How ProShot & Tidal Sports creates community and boosts sales with email marketing
For Daphne Bruno, Head of Marketing at ProShot and Tidal Sports, sharing interesting and valuable content with customers was the main goal when she decided to overhaul the company’s email marketing strategy.
We really wanted to provide value, create a community, and just keep our customers engaged as much as possible. And that's really what drove our decision to invest more in our email marketing.
By shifting the focus from making sales to providing content their subscribers love, email marketing has become an integral part of ProShot & Tidal Sports’ overall marketing strategy. And since taking this approach, they’ve experienced a significant traffic boost to the website along with successful product launches that even the team itself didn’t anticipate.
We had a chat with Daphne to learn more about how Proshot & Tidal Sports uses email marketing and the features that have helped them to succeed.
Getting started with MailerLite
For 10 years, ProShot & Tidal Sports has been developing products for divers, snorkellers, and underwater photographers. The company started out with a single product—the ProShot case—designed to help underwater enthusiasts use their iPhone, you guessed it, underwater.
As owners Andrew and Sophie realized there were gaps in the market for more high-quality gear, the business quickly expanded to include specialist masks, snorkels, fins, and other accessories. ProShot & Tidal Sports was born.
In their quest to find a suitable email marketing solution, Daphne’s research led the team to MailerLite. Its affordable pricing, intuitive features, and ability to grow alongside the business sealed the deal.
We needed an email platform that could keep up with our growing small business. And one of the reasons we chose MailerLite was because of its cost-effectiveness. Plus, the setup was relatively easy and the customer service team was great. They were always on hand to help with any questions right away.
The perfect balance of affordability and features
In the early stages of the business, the team tried out a few solutions that they felt lacked enough scalability and user-friendliness for their needs.
ProShot & Tidal Sports uses Wix for its website, so it was an obvious choice to try out the tool’s built-in email marketing platform. But they found it doesn’t really compare to dedicated solutions and was missing a lot of the features and automations that they needed. This led to Daphne’s search for a separate platform to handle emails.
We also started with Mailchimp in the beginning. It was a bit clunky and got expensive very quickly. Once you got to about 10,000 email subscribers, the pricing went up significantly. MailerLite offers us the perfect balance of affordability and quality.
Here are the MailerLite features Daphne uses the most.
Daphne can easily create beautiful emails that are visually aligned with the brand.
Daphne can engage customers with post-purchase flows that share valuable content.
Daphne gathers feedback about existing products and those that customers would like to see launched next.
Segmentation helps Daphne personalize newsletter content based on subscribers’ favorite brands and other data.
Forms let people sign up for product launch emails and register for extended warranties.
The ProShot & Tidal Sports website is built on Wix, which offers limited integrations when it comes to automation and customization.
To solve this, Daphne connected Zapier with the MailerLite API to pull in customers’ purchase information, which can then be used for their post-purchase automations.
Zapier allows you to connect MailerLite with thousands of other apps so you can easily create more complex customizations and advanced workflows.
Fostering strong customer relationships
Daphne is a consumer too and she understands that constantly trying to push for sales results in boring and dry email marketing. While upselling and lead nurturing have their place in Proshot & Tidal Sports’ strategy, where the brand really shines is in its ability to connect with customers and provide an exceptional brand experience that keeps people engaged.
For example, when a customer purchases one of the ProShot cases, they’re entered into the post-purchase automation where they’ll receive guides and tips on how to use the case with the app, plus other valuable content.
Our post-purchase email flow is so important for our customers. You know, while our product is intuitive, It does take a little explaining and you need some instruction. It's so nice that we can have a chain of emails that ensures customers understand how to use our products after they purchase them.
Daphne also loves to get creative and find new ways to inspire and engage subscribers—and no 2 newsletters look the same. She often plays around with different blocks in the drag & drop builder to include surveys, polls, videos, and social media posts. This, she says, goes back to her ultimate goal of creating a community within the ProShot & Tidal Sports customer base.
We try to think outside the box to figure out ways to nurture our community, but also provide value. So as well as ideas on how to use our products, we also share content about where they should be traveling to view certain types of underwater creatures, information about advanced diving techniques or advanced certifications.
Exceeding sales expectations with product launch emails
One of Daphne’s greatest email marketing achievements, something that really cemented the importance of email for the company, was a product launch campaign.
Prior to the release of a new iPhone case, Daphne set up embedded forms and pop-ups on the Pro Shot & Tidal Sports website so that people could subscribe to be notified via email when the product was released. This strategy resulted in hundreds of signups and generated a lot of buzz leading up to the launch.
We sent out teasers with countdown timers a couple of days before the launch. And people were literally emailing in an hour before the time was up! Like, is it ready yet? Can I buy it now? I think my favorite feature is the countdown timer. I love adding it everywhere I can.
On the first day the case went on sale, there were over 15,000 sales, surpassing anything the team had expected.
We’d been collecting emails for a long time and we had some predictions for sales but it blew past what we were expecting and continued to work well. It was a month-long campaign launch and every time we'd send an email, we'd see a huge spike in sales. It was a lot of hard work to get a product like that off the ground so it was great that MailerLite was an integral part of that launch plan.
Using email to raise awareness
At the end of 2024, the company’s goal wasn’t only to drive sales, but to also raise awareness for a cause that remains close to heart for the team: The Coral Restoration Foundation. This involved ProShot & Tidal Sports donating a percentage of their proceeds during November and December to the non-proft organization.
Since our whole mission is to inspire people to explore the ocean, we want to make sure we’re also doing something to help protect it. Every year in November and December, a portion of our sales goes directly toward protecting and restoring coral reefs. And we’re happy to share that our December 2024 sales outperformed the previous year—it was a successful campaign in terms of both impact and growth.
The perfect recipe for successful email marketing
The key behind ProShot & Tidal Sports’ success with email marketing ultimately comes down to caring about customers’ experiences with their products.
Throughout our chat, Daphne emphasized the importance of creating a community for their customers. She approaches campaigns as an extension of the brand personality; they are not simply just another way to make sales.
We love what we do and we just want to get people into the water, to motivate them and show them how to dive the best way. To help them learn about underwater photography techniques and show them how they can have more fun and get the best experience possible.
It’s this passion combined with an extensive understanding of their customers that adds a true sense of authenticity to ProShot & Tidal Sports’ email marketing.
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