Entrepreneur Knows What Women Want

Constant Contact customer Girls Learn to Ride (GLTR) offers snowboarding, skateboarding, and surfing clinics for women and girls of all ages. GLTR was born out of a frustrating experience founder Mark Sperling had nine years ago when he attempted to teach his then-girlfriend to snowboard. He talked to friends, who had had the same experience—the girls wanted to learn but were in need of a neutral instructor. Now, under the ownership of Airborne Media, GLTR promotes more than 700 clinics and camps each year.

Challenge: Reaching Customers on the Slopes, Streets, or Seas

All this activity means that GLTR has a large, ever-growing customer base—which they must stay in touch with on a regular basis. Communication is key, as they need to promote upcoming events, as well as send last-minute announcements to fill clinics with low enrollment.

GLTR also faces the challenge of having different constituents—a girl's age, sport, and region all determine which events will interest her. For GLTR, being able to customize their marketing material is critically important.

Solution: Shredding It Up with Email Marketing

Five years ago, Mark decided that email marketing would be the best way to stay in touch with their diverse customer base. We've done radio, TV, direct mail, and national ads...but, by far, email marketing with Constant Contact has had better results every time. He chose Constant Contact because it was affordable and easy to use. They are thrilled with the results. "We've done radio, TV, direct mail, and national ads—including full-page ads in Teen Vogue and YM, but, by far, email marketing with Constant Contact has had better results every time," Mark says.

In order to send their customers communications relevant to their interests, GLTR collects information about a person's age, region, and sport when she joins the list through the website, or when she registers for a clinic or camp. In this way, they build and segment their list so that they can effectively communicate with each group—and determine where they should host events. "The ability to have multiple lists in my Constant Contact account is great because we can select either a certain region or a particular sport to send an email to. Also, we can look at how many girls we have in a particular region and decide whether or not to have an event there," Mark says.

In addition to sending event announcements, GLTR sends last minute reminders to help fill their clinics and a monthly email newsletter to their entire list. The newsletter directs readers back to the website, which offers an online magazine for their core audience, young women ages 14 to 25. "The newsletter offers teasers about information on the website, and we also include links to articles about music, popular female athletes, health, and other areas of interest," Mark says.

Results: Catching the Wave with Email Marketing

GLTR's creative email marketing and website strategy has helped them reach more female riders, skateboarders, and surfers; their list started at 250 just five years ago and is currently over 10,000 strong. "We track all of our participants and have found that more than 53% of them found out about us through the Internet or our email newsletter. Email marketing is only a fraction of the cost of print ads and it brings in a phenomenal ROI," Mark says.

GLTR also gets an excellent response from last-minute announcements. Mark says, "We send out the email and 'boom!' the event is sold out. We recently sent out a snowboarding announcement in New Jersey and within the next two days, 60 people signed up."

GLTR understands their audience and how to give them what they want. With the help of email marketing from Constant Contact, they give girls all over the country their ticket to ride.