Emails from Racing Fans

Emails are the most inexpensive method of communication with customers ever to come along. The cheapest form of direct mail—a postcard—will cost you at least $0.35. Email to your own customers is almost free. But how do you collect email names? That is difficult. Here is how one company went about the process.

Horse racing was once the most popular sport in America, but attendance has dropped significantly over the years. Other gambling and sport viewing options have proliferated, hurting attendance. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s challenge has been to increase track attendance and fan involvement in horse racing. It turned to e-Dialog of Lexington, Massachusetts, to help it use the Internet to develop a deeper relationship with core fans and to attract new fans to the sport.

At first, the NTRA had no opt-in email addresses. e-Dialog recommended a campaign that would create an email database: the $1,000,000 Breeders’ Cup Challenge. The challenge was launched 8 weeks before the actual race. The contest was straightforward, but not easy: Correctly pick the winner of each of the Breeders’ Cup races and win $1 million. A unique hurdle for this program was that the final roster for each of the eight races was announced just 72 hours before the big day. All contestants had to submit their eight picks during that 72-hour window. For this reason, it was critical to develop a communications program that would keep fans engaged throughout the 8 weeks between registering for the contest and submitting their picks.

The solution was a weekly email campaign called “Countdown to the Breeders’ Cup.” Contestants registered for the contest through an online form that included seven segmenting questions. The final email in the program, sent just hours after the rosters were finalized, contained a link to the actual “pick your horse” page.

To drum up interest in the contest, a combination of online, offline, broadcast, and direct media was used. There were TV ads, emails with “forward to a friend,” and signage displayed at racetracks.

The seven weekly emails to registrants created an overall click-through rate of 41 percent and an unsubscribe rate of 2 percent. Over the 7 weeks, the campaign registered 23,407 people, of whom 87 percent, or 20,863 people, opted in to receive additional communications and offers from the NTRA.