Marketing server customizes e-mails and boosts delivery rates at Golfballs.com

From December 2007

By Michael Hartnett

From its humble beginnings selling golf balls fished out of water hazards by divers, Golfballs.com has developed a broader, more upscale assortment of leading brand-name golf equipment and apparel.

A key driver of the company’s growth is the creativity, efficiency and precision of its e-mail-based marketing programs.

The company sends an average of 13.5 million e-mail messages each month. With a branded assortment, price points ranging from $5 to $1,000 and customized services (logoed balls, caps and shirts), Golfballs.com now presents its shoppers with manufacturers’ offers that are specific to each individual’s buying history and brand preferences.

“A Titleist buyer gets specific Titleist offers,” says Steven Broussard, director of marketing and e-commerce for the Lafayette, La.-based company. “We try not to bombard our e-mail accounts with offers that are not relevant.”

Golfballs.com’s original, in-house system served the company well for many years, but “we realized we had issues,” Broussard says. “We were growing and we wanted to continue growing, but we had deliverability issues. We were doing everything in house, and we had trouble getting the messages out quickly and efficiently. We were missing revenue every time it didn’t work exactly like we wanted it to.”

The company turned to StrongMail Systems, whose platform was able to “break out the ‘send’ part and integrate it with what we had,” he says. “That allowed us to move resources from the ‘send’ functions into other operations.”

Dealing with the industry average (10 to 12 percent) of undeliverable outgoing e-mails was especially problematic for Golfballs.com because the company lacked the time and resources to determine why some messages weren’t arriving at their intended destinations.

“Some of our messages were being blocked by ISPs, and we didn’t know why,” Broussard says. “But now, with StrongMail, we can deal with that problem. We can now watch every e-mail that goes out. We can watch who opens it, and whether it’s blocked, and we can try to fix those blocks quickly by getting on the phone with the ISP and correcting the problem.”

Barriers between a merchant’s “send” function and a recipient’s inbox can run the gamut from spam filters and authentication codes to outdated e-mail lists.

The centerpiece of StrongMail’s system is its e-mail marketing server, which combines the company’s MTA and EAS software with its e-mail marketing and management application. While high rates of deliverability are key to the system’s success, the company also helps its clients to create targeted, personalized e-mail campaigns, with visibility at every stage of delivery and control and flexibility in e-mail volume.

And, depending on the specific StrongMail application, the platform provides clients with campaign management tools, help with content creation, data segmentation and targeting functions.

Bounce management
StrongMail’s strong suit is “bounce management,” according to Tricia Robinson-Pridemore, vice president of product and market strategy for the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company.

“When an e-mail is not received, the bounces are looked at in two ways: Is it a temporary failure, such as a full mailbox, or is it a permanent failure, such as the mailbox no longer exists? In the case of the latter, StrongMail “provides information about each individual address and how the message is being sent or received,” she says.

Possible solutions for those permanent failures include a checklist of issues that should be considered, such as inaccurate addresses and the actual content of e-mails.

“We offer a best practices approach, based on what we have seen in the market and what we have heard from ISPs on how they are handling deliverability,” Robinson-Pridemore says.

Installation of the StrongMail platform requires just a few days and carries fixed costs, minimal maintenance costs and no monthly fees. Clients who are replacing a home-grown system typically recover their initial investment in a few months, Robinson-Pridemore says, while those who were renting their previous system can usually recover their investment within weeks.

In the case of Golfballs.com, StrongMail personalized e-mails with the recipient’s name, past purchases and recent behavior; those e-mails could also include product photos of past purchases.

Since it began using StrongMail’s systems in August 2005, Golfballs.com has been freed up to explore new ways to customize individual e-mails rather than having to monitor “send” functions.

“The system has paid for itself many times over,” Broussard says.