How a consistent, audience-first email strategy kept Angling Unlimited‘s newsletter among the top performers in the travel and outdoor recreation industry, year after year.
Client
Services Provided
Email Marketing
Website Build
Local SEO
Google Ads
Website Build
Local SEO
Google Ads
Results in Summary
37% open rate
5% click rate
6,700 active subscribers
8+ years of partnership
5% click rate
6,700 active subscribers
8+ years of partnership
The Goals & Challenges
Angling Unlimited (AU) has been guiding anglers through the saltwater wilderness of Sitka, Alaska, for over 30 years. With multi-day fishing trips and a deeply loyal repeat customer base, their email list isn’t just a marketing channel; it’s the primary relationship between Angling Unlimited and the guests who keep coming back season after season.
Their audience is passionate, engaged, and expects to be in the know: season openings, regulation changes, king salmon limits, trip availability, and the latest from the water. The challenge was delivering that content consistently, at the right cadence, in a way that felt personal and worth opening every single time.
Over 8+ years, we managed Angling Unlimited’s full email marketing strategy and execution on Mailchimp — from strategy and scheduling to writing, design, list management, and reporting. Campaigns ran biweekly during Alaska’s fishing season (May–October) and monthly or bimonthly in the off-season, keeping the audience warm without over-saturating inboxes.
Our Solutions
Content that Earns the Open
AU’s subscribers are passionate anglers who’ve often already fished with them or are actively planning to. Every email had to earn its place in the inbox, mixing trip updates, fishing reports, regulation news, crew highlights, guest testimonials, and seasonal specials into content that felt genuinely worth reading — not just promotional. That subscriber trust is what drove open rates well above industry averages for years.
List Health & Consistent Deliverability
The AU newsletter list grew from around 6,250 to over 6,700 subscribers during the engagement, healthy, organic list growth with no artificial inflation. Consistent list hygiene and thoughtful send practices kept deliverability strong and unsubscribe rates low throughout, protecting the sender reputation AU’s program depended on.
Welcome Automation for New Subscribers
We built and managed an automated welcome email sequence to greet new list members immediately after sign-up, introducing the AU experience, building trust early, and moving prospective guests toward a booking inquiry. The automation consistently achieved a 60% open rate and 15% click rate.
The Results
Email performance benchmarks vary by platform and industry, but across the board, Angling Unlimited’s program consistently outperformed standard averages for travel and outdoor businesses during Odd Dog‘s tenure, particularly in open and click rates, the two metrics that matter most for an engaged audience.
Over the years, the AU newsletter became one of the most reliably high-performing assets in its marketing mix. Email drove the highest website engagement time of any traffic channel, including organic search, signaling that subscribers who clicked through were genuinely interested and ready to act. Email also produced one of the highest returning visitor rates across all channels, meaning the newsletter was actively bringing past guests back to the site.
Click-through rates (CTR) averaged well above 2x the industry standard throughout the engagement. CTR peaked with standout sends, such as king salmon regulatory updates and early-season specials that drove urgent, qualified traffic at exactly the right moment in the booking cycle.
The program delivered more than open rates and clicks; it kept AU’s most valuable audience, their past and prospective guests, warm, informed, and connected to the brand across every season for nearly a decade.
37%
Average Open Rate
5%
Click Rate
200+
Newsletters Sent
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