UpToPar Management

UpToPar is the company that powers digital marketing activities for golf courses, resorts, and restaurants across the United States. This means managing email, social media, branding, and more for clients like Berry Hill Resort and Lexington Golf & Country Club. It also means a very dispersed workforce and client base, making seamless collaboration one of the key priorities for their business.

Across other channels, like social media, collaboration was baked into all of its tools, making it easy to run campaigns with many contributors, for multiple clients. Everyone could work in one interface, they could access detailed analytics, and they could save time.

From the customer’s perspective, UpToPar’s email program provided value to end users and increasingly drove revenue. On the back end though, UpToPar faced issues like a slow and complex email builder, the email platform going down, and suddenly losing all of the work.

When it came to email, UpToPar’s tools were a step behind. The marketing team knew email contributed some of the best bang for the buck, especially when promoting events (which often sell out from email promotion alone), as well as when sending notifications like reservation and tee-time reminders.

• Time usage analysis: The team conducted an internal review of time spent on email campaigns, where time was lost, and where efficiencies could be found.
• Email service provider review: They identified the key priorities for an email service provider and conducted a search for a solution that addressed those needs.

UpToPar’s internal review found that on average it was spending 18 hours per week sending email. With a growing base of limited time avaiable, the team decided to switch to a much faster and more team-friendly email service provider. The answer to their problem was Mailjet.

After switching to Mailjet, UpToPar conducted another review of time spent on email campaigns. Today, the company has reduced time spent on campaigns by 66%, with email managers spending no more than 6 hours per week on campaigns. From a financial perspective, they save $12,480 in time alone by using Mailjet.

Ultimately, UpToPar selected Mailjet over alternatives because of Mailjet’s collaboration tools, intuitive email builder and template manager, reliable infrastructure, and a customer success manager at their disposal.

After the internal analysis of how the marketing team creates and sends email, it became clear that it needed a platform that was built for a large remote team, and one that could also involve external contributors like their clients.

Mailjet’s focus on teams allowed UpToPar to better manage its many clients in one interface, ensure it could keep stats and templates separate across different clients, and ultimately help create and send emails much faster than before.

Not only did we achieve cost savings with a better system, our department is now more efficient than ever. A good example of these changes is that we were able to gain 2 properties and complete 2 consulting contracts with the same staff because of the efficiency achieved.

Natalia Contreras Director of Marketing – UpToPar Management

With the help of a customer success manager, UpToPar created a subaccount for each of their clients and can now assign specific user roles for different internal and external contributors. For example, a copywriter for one client cannot access the billing section or the templates of other clients unless granted permission.

Further, campaigns cannot be sent without the approval of a client manager to ensure typos and design errors don’t slip through the cracks.

Now that we’re with Mailjet, it takes less than half the time to build campaigns.

Natalia Contreras Director of Marketing – UpToPar Management

In addition, working with Mailjet’s customer success team has enabled UpToPar to increase open rates by focusing on targeting engaged users and sending campaigns with a personalized, relevant message. In just over a year, UpToPar’s open rates have grown from 5% to 30%, and are still growing.

Not only has UpToPar been able to increase its efficiency in sending emails, but the company also has been able to see a noticeable increase in the return on investment of individual campaigns. This allows UpToPar to focus on channels it owns, like email marketing, spending money on low-impact channels like social media advertising.

The UpToPar team is now poised for significant growth over the next few years, partially thanks to a more efficient email system, and a validated revenue-generating channel for campaigns.

In just over a year, the UpToPar team was able to:

• Decrease time spent on emails by 66%, saving more than $12,000
• Increase open rates by 6x
• Increase the number of clients they managed by 30% with the same number of staff
• Save money on advertising and other marketing channels due to an optimized email strategy