Ballarat Cycle Classic EDM templates

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Client: Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute

Services provided: Campaign, Design, Email marketing, In-House, Volunteer

The annual Ballarat Cycle Classic community event is the Fiona Elsey Cancer Research Institute’s major fundraising initiative, raising important money for cancer research. I have assisted with email marketing services for two years, helping the Institute raise engagement levels and streamline processes.

The Institute’s email marketing strategy needed an update to increase audience engagement and grow event participation. The internal EDM process also needed to be streamlined and better integrated into other back-office systems.

Mailchimp’s campaign features, such as A/B Testing, Conditional Merge Tags and Send Time Optimization, were employed to increase audience engagement. The templates were redesigned to be responsive and standardised using the MJML email framework. Finally, the audience database in Mailchimp’s was optimised and subscribers who hadn’t engaged with the Institute in some time were stripped out.

The open rate of emails went from an average of approximately 25% to a peak of over 75% for targeted campaigns to appropriately segmented audiences. The click-through rate (those who clicked a link within the email) grew from 3% to over 13%, with some individual communications to audiences larger than 1000 recipients reaching 65% click through rate. These figures represent twice the industry average open rate1 and four times the click through engagement rate2.

On top of pure metrics, the email marketing efforts also assisted in back-office efficiencies and an improved professionalism and branding.


  1. Industry average open rate for a non-profit organisation, according to Mailchimp: 25.2%
  2. Industry average click-through rate for a non-profit organisation, according to Mailchimp: 2.8%

Responsive, mobile-first design

The template structure was built using the MJML framework, allowing for a mobile-first design philosophy. This means the template is designed for a mobile, then expanding out as the client’s screen size increased.

2021 template:

macbook background
macbook background
iphone_6plus background
iphone_6plus background

2020 template:

macbook background
macbook background
iphone_6plus background
iphone_6plus background

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