Avg. Open Rate:
+45%
Open Rate vs Industry Avg.:
+2%
Contact List Growth:
+81
Feature they can’t live without: BrandKit

Hitting a hole-in-one with your email marketing doesn’t have to take as much time and practice as you may think. Look to The National Golf Course Owners Association Canada (NGCOA Canada) for inspiration on how the association uses email marketing to grow its not-for-profit association and stay connected with members and partners.
NGCOA Canada needed a way to connect with members and partners about upcoming in-person and virtual industry events, share membership reminders and communications, present opportunities for golf course owners, and drive traffic to the website.
After hearing an NGCOA Canada partner present about email marketing at an NGCOA Canada conference and loving the session’s topic, Gloria Hammond, Director of Communications at NGCOA Canada, spoke with a Constant Contact representative at the event.
“(She) set me up with a trial account, and I played around a little bit, and I said, ‘Yeah, I really want to go here.’ We’ve been there ever since,” Gloria shared.
Since 2015, Gloria has used Constant Contact to ace marketing for the association.

Creating email newsletters using templates and BrandKit
Gloria needed a way to create email communications to share events, news, and information that would be valuable and interesting to members of NGCOA Canada and partners. Using Constant Contact’s email templates and Brandkit tools allows her to keep the NGCOA Canada brand consistent while saving time to focus on other marketing tasks.
Instead of starting from scratch for each email newsletter, Gloria uses Constant Contact’s email templates to create a consistent design and drags and drops the elements she needs to add to emails.
Constant Contact BrandKit and email templates save her time branding each email with the association’s logo, brand colors, and images, which are saved in the media library for quick access and ease of use.
“Being able to set it and forget it is great. From a campaign-building standpoint, that is one of my favorite features. I didn’t start using it right out of the gate, and … then I finally clued in that I had this handy dandy tool over here. It just speeds things up,” Gloria said.

Constant Contact makes marketing to their audiences simple, effective, and connected to the overall NGCOA Canada brand.
Using email marketing reports to improve future emails and email list growth
Knowing what’s working and what needs improvement in her email marketing, like learning why people unsubscribe and to take steps to reduce future unsubscribes, is a big part of how Gloria finds success in communicating with members and industry partners and continuing to drive traffic to the website.
“Data, for me, tells the story, and if I’m not looking at the data, I’m not getting the full picture of how we’re doing,” she explained.
Analyzing the best time to send an email
One of the ways she uses Constant Contact’s reports feature is to understand the best time and day of the week to send emails.
When looking at an email report, she can determine if the time and date the email sent was ideal for NGCOA Canada email subscribers based on how high the email open rate shows for an email, the click rate, and the conversion rate.

For NGCOA Canada, the average open rate is 44% but can range up to 65%, compared to an industry average of 43%.
“I pull reports of who opened the message and what time they open it. I like to gauge from send time to either open or engagement time, what’s that time span? I also use that to help me determine optimal send times,” Gloria shared.
Knowing their email subscribers’ preferences to personalize marketing
Gloria uses email personalization and list segmentation to keep NGCOA Canada email subscribers interested in hearing from the association.
To take her emails from generic to tailored for specific subscribers, she sends customized emails to sets of subscribers based on attributes the association collects from their subscribers. In the emails, she strategically includes content geared toward preferences and information golf course owners and industry partners shared, like the events they’re interested in, their role at their golf course company, and their location.


This email personalization and list segmentation strategy helps keep subscribers engaged with the association because the emails are packed with information and news that’s relevant to them. The subscribers aren’t just opening the emails, they’re engaging in the emails by clicking on hyperlinks within the email that lead to the website or simply viewing and reading the entire email.
The results of personalizing emails and segmenting the lists show — 4% of NGCOA Canada’s email subscribers are clicking the links in their emails, significantly higher than the industry average.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, NGCOA Canada switched to virtual events, and when in-person events returned, they continued to offer virtual events as an option. Now, they can segment emails promoting virtual events to subscribers who have expressed interest in them while targeting the remaining subscribers with information on live events.
Using multiple types of marketing together to create a consistent message
Using a multi-channel marketing approach, the team at NGCOA Canada ensures its marketing is all tied together with consistent branding and messages. They promote the association on social media and at a variety of in-person and virtual events like trade publications and golf expos.
Creating consistent emails with BrandKit
With the help of Constant Contact’s BrandKit and email marketing tools, Gloria can easily put together email marketing campaigns that connect to other marketing channels.
“Whether I’m starting from scratch on building a campaign or whether I’m going into some of the templates that are available in Constant Contact and just manipulating them to be what I need them to be, I just love the ease of the drag and drop.”
— Gloria Hammond
Growing their email list with a sign-up form
To grow their email list, NGCOA Canada uses a multi-channel marketing strategy to reach non-members about their offerings and promote the email newsletters and communications to them.
Using a Constant Contact sign-up form, new members are invited to join the NGCOA Canada email list via a variety of channels, like social media, the association website, and more.

Getting inspiration from AI Content Generator
Finding inspiration for new, creative campaign ideas is quick and simple thanks to Constant Contact’s AI Content Generator. The generator helps Gloria get inspiration on fresh ways to promote the association’s offerings, events, and partnerships.
“I use AI to help me kind of get inspired. How can I tweak this? How can I change this? What kind of image could I create to go with this?” she said.
Advice to ace your next marketing campaign
Whether you’re promoting events, sharing your organization’s latest offerings, or trying to stay connected with your audience, these two pieces of advice from Gloria can help you take steps to ace your next marketing campaign:
Talk to an expert
Gloria’s phone call with a Constant Contact expert made a big difference in how she leveraged the platform. She received tips on how to use the features more effectively and efficiently and was able to implement these in her regular marketing activities.
By talking with a Constant Contact expert, you can learn how to best use Constant Contact tools, what to add to your email marketing, or get ideas on how to get started.
Use email templates
Avoid getting stuck on how to build your email’s design. Using an email template will get you started sending mobile-responsive emails that have all of the content, colors, and branding that match your business.
Gloria shared her advice on email templates, “If you’re just starting out and you’re not really sure how to build a campaign or how to structure a campaign for maximum effect, there are some really good examples in there that [are] so easy to manipulate and edit.”
Like having the best golf club to play your best game, finding success in marketing a not-for-profit association is possible with the right tools and support to make the digital marketing strategy easier to plan, launch, and analyze for results and business growth.
“We use Constant Contact to drive traffic to our website. For me, reaching the audience that I need to reach with the tools that I have available has been my biggest success.”
— Gloria Hammond