With horse-racing season set to begin today at Emerald Downs in Seattle, the racetrack wants to drive fans to its Web site and make its online marketing campaigns more personalized.
The racetrack started an online community, called an e-club, with the help of e-marketing company NewWorld Commerce, Kirkland, WA. With the e-club, visitors to the Web site can register to receive an e-mail newsletter, special discounts, and news on future events and promotions.
“We want to build memberships through the e-club, which will enable us to tailor different marketing campaigns specifically toward different factions,” said Kerry Dalton, director of merchandising at Emerald Downs.
“There are many different types of racing fans,” Dalton added. “There's the regular racing fan, there are the family and many others.”
The racetrack, which is promoting the e-club via offline collateral, plans to collect demographic information and segment its audience accordingly.
Emerald Downs placed an ad for the e-club last week in its monthly newsletter, which is delivered to 45,000 offline members. So far it has registered 250 fans, Dalton said.
