How SportsCarnival Uses Mailshake for Personalized Email Outreach
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Selling niche software is extremely challenging. But it’s not impossible, given that you use the right tools, something that SportsCarival does.
The company provides a booking and facility management software system that helps recreational business owners organize lane assignments, collect waivers, process payments, and market their services effectively. Think axe-throwing venues, escape rooms, and paintball fields.
We interviewed Jordan Weinand, Head of Growth at SportsCarnival, to understand how he’s been growing his company by focusing on personalized outreach since 2022.
“Our ideal customer profile is pretty scattered and specialized,” Jordan explains. “We don’t have the world to go after. We’re not consumer-based SaaS software. There are a few industry types that we really focus on.”
This means when Jordan first joined the company, he needed a way to create email campaigns that could be broad enough to reach about a thousand contacts, yet personalized enough to address the needs of different recreational facility types.
And he needed to do all of this alone. That’s when Mailshake came to the rescue.
SportsCarvnival’s Email Outreach Challenge
Unlike mass-market SaaS products with millions of potential customers, SportsCarnival targets specific business types with highly specific needs.
This specialization creates a difficult outreach challenge. An axe-throwing venue has different concerns than a paintball field, which differs again from a pickleball club or escape room. Each requires tailored messaging that addresses their specific operational challenges.
Regional differences further complicate outreach. “A California axe-throwing group might have certain tax components that are slightly different than what somebody down in Florida would have,” Jordan explains. These nuances require customization in messaging to resonate with prospects in different locations.
Another challenge was efficiency and usability. With Jordan handling all outreach efforts himself, he needed a tool that was simple to use but powerful enough.
Initially, SportsCarnival used HubSpot for its outreach, but found limitations when it came to sales-focused campaigns. Jordan explains, “HubSpot had a few limitations where [Mailshake] won in a really big way, which is the whole sales and marketing, particularly sales [aspect].”
These challenges required a solution that could help Jordan:
- Efficiently segment his audience
- Personalize messaging at scale
- Track results
All while maintaining high deliverability rates. Enter Mailshake.
Why SportsCarnival Chose Mailshake Over Alternatives
When evaluating email outreach platforms, five factors led Jordan to select Mailshake as SportsCarnival’s solution of choice.
- Competitive pricing. “The price point of it was appealing,” Jordan shares.
- Established relationship. “Candidly, I’ve worked with Sujan in the past couple of jobs before this one. So I knew him and knew what he had built,” Jordan explains about his professional connection with Mailshake’s founder.
- Dialer capability. “Knowing that it was there was something I did want to take advantage of at some point,” Jordan says. He and a teammate began incorporating the dialer into their workflow a few months ago for follow-up calls.
- Deliverability expertise. “For what I need, I know that the company and the group that I’m working with at Mailshake are doing all they can as experts in getting into Google and Outlook,” he explains. “If you don’t have it, you’re spending a lot of money for nothing, and you’re just ruining your domain.”
- Hands-on implementation support. “Andrea was very helpful at the very beginning stages to get things set up,” Jordan recalls. “She kind of actually did it.”
Our high-touch onboarding approach resonated with SportsCarnival’s own business philosophy.
“One thing that we at SportsCarnival pride ourselves on is taking the reins at the very beginning of the process for our customers,” Jordan notes.
“The numbers prove out that if we build their account for them and do all the work — if we do 85% of it for them — the other 15% that is their day-to-day operation in our software is really what they control.”
How Mailshake Turned Around SportsCarnival’s Email Outreach
Once Mailshake was set up, here’s how Jordan used it to give email outreach wings:
Segmentation by Facility Type
One of Jordan’s main strategies is segmenting prospects by the type of recreational facility they operate.
“For us, it’s how do you create an email that needs to be broad and kind of sent out to roughly a thousand contacts, but also be super finite in what it is that you’re saying to them,” Jordan explains.
Paintball fields, axe-throwing venues, pickleball clubs, and escape rooms all have different operational challenges, so segmentation is crucial for relevant messaging.
Personal Touch at Scale
Though reaching out to many prospects, Jordan maintains a personal touch by using personalization elements.
“I have done first names, business names, that kind of thing,” he says, explaining how he uses Mailshake’s mail merge capabilities to insert these personal details automatically.
First-Email Optimization
Jordan has learned the importance of keeping initial emails simple to maximize deliverability.
“I was told the first email, the importance of the first email going out being about as basic and like, do everything you can to get it into the inbox,” he explains. “And then, after that, emails can be a little bit more creative or have emojis and other things like that.”
This strategy of starting simple and increasing creativity in follow-ups has yielded positive results: “The last two campaigns have probably been a lot more positive than the previous three had been, only because that first email now hits the inbox.”
At Mailshake, we are big on email deliverability. Email warm-up, deliverability set up, email validation, and inbox rotation are some of the ways we help customers like Jordan avoid the spam folder.
Lead Temperature Tracking
One Mailshake feature that Jordan finds particularly valuable is the ability to categorize leads by temperature.
“How I think it leads in the sales side of it is the hot, the cold, and the warm email,” he explains. “It’s very easy for me to go in and say, these are all the hot ones, and I’m gonna take that list and do something different.”
This categorization is especially important given the tight-knit nature of SportsCarnival’s target market.
“The customers we go after, I don’t necessarily need to have a whole call center on anybody. It’s a small community, and if you do anything wrong by any of them, words are gonna get out,” Jordan notes.
Dialer Integration
For promising prospects, Jordan can easily transition from email outreach to direct phone contact.
“I know exactly who the hot people are, might be a list of ten that small, even, but a very customized direct phone call to them to let them know that a human is around and available,” Jordan explains.
Lead Catcher Monitoring
Jordan regularly uses Mailshake’s Lead Catcher feature to monitor responses and engagement. “I’ll next step pop into Mailshake and see what happened from yesterday till the time I end up getting into Mailshake,” he describes his daily workflow.
“The lead temperature is typically what I’m looking at. And then I’ll go into the lead catcher component just to see what’s been collected. Who’s reached out? Who’s emailed?”
This monitoring allows him to quickly identify and follow up with engaged prospects, even as a one-person sales operation.
SportsCarnival’s Future Plans for Using Mailshake
While Jordan has already seen significant improvements in SportsCarnival’s outreach efforts, he’s excited about exploring more advanced Mailshake features.
Three features he is particularly excited about include:
1. Advanced Personalization With Text Replacements
Jordan is looking forward to implementing more sophisticated personalization using Mailshake’s text replacement capabilities.
Beyond just first names and business names, these text replacements will allow for hyper-customized messages that include specific details relevant to each prospect.
2. Conversion Tracking for Website Integration
Another feature on Jordan’s radar is Mailshake’s conversion tracking, which would allow SportsCarnival to monitor prospects’ interactions with their website after email engagement.
“You can put this on your website. You can actually have it mark someone as like ‘closed won’ or ‘closed lost,’ or whatever — take certain actions based on if they visit something on your website,” explains Trevor from our team.
3. AI and Automation Opportunities
As a forward-thinking company already exploring AI for its own product, SportsCarnival is keen to use any AI and automation capabilities that Mailshake develops.
“Being, you know, using you guys, if there’s integrations and AI components and ways that I can use Make or Zapier to make my life easier to automate this… how we can tie into a lot of different things with what you guys do with other automations, I think that’s only gonna continue to grow,” Jordan shares.
Jordan is particularly interested in AI reporting mechanisms that could help analyze campaign performance and provide actionable insights. And we aim to add them to Mailshake soon!
Why not Book a Demo with Mailshake today? See how you can use outbound sales to scale your business
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