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The Curling Club

526% marketing ROI on a six-figure investment (agency fees included). A new website, four channels, one integrated season.

Website Design, Development and CRO
Email and CRM Marketing
SEO
PPC

A seasonal pop-up curling and hospitality brand operating winter venues across London and Manchester. Visitors curl, drink, and party across a 16 to 20-week trading window each year.

A market with a short window to capture demand, increasing competition from activity bars, and a buyer journey that runs from casual discovery through to high-value group bookings.

The 2025/26 season included new venues in Manchester, Chelsea, and Canary Wharf, alongside the established Vinegar Yard site, while accounting for the loss of the Southbank venue, the brand had been best known for.

A full-service engagement, with every channel managed and reported under one roof.

Website rebuild (Design and Development in tight timeframe), SEO, GEO, paid media (Google, Microsoft, Meta, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn), email and CRM, CRO, benchmarking.

A long enough relationship to know the seasonal rhythm, the buyer, and the commercial levers that move the business. The 2025/26 season was the fourth Roar has delivered, and the one with the most challenges.

Roar acts as The Curling Club’s marketing function, working directly with the marketing director and with frequent communication with founders and the senior team across strategy, build, and weekly delivery.

34K

Record Breaking Attendance

6

Figure Revenue and ROI

26%

Conversion Rate

The Curling Club had a working business and a growing audience, but the website was leaking demand. At its best in December 2024, the conversion rate was 2.85%. Most months it sat lower. Traffic was arriving, but a large share of it was failing to convert into either a direct booking or a group enquiry.

The buyer journey added to the problem. The brand sells across multiple booking types, from individual pay-and-play curling slots through to large corporate group bookings, with very different price points and decision cycles. The previous site treated all of these audiences with broadly the same flow, and the booking system gave the marketing team limited visibility into what was breaking down where.

Competition was also intensifying. More venues were adding curling as an experience, and activity bars were spending heavily through the winter. To grow against that, The Curling Club needed to convert more of the traffic it already had, and then expand into new audiences with a site capable of holding up under scale.

The 2025/26 season also brought a structural change. The Southbank venue, the location the brand was best known for, was no longer in the portfolio. Three new venues were added in its place. That meant new local SEO ground to take, new Manchester awareness to build from a low base, and a peak season that needed to deliver from venues with no historical search demand attached to them.

What we did

A coordinated five-pillar approach, sequenced across pre-season, peak, and post-peak.

1. Rebuilt the website to convert, not just exist

The new site went live on 15 September, six weeks ahead of the venues opening in November. Structure, booking journey, and tracking were rebuilt from the ground up, with proper visibility into abandoned carts and clearer revenue attribution across every channel. The site was designed so that the multiple booking types each had their own clean path through to conversion, rather than competing for attention in a single flow. By the close of the pre-season window, mid-September to end of October, 17.6% of users were already booking or enquiring before the venues had even opened. The same window the previous year on the old site converted at 1.4%.

2. Ran integrated paid media across six platforms

Google and Microsoft handled high-intent search demand. Meta carried awareness and direct booking volume. TikTok and Reddit were added to reach segments that had previously been hard to justify investment in, on the basis that the new site could now convert what they sent. LinkedIn supported corporate and group enquiries. Campaigns were structured by audience and intent, not by platform or demographics, so that messaging stayed consistent as users moved between channels. Total tracked advertising ROI for the season came in at 367%. With ads being responsible for 1/3 of the desirable large corporate bookings.

3.Built compounding organic visibility, then timed the Olympics

SEO ran in two phases. Pre-season focused on technical foundations, new location pages for the venue changes, and high-intent commercial terms across both London and Manchester. Top three rankings were achieved early and held throughout peak. Then in December, with peak demand still being captured, content was planned around the Winter Olympics. It was built in January and timed to publish in line with Team GB matches. In February, the site hit 14,149 users, up 616% month-on-month, and the site held a 20.92% conversion rate against a 118% increase in total traffic.

Roar SEO services

4. Turned email into a real revenue channel

The pre-season database clean made segmented sends possible for the first time. Campaigns were built by location, audience type, and customer value, and automated flows were introduced for Manchester, post-visit re-engagement, and discount-led recovery. Email-driven website traffic was up 5,100% year-on-year across the season, and in January, one in two of those visitors completed a key event. Manchester’s automated flow drove a 24% conversion rate (1 in 4 subscribers made a booking fro 2+ people) throughout the season.

5. Ran the whole season as one operation

PPC, SEO, email, paid social, and CRO were managed by a single team with shared reporting and weekly decision-making. When peak demand hit in November, budget could move between channels in days rather than weeks. When the Olympics opportunity emerged in December, the content team, SEO team, and email team built around the same calendar. When January traffic dropped post-peak, the channels adjusted in step rather than each running their own playbook. This is the pillar that produced the commercial result.

The results

Business impact

526% marketing ROI across the full season — inclusive of agency fees.
Highest season revenue to date
34,000 curlers across four venues
27,150 covers delivered through 1,567 large group enquiries, with additional revenue potential from forms alone ranging from £407,250 (basic booking) to £2.89m (peak packages)
Website conversion rate increased from 2.85% to 26.4%.
Pre-season conversion rate up from 1.4% to 17.6% comparing the same Sept-to-Oct window year-on-year
CPA down to £7.72, down from almost £10 the previous season
Google Ads conversion value increased 34% year-on-year

Channel performance

Google Ads:

560% PPC ROI on five-figure media budgets for one product type only
peak CTR of 19.92% in February
average CPC of 60p on high-intent terms

Meta:

202% PPC ROI
peak ROAS of 5.34 in November
874,000+ impressions in December alone

Microsoft:

Strongest channel for corporate and group enquiry forms throughout peak, with December CPA of £2.86.
(note: direct booking revenue from Microsoft could not be tracked through the booking platform during this season, so reported tracked revenue massively understates true contribution)

SEO:

Top three rankings held across key commercial terms in both London and Manchester from launch through to season close.
Total website traffic up 198% in February versus the previous year, the majority from organic.
February organic sessions up 616% month-on-month

Email:

Peak open rate 66.9%,
peak click rate 17%, both significantly above the 2025 hospitality average.
Email-driven traffic up 5,100% year-on-year.
12,559 subscribers by January, growing through every month of the season

Strategic position

A website infrastructure that supports continued expansion. The platform now converts reliably enough to justify spend on emerging channels (TikTok, Reddit) that previously could not be commercially defended.
Three new venues established with their own organic search presence and converting paid campaigns, replacing the lost Southbank visibility
A clean, segmented email database that operates as a revenue channel in its own right, not just a broadcast list.
Reporting and attribution infrastructure that gives the founder a single, accurate view of marketing performance across every channel
A trading window extended into March in both Vinegar Yard and Manchester on the strength of post-peak conversion performance

Integrated marketing for exponential growth

Why It Worked

Most agency engagements would have treated the website rebuild as a project, the paid media as a retainer, and the SEO and email as separate scopes. The result would have been four sets of numbers that didn’t quite add up to a season. What worked here was the opposite: every channel was built to feed the same booking journey, and every decision was made against the same shared view of performance.

That allowed the season to be run in sequence rather than in parallel.

The website was rebuilt and tracking was rebuilt with it, so when paid media launched in October, every click landed on a site that could convert and report. When November peaked, budget moved to the channels that were converting best at that exact moment. When the Olympics opportunity was identified in December, content was built in January and timed for February, while paid budget was tightened in step. By the time the season closed, the marketing operation looked like one campaign, not five.

The conversion rate transformation is what unlocked everything else. Lifting from 2.85% to 26.4% changes the maths on every channel. It justifies testing new platforms. It allows budget to flow toward awareness rather than only toward last-click. It turns a marginal email send into a meaningful revenue line. None of the channel results in this case study would have looked the same on the previous site.

We have worked with The Curling Club for four years. That length of relationship is the reason this season could be sequenced the way it was. The team know the buyer, the calendar, the venues, and the booking platform inside out. They knew that Olympic content was worth building in December because they had seen what cultural moments do to demand in previous years. They knew which audiences to test on TikTok because they had four years of data telling them where the corporate and group bookings came from. Short-term engagements don’t accumulate that kind of operational knowledge, and they can’t move at the speed a 16 to 20 week trading window demands.