OBJECTIVE
Use email marketing to complement digital advertising efforts in order to increase attendance for North Carolina Courage and North Carolina FC home games during the 2023 season. In 2022 - the year before I was hired to be the club's marketing director - the Courage had finished 11th (of 12) in attendance in NWSL, while NCFC had finished 6th (of 10) in attendance in USL League One.

PROCESS
The email changes I implemented included:
• Creating an email calendar to plan content in advance and stagger sends so as not to spam recipients
• Using optimal send times and dates to ensure highest possible open rates
• Using consistent naming to differentiate the teams in a reader's inbox
• Differentiating the color palate for each team (Cardinal Red for the Courage; Atlantic Blue for NCFC)
• Personalizing emails with strategic use of tokens
• Shortening subject lines and lengthening preheaders, while frontloading keywords and not duplicating information
• Breaking up the content within emails into clearly defined sections
• Using more white space to make the emails look cleaner
• Including player profiles to help fans get get emotionally invested in the players
• Including upcoming match and ticketing promos in the first block, so that they're part of the envelope
• Including player imagery in the promos, to reinforce the emotional attachments
• Using similar graphics for each match in emails, digital advertising, and the team's website in order to create synergy and reinforce the brand
• Profiling visiting teams and players to convey the excellence of the league and its athletes to readers who weren't as immersed in it

I also promoted the teams at major events, such as The Soccer Tournament and the NHL's Stadium Series block party, to increase brand awareness and sign people up for the mailing list. These efforts led to approximately 5,000 new fans being added to our database.

OUTCOME
Open rates and conversion rates for both teams increased by 9% and 2% respectively after the changes were implemented. With more people opening the emails and purchasing tickets, attendance then increased for both teams. The Courage had the fifth-largest attendance increase (by percentage) in NWSL and had their largest-ever home crowd; NCFC had the third-largest attendance increase (by percentage) in USL League One, rose from 6th to 4th (of 12) in average attendance per match, and played in front of their largest-ever USL1 home crowd.

OBJECTIVE
Increase open rates and conversion rates for the University of Oregon's alumni enews. The digital publication is sent monthly to more than 100,000 graduates and donors of the university, and includes feature stories, event listings, and membership information. The latter two are revenue generators for the UO Alumni Association, and that revenue helps support more than 30 scholarships for students from underrepresented backgrounds. The enews is the single-largest advertising medium for those revenue generators.

PROCESS
The UO also has a print magazine - Oregon Quarterly - which is sent to a similar audience, and that audience sometimes thought the publications were the same. I needed to differentiate the publications in the minds of the audience in order to make the UOAA's more effective, so that it would be more effective at raising funds for scholarships.

That started with a name. Animal House was filmed on the UO campus, and is part of the university's lore. The song "Shout" from the film is played at every sporting event, so I renamed the enews "Shout" - it was a name that would resonate with the target audience, and also suggested the content was worth shouting about. My designer created a masthead that featured concentric circles, representing soundwaves radiating outward.

While doing that, I also conducted an audit of the previous three years' worth of enews content to learn what the target audience was and was not interested in reading about. Donor and academic information was firmly in the "not interested in" category, but was also news the university needed to promote. So, I came up with a strategy for incorporating that information into the stories readers were interested in.

OUTCOME
When Shout was launched, the response was immediate. Readers loved it, the open rate increased 10%, average clicks per story increased 114%, and the conversion rate for the revenue generating items doubled.