During the summer of 2010, Hickstead held two of the most prestigious events on the UK equine calendar at their famous All England Jumping Course in the heart of Sussex: the British Jumping Derby Meeting and the Longines Royal International Horse Show. Having worked with Hickstead over a number of years to build their web presence, Clear Forward were asked to build a solution that enabled staff at Hickstead to send newsletter and marketing emails to a selected list of their customers to enable closer communications with them.

The first task was to create a quality mailing list from Hickstead; with no pre-existing central data source, it was necessary to construct a mailing list from spreadsheets of previous customers and existing online members, and run processes to clean and de-duplicate this data. Once the mailing list had been established, we developed a series of HTML email templates that would form the basis of newsletter and marketing campaigns. Finally, after looking at several alternatives, we chose to use Campaign Monitor as a easy-to-use tool for Hickstead to manage the sending of their mailshots, member lists and performance analytics.

An example Hickstead newsletter email, taken from the Longines Royal International Horse Show

Using the new solution, Hickstead were able to send daily newsletters to their mailing list during each day of their events, keeping their members informed of the day’s action, promoting special offers and encouraging their members to become involved in their competitions, Facebook and Twitter pages. They have continued to use the tool throughout Autumn/Winter 2010 to keep their customers in the loop with their polo events and seasonal parties.

Related links:

Hickstead
Clear Forward