and fully engaged.

Why Email Content Matters

As previously mentioned, people spend an average of eight hours a day on the internet. That’s a lot of information consumption. It’s important for you to differentiate your team and the content in your emails as worth a viewer’s time, otherwise the unsubscribe button is only a click away.

Engaging with your fans and providing content that’s relevant, personal, and unique is a way of promoting connection and making them feel like a part of the community. You don’t always have to be selling or promoting something. Sometimes, it’s enough to relay information like parking instructions in an engaging and visually interesting way.

Additionally, when you provide opportunities for fans to engage with you, it provides valuable information and data that you can analyze to connect with them even further.

Real Madrid, one of the most high profile soccer teams in the world, recently reworked their marketing system and implemented a digital platform that allows the team to engage with fans in a whole new way.

According to Real Madrid’s Commercial General Manager, Begoña Sanz, “We used to pull data from just five sources before, but can now pull from more than 70 source…This has enabled us to grow our number of fan profiles by about 400 percent in the past two years”—it’s now in the millions.”

Creating a digital platform might be out of the question for many teams, but it’s a broad look at the exponential returns you can receive when you really put forth an effort to connect with fans and make any interaction they have with you a good one.

For details, check out 5 Reasons Your Sports Team Needs an Email List.

Sports Email Marketing Ideas for Content

When it comes to developing content, above all, keep it purposeful, making sure your emails are both engaging and valuable. Below are several sports email marketing ideas to get you thinking.

Welcome Email

When people sign up for your email list, let them know you’re thrilled they signed up. You can automate a personalized email to be sent immediately after someone registers with lots of information and excitement that they have joined the team.

The Tennessee Titans do this well by having an inviting hero image, some dynamic copy and a gift for joining the team.

Example email
The Tennessee Titans’ welcome email.

Make sure you take the opportunity to nurture the relationship with your new subscriber in the first few weeks.

Most email marketing platforms have an automation functionality that lets you set up a series of post-welcome emails in the first few weeks of subscribership that help drive traffic back to your site, invite fans to join you on social media or remind them of the cool team merchandise up for purchase.

Birthday Emails

Let your fans know you appreciate them on their special day with a personalized birthday message.

The Manchester City Football Team has a customized message with a video, a fact about the team from the year you were born and a coupon for team merchandise.

You can also encourage fans to wish team members and coaches a happy birthday. Put a one-click button in an email that automatically displays a previously crafted tweet or Facebook post (that you’re tagged in) for fans to immediately post wishing your favorite player a great day.

Creating a tweet or post for them helps users save time, which can ultimately help sway them to take the time to publish the social media post.

You can also encourage them to customize the message if they want to show their support in a unique way. Mentioning this option helps the players’ social media feed look like it isn’t being flooded with spam, which also serves to help you stay in line with Twitter’s policies.

To encourage users to customize messages, you can craft a prompt that includes a segue for their custom message either in the email you send or in a previously crafted message.

For example, “Happy Birthday! You’re my favorite player because…” or mention a writing prompt similar to this: “What’s the best play you saw this player make? What would you say to wish them a ‘Happy Birthday’ and how do you plan to celebrate?”

Game Recaps and Messages from the Coach

After a particularly stellar game, everybody wants to watch the great plays over again to relive the action—it’s in our nature as fans. Make it easy for your fans to view clips by embedding videos in your site.

You can also include stats and an analysis on where this puts the team for the season. Even a message from the coach about how the game went would be a nice touch, especially if the game went less well than preferred.

As an added bonus, you can also use the videos and content to bring fans back to your website for more engagement.

Newsletters

A newsletter is a great way to give those die-hard fans all the information they want before, during and after the season. Studies have shown people prefer to receive information and news via email newsletter rather than Facebook or another form of social media.

You can pack newsletters with interviews, game reviews, new fan gear and other exciting offers.

Newsletters may not be for everyone so you can make yours part of the standard rotation or take the personalization a step further by asking fans the specific content they want to receive.

In either case, it’s good practice to be upfront about what newsletter content entails on the subscription sign-up page.

The Indianapolis Colts do a nice job of informing users about the frequency of their newsletter while also providing content options.

Example email sign up form
The Indianapolis Colts let their fans choose what emails they want to receive.

Event Reminders

Searching for a specific email can be frustrating. Reminder emails are a great way to anticipate that need as well make sure you get those butts in seats!

Remind fans of the upcoming event as well as provide key information about what to expect such as how to get there, nearby hotels (if applicable) and post-game festivities. The more helpful you can be to your fans, the more they’ll feel taken care of and like they’re a part of the organization.

Feedback Emails

Let your fans know you value their experience and also gather some useful data at the same time. You can set up an automated email to periodically ask for feedback directly or via your website about the venue, the ease of using your app or site, or the quality of their recent visit.

Die-hard fans are sure to have some opinions and it’s an effortless way for them to feel heard.

You can check out What Is The Best WordPress Survey Plugin? 5 Options Investigated for details.

Thank You Emails

Everyone likes to be appreciated. Your fans gave you access to their email accounts and it shouldn’t be taken lightly. Show your community how much you appreciate them with “thank you” emails and lots of love sent their way around the end of the season, their anniversary of becoming a member or even just as a surprise.

The Rules of Engagement

There are so many ways to connect using content, but refining your approach will make sure you knock it out of the park each time. Here are a few more sports email marketing ideas to help you craft the perfect message to sports team fans.

Give Calls-to-Action

Emails with a single call to action increase clicks by 371% and sales 1617%, as vice president of Marketing at Toast, Ellie Mirman, mentioned in an interview.

It’s a significant reason why you should have a clear action for your fans to take with each email.

Have a link to save a game date in their calendar, to purchase tickets or to invite a friend to the game, for example.

Entice Fans with Discounts

With a little thought, there may be a way you can help a fan feel like they’re getting a great deal because they subscribed.

For example, you can make season tickets available to email subscribers first. Your sponsors may also be interested in having a coupon in the weekly email.

You could also reach out to the arena or stadium where you play, or a local café and ask for a discount at the snack bar so you can offer it in an email and help make fans feel like they’re getting something special through your friendship.

Keep it Visual

Of all of the sports email marketing ideas here, this one might be the most vital: a huge wall of text or list of links isn’t visually appealing or pleasant to read. Keep it fun and visual with on-brand colors and photography.

Fans love seeing pictures of players and awesome action shots. Do whatever makes sense for your brand.

For example, you could even make GIFs work if your brand is particularly comical or quirky.

Manchester City embodies this principle well with a dynamic visual recap of their entire season.

Example email
A portion of Manchester City’s season recap email.

Stir Up Those Emotions (The Good Kind)

Sports is about passion and adrenaline. Give fans something to root for! If you’re in a league, help fans pick a team to get passionate about such as through a light-hearted quiz so they don’t want to miss game updates and stats in your newsletters. If you’re a city team, draw on a fan’s pride for the area. Invite everybody to support local restaurants, or a team or fan volunteer renewal project.

Check Out the Big Leagues

Pay attention to national leagues and how they get fans to sign up for their email lists. Note their Facebook pages and see how the team is engaging with them with everything from comments to events.

Join a few to see what kinds of emails they send and see what sports email marketing ideas you can borrow.

Choose an Email Marketing Service

Once you’ve got a good idea for the types of emails you want to send out to your subscribers, it’s time to choose an email marketing service to deliver your messages!

If you’re struggling to find which service is best for you, check out this article for an in-depth comparison of the best beginner-friendly email marketing tools and platforms out there.

Conclusion

Developing your email list is a big step toward vast growth as a team and as a community. These sports email marketing ideas should get your brain jogging and excited to gear up for some fan engagement.

What teams do you think have dynamic email marketing? What sports email marketing ideas are you and your team excited to implement? Let us know over on Twitter or Facebook.

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