Of course that’s a summary for lots of different services that we offer:

• insight work into how best to market to different segments
• writing marketing plans
• design
• writing for magazines
• designing and sending direct mail campaigns
• building websites
• email marketing
• social media
• training people in how to run campaigns themselves
• training for clubs in how to run their own marketing

Here are some examples of how we’ve helped CSPs, councils, PCTs and charities in the last month:

• Helping a council identify who their target audience should be for work with their Leisure provider
• Social marketing workshop for the Black Country sports partnership
• Writing a funding application for NHS Greenwich, Charlton Athletic and Greenwich Council
• Writing a marketing campaign project plan for a PCT
• Insight work into how to market activity to cancer survivors for Macmillan Cancer Support
• Further insight work into how to market activity to specific Sport England segments
• Managing the activity database for Change4Life

The Fitness Industry Association’s annual conference is back and this year they will be focussing on “Creating Connections – The key to our future”.

The proliferation of social technology means that we live in an increasingly connected world, a world where consumers expect their suppliers to be transparent, accessible and accountable.

The Flame Conference programme for 2011 is designed to reflect the fact that if we are to make an impact on participation in such an environment, we need to use all the tools at our disposal – online and offline – to forge powerful connections both at the micro level (with our customers, communities and staff) and at the macro level (with business, healthcare and Government).

Date: 13th July 2011

Location: Telford International Centre

For more information; to see the line up of world-class speakers and to book your place – CLICK HERE (opens as a new window).

This free 1-hour teleseminar will help Personal Trainers to:

• get more personal training clients
• learn the tips and tricks used by sports and activity organisations to market themselves
• learn about free activity marketing resources they can access online

Personal trainers can learn this and more in this FREE 1-hour teleseminar. They should just go to www.marketingpersonaltrainers.com or fill in the form below.

We’ll cover topics including:

• How to use social media to drive more clients
• How to get more referrals from your current clients
• How to automate your marketing so you can focus on keeping your clients happy
• How to access free resources including over 2000 free photos, a free poster design tool and a free calendar of campaigns

What’s a teleseminar

It’s just a meeting on the phone to listen to someone give a presentation. You call a local rate number we give you and then you’ll be able to hear us and anyone else on the call.

Why is it free?

We normally charge £49/ person for a teleseminar, but we’re offering it for free as we’re keen to learn from personal trainers what marketing support they need, and as a way of introducing ourselves to Personal Trainers across the UK.

• how social media differs from traditional marketing and why it’s growing so fast
• 5 golden rules for effective social media communication
• 5 key social media tools and where they are best used – including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs
• case studies of best practice from big brands and throughout activity
• how to set targets and measure your results

At the end of the webinar we will provide all this information as handouts.

Details

• Date: Thursday 17th February
• Time: 10am – 12 noon
• Cost: £49 + VAT per person (£39 + VAT for e-newsletter subscribers and people who’ve attended the Top 10 ways seminar). We accept Purchase Orders, cheques, credit cards and debit cards
• Requirements: all you need to access this webinar is a computer with internet and a phone

Satisfaction guarantee

We’re so sure you’re going to love this webinar that we’re offering a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not completely satisfied then just let us know and we’ll try and fix the problems immediately. If we can’t fix the problems to your satisfaction then we’ll give you a full refund.

To book a place just fill in your details in the form below or email john@makesportfun.com or call John on 020 3239 8824.

To help you with this we’ve turned our popular “How to write effective marketing materials” workshop into a training webinar which you can access from the comfort of your own desk. No travelling required. If you attend this webinar you will learn:

• how to get more results to your posters, leaflets, adverts and website articles
• how to create attention-grabbing headlines
• how to get people to respond to your marketing materials.

Thursday 3rd February 2011 10am

£19 - learn more and book

However quite a few people have told me that they’re not able to travel to London for a 2-hour seminar. So to help those people access the content we’re now making the seminar available online. You can access it as 7 individual lessons – each about 5-15 minutes long. If you sign up then you’ll receive one of these a day for 7 days.

To learn more or sign up go to www.howtoincreaseparticipation.com. Please feel free to email this link to any of your colleagues or networks too.

You can download the good practice guidelines that the ASA has put together.

Have you ever wanted to know how to run an effective activity marketing campaign?

Would you like to know what the National Social Marketing Centre says you must do when running a social marketing campaign?

Now’s your chance to find out. Make Sport Fun have pulled together dozens of research reports, dozens of case studies of effective activity marketing campaigns and millions of pounds of research data. They’re making it all available for free at 10am on 10th September at the Top 10 ways to increase participation seminar in King’s Cross. 6 free places are available to Heads of Leisure, Heads of Sports Development and people involved in planning or running activity marketing campaigns.

If you attend you will learn:

• What millions of pounds of research have found to be the top 10 ways to increase participation
• The 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• The 8 criteria your campaign must meet to be classed as social marketing
• How www.promotingactivity.com can help you plan and run your activity marketing campaign

To book a place for the Top 10 ways to increase participation seminar please download this letter, fill it in  and email it to john@makesportfun.com. Places are allocated on a first come, first served basis.

They have been developed to help strengthen the use of effective social marketing approaches. They were developed following a two year independent review in 2006 which examined social marketing methods and approaches. The review identified that there was an increasing tendency for work to describe itself as social marketing without necessarily reflecting social marketing core concepts and principles. The eight point benchmark criteria built on the review findings and also Alan Andreasen’s previous six point benchmark from 2001.

It is important to note the reason why other factors, which are critical to any successful intervention have not been included. Obvious examples would include: strategic planning, partnership and stakeholder engagement, review
and evaluation, (to name a few). These are clearly all important in there own right, and key to successful interventions.

The reason they are not part of the benchmarks is that they are not unique to social marketing. Their presence (or absence) does not indicate if something is social marketing or not. The eight criteria included in the benchmark are however, the things that have to be present in order to be described as consistent with social marketing.

I’ve explained here how each of these should be used as part of an activity marketing campaign.

1. CUSTOMER ORIENTATION
‘Customer in the round’ Develops a robust understanding of the audience, based on good market and consumer research, combining data from different sources

Make sure that you use the marketing communication plans when deciding how to market to your chosen segments. These are based on the very robust Sport England and DH segmentation, and an extra £100,000 of research on top of that.

2. BEHAVIOUR
Has a clear focus on behaviour, based on a strong behavioural analysis, with specific behaviour goals

3. THEORY
Is behavioural theory-based and informed. Drawing from an integrated theory framework

Use the four stage Make Sport Fun method (Know, Link, Try and Repeat). This is a proven framework to make sure that you’re driving people to try activity, then to stick with it, rather than just increasing the intention to participate.

4. INSIGHT
Based on developing a deeper ‘insight’ approach – focusing on what ‘moves and motivates’

Make sure that you use the marketing communication plans when deciding how to market to your chosen segments. These are based on the very robust Sport England and DH segmentation, and an extra £100,000 of research on top of that.

5. EXCHANGE
Incorporates an ‘exchange’ analysis. Understanding what the person has to give to get the benefits proposed

Look in the marketing communication plans at the motivations of that group (these are on page 2 of each plan).

6. COMPETITION
Incorporates a ‘competition’ analysis to understand what competes for the time and attention of the audience

Look at the barriers that you need to overcome, these are in the marketing communication plans on page 2.

7. SEGMENTATION
Uses a developed segmentation approach (not just targeting). Avoiding blanket approaches

Choose who your target audience is by looking at the strategic tools on www.promotingactivity.com – especially:

• The Strategic Planning tool which will show you where participation is low, where interest in an activity is high and where different adult segments live
• The Sport England bar charts which show you how many of the Sport England segments live in your borough
• The DH family segment maps which show you where the DH family segments live

8. METHODS MIX
Identifies an appropriate ‘mix of methods’
‘Intervention mix’ = Strategic SM
‘Marketing mix’ = Operational SM

Look at the recommended communication channels in the marketing communication plans, these show you which communication channels work best for that segment. Also look at how these different communication channels fit into the four stages of an effective activity marketing campaign.

What is an open rate?

Open rate is a measure of how many people on an email list open (or view) a particular email campaign. The open rate is normally expressed as a percentage, and at Make Sport Fun we calculate it as follows:

So a 20% open rate would mean that of every 10 emails delivered to the inbox, 2 were actually opened.

How do you measure an open?

When each email is sent out, we automatically add a piece of code that requests a tiny, invisible image from our web servers. So when a reader opens the email, the image is downloaded, and we can record that download as an open for that specific email.

It is important to understand that the open rate is not a 100% accurate measure. Recording an ‘open’ can only happen if the readers email client is capable of displaying html with images, and that option is turned on. So if you are sending text-only emails, there is no way to record open rates (the exception is if they actually click a link). Similarly, people reading your html email without images showing will not be recorded as opens.

Another issue is that your readers may have a preview pane in their email client. That preview pane might be displaying your email automatically (and therefore downloading the images) without the reader ever having to click on it or read it.

So you should never take your open rate as a hard and fast number, because you can never know the true figure. It is much better used as general guide, and as a way of measuring the trends on your email campaigns.

What is a typical open rate?

Really, there is no typical open rate. The rate obtained for any list, or group of lists will depend on how it was measured, when it was sent, the size of the list and a zillion other potential variables. There is no shortage of benchmark numbers out there, but even between benchmark figures you will find big variation in the reported open rates.

So instead of giving a specific percentage, we’ve come up with the following chart.

There are certainly some broad trends in open rates.

• As list size goes up, the open rate tends to fall; possibly because smaller companies are more likely to have personal relationships with their list subscribers.
• Companies and organizations that are focusing on enthusiasts and supporters, like churches, sport teams and non profits see higher open rates
• More specific niche topics, like some manufacturing areas also typically have higher open rates than emails on broader topics

Why don’t you just give me a number!

So what if you or your clients just have no idea of what is a reasonable open rate? Based on everything we have seen here at Make Sport Fun, and on the other research out there, the bottom line is this:

If you are getting an open rate between 20% and 40%, you are probably somewhere around average.

Very few lists of reasonable size are getting much above 50% open rates from normal campaigns. Your list may have some specific factors that give you higher rates; if so, well done.

However, don’t expect to be getting 80% open rates. People are too busy, inboxes are too full and the measurements are technically limited. If, after all that, you are still interested in seeing specific figures, see the footer for some references you can browse through.

How can I increase my open rate?

There are a ton of elements you can vary to try to entice more of your subscribers to open up your emails. Here are just a few things you could try:

• Experiment with your subject lines: Try including details about the content of the email right in the subject line, instead of using your standard subject.
• Send on a different day: Are your subscribers too busy on a Wednesday morning to read your email, leaving it languishing down the inbox? Maybe a Friday afternoon email would be welcomed.
• Get the important content up the top: Remember that many people will see a preview of your email before deciding to open it or ignore it. Make sure your email is recognizable, and that your key points are in the top third.