Golfballs.com generates e-mail lists and orders with marketing partners

In a recent 90-day e-mail sweepstakes promotion that gave away a dozen Callaway HX Hot golf balls a day, Golfballs.com garnered 60,000 unique sweepstakes entries, including 40,000 new customers, says vice president of marketing Steven Broussard.

That was just the last of several consecutive e-mail promotions Golfballs.com has conducted, and each one has involved several marketing partners who help market them, Broussard says. “Our strategy is to have partners help us promote the contests,” he says. “We get a lot of extra exposure that way.”

In the most recent promotion, Callaway Golf Co.’s online unit, CallawayGolfPreowned.com, helped to market the Golfballs.com sweepstakes on its own site, bringing in 15,000 entries and generating 720 orders, Broussard says. Callaway provided golf balls for the promotion in addition to a Callaway golf bag and set of clubs for a grand prize.

Golfballs.com’s other marketing partners include golf publications, golf travel web sites and TeeTimeWatch.com, a service that lets golfers search for and schedule golf course outings.

The promotions have been going so well, Broussard adds, that Golfballs.com recently deployed an e-mail management service from StrongMail Systems to replace its in-house system. “We were having to spend more time monitoring our own system looking for problems,” he says. “Sometimes we couldn’t send our entire list, or it broke down in mid-send.”

StrongMail provides a web-based graphical dashboard where Broussard can quickly see details on how much of its e-mail list was delivered, then drill down for details on why undelivered e-mail didn’t get through a particular e-mail gateway.

Broussard uses the StrongMail system with some remaining features of Golfballs.com’s in-house system to view e-mail open rates among different types of customers. He can then tweak promotional campaigns to improve those rates among different categories of customers. “We may try to win back customers who haven’t responded with a better offer,” he says.