Customer Spotlight: Dynamic Elite Athletics

[Caitlin_M]

Lisa Huck knows better than anyone that in the worlds of elite cheerleading and business, teamwork and grit are two main pillars for success.

After leaving the corporate world to become her own boss, Lisa partnered with her daughter Angela to open Dynamic Elite Athletics in 2013 where they trained a small but mighty team of five kids. When their business was small, they were able to rely on each other to take care of training their students and used word-of-mouth to market their business.

With a decade of success under their belt, Dynamic Elite Athletics continued to expand from 5 students to nearly 300 students while growing their team to 30 staff members, 5 of whom are full-time. Lisa’s son, Christopher Furnace, is the Director of Operations for Dynamic Elite Athletics. While he says “I was never a cheerleader, myself,” he takes care of the business side of Dynamic. That means taking care of logistics, marketing, and finance — the whole kit and kaboodle of what it takes to keep Dynamic Elite Athletics chugging along each day. Meanwhile, Christopher’s husband, Trent, takes the reins as Program Director. Trent, along with Christopher’s brother and sister (Derek and Angela) train students in their elite all-star and tumbling programs.

Spreading the word

As a community-centric business, in the past Dynamic Elite Athletics relied mostly on word of mouth marketing — using the rapport between current students and their families as a catalyst to create trust within the community and interest in the training programs Dynamic Elite Athletics has to offer.  

When Christopher and his team began to dabble with digital marketing they did so through the features offered by their business management software, Jackrabbit. While the software supports them in many areas of their business, they found that they needed more support when it came to designing their emails, managing their sends, and receiving reporting metrics that would help them make important decisions for their marketing strategy. 

In May of 2021, Christopher took the initiative to invest in Constant Contact for his team. 

“[Constant Contact] really assisted us in providing those perfect marketing emails. They have a lot of great templates … [our previous email software] just didn't have the streamlined look that we wanted. So getting Constant Contact was a no-brainer. Once I started with it, it was just so easy, so simple, and it just made my work life so much easier.” — Christopher Furnace, Director of Operations

Now that they have the look and feel they want for their email marketing, it’s time for a new challenge: managing email sends for multiple locations. With the addition of their Geneseo location, and their hope to expand to a third location next year, Christopher and the team have been experimenting with list segmentation as a way to solve their problem. By using list segmentation to create and manage separate lists for their audiences in Rochester and Geneseo, they make sure that they are reaching the right inbox, with the right content every time. 

The Dynamic Elite Athletics team works hard every day to set athletes up for success, but they’re also invested in building a better community beyond the floor mats. Between their locations in Rochester and Geneseo, NY, they have a big audience to attend to, so they use Constant Contact to help get the word out about their business. Beautifully designed emails and segmented lists help them to keep clients informed about how they are making all-star cheer, cheer camp, and tumbling classes accessible to the communities they serve. 

Dynamic Elite Athletics: Ingredients to good marketing 

Primary email marketing goal: Reaching current and potential customers

Types of emails they send: Course offerings, apparel sales, discount offers

Marketing channels: Email, social media ads, word of mouth

Feature they can’t live without: Email builder

Key analytics: Open rates and click through rates

Business advice: “Breathe. Really remember your ‘why’. Why you opened up the business, what your mission is — stay with that.”