How InterCoastal Net Designs Brings More People to the Beach

When a family wants to enjoy the waves, soak up the sun, or build sandcastles together, they turn to Surfside Realty. But how do they find Surfside? It’s all thanks to their marketing agency, ICND.

Founder Brandon Sauls started the business in 1999 as a website design service, but when he and his wife, Whitney, who spent her career booking vacation rentals, went to a business conference, they realized there were no companies taking bookings online—everything was being done over the phone or even through catalogs. InterCoastal Net Designs (ICND) aimed to change that and modernize how people booked their properties.

Today, ICND not only provides website design, but as a Mailchimp pro partner, they also manage email marketing strategies for their clients around the world. 

Surfside Realty, a longtime client of theirs, manages over 350 vacation rentals within a three-mile stretch in Surfside, SC, just south of Myrtle Beach, which is known for sunny boardwalk strolls and nightlife. But Surfside? Think quiet nights, relaxed dining, kids’ activities, and plenty of sand and sea for the whole family to enjoy.

We sat down with ICND’s Digital Marketing Project Manager, Diamond Frandsen, and Digital Marketing Specialist, Wesley Aulet, to see how they use Mailchimp to help ICND as well as their clients, reach their marketing goals.

The challenge: Differentiation in the market, engagement, retention, gaining new customers

As for Surfside Realty, Diamond says that because of their proximity to Myrtle Beach, they needed to differentiate themselves and educate potential guests about their unique atmosphere. ICND’s strategy was to move beyond broad messaging and target their customers by interest. For example, people search for homes with access to golf courses, ones with private pools, and the most popular one, homes that welcome dogs. Customers also want to know about activities and events in the area, so they can plan their stay with those in mind.

With a large contact list accumulated over decades, they needed an effective way to maintain engagement and encourage repeat bookings. The question for Wesley is how to connect with guests, and offer different kinds of exclusive retention discounts. “The best thing to us is repeat guests,” he says. “Even though you want new guests to come along too, how do you take advantage of the guests you've already had in-house, and how do you retain them? I think that's the biggest challenge when it comes to email marketing.”

The tools: Segmentation, click maps, resends to non-openers

Vacation rentals aren’t like e-commerce stores, where sales can be attributed directly to a single email. For Surfside, most clients open the email several times and click around the website to browse, or might even forward to the email to a friend or family member to book for them. Because of this, they use Google Analytics to effectively track the revenue generated from their email campaigns. 

Surfside Realty sends a monthly newsletter to everyone on their list, highlighting local family-friendly events throughout the Grand Strand, helping to differentiate them from the busy and bustling Myrtle Beach. An important tool ICND helped them implement with this email is resending to non-openers, Wesley says. They send the first version in the morning, but then a few days later they’ll resend it in the afternoon with a different subject line to catch people who check their emails later in the day. As a remarketing tool, they’ve been resending to people who clicked on the original send as well. 

For targeting Surfside Realty’s specific audiences, segmentation does some heavy lifting. Wesley says that they add interest-based navigation links (like pet-friendly properties) within emails and analyze click map reports, which help  them segment and communicate in a more personalized way. For example, those dog-loving travelers can now receive information about updated leash laws in the Grand Strand area as the seasons change.

Additionally, Diamond mentioned that when their client is running a discount, they can provide Wesley with a list of guests who have already booked during any promo periods, allowing him to exclude them from the promotional emails. “This helps ensure we’re targeting the right audience who may be interested in a last minute stay,” she says.

The results: High engagement and significant ROI

Using a combination of segmentation, click maps, and resends to non-openers, ICND helped Surfside Realty earn significant engagement and ROI on their email marketing with Mailchimp between September 2024 and August 2025. Their average click-through rate of 2.68%, is 20.18% higher than the real estate industry average, and along with their average open rate of 27.58%, they’ve been able to generate 66x ROI.

Mailchimp’s expert help has been instrumental in providing Surfside Realty with an effective email marketing strategy. In the future, Wesley says he wants to make targeting even more granular and send more emails, without overwhelming their inboxes. “I feel like with that, we can generate more revenue and more bookings, versus just sending one newsletter for them per month.”

Mailchimp isn’t just for ICND’s clients

Similar to the strategies they provide to their clients, ICND themselves use segmentation to manage leads and prospects. ICND grows a significant portion of their client roster through industry conferences, and after these events, they need a way to nurture those relationships so they can stay top of mind. Diamond says that once the event has wrapped up, the sales department uploads attendee lists and tags each contact with the specific event they attended. Then, they can send customized messages directly to these groups, incorporating specific details from the conference, such as photos or answers to common questions, making follow ups more personal and impactful. 

They also segment by audience types: current clients, potential clients, and industry peers, and can send relevant information to each group. For instance, critical updates regarding website changes or third-party updates are sent exclusively to active clients, ensuring they receive pertinent operational information.

As a pro partner benefit, Mailchimp has provided valuable guidance for their whole team. “Wesley predominantly does all of our email marketing for our clients, but he's not the only one. We have other members of our team that are doing email marketing as well,” says Diamond. “So those mini-classes that [the Mailchimp] team is developing help us to provide updates or more information for our team members to use when they're creating campaigns.”

Looking ahead, Diamond says they want to expand their client base using Mailchimp. “We have clients that come to us that have never done email marketing, and that's a great opportunity for us to say, ‘hey, we have a great partnership with Mailchimp, we really trust them, they really trust us, let's start using it for your email marketing needs.’ And we’re going to offer Mailchimp as our preferred partner,” she says.

Diamond offers a little bit of advice to other marketers about email marketing, too. “I would just say that you have to start somewhere,” she says. “Some clients that we've recently taken on have giant lists of clients that they've served over the years…but they've done nothing with it.” She advises cleaning up the list with a welcome message to see who’s still interested, and just getting started. And if that’s too much? Get an agency partner. 

“Just use Mailchimp,” Wesley says. “I've had a couple clients I've switched from other companies to Mailchimp. Mailchimp just makes it streamlined ... It’s been the easiest platform I've used, and I've done this for almost 8 years.”