Page 18 - GBC summer 2016

Mike Bourne
Mike is the Founder and President of pricelooper.com and underpar.com, both of which provide proven, turnkey email marketing solutions that allow golf course owners to leverage pre-paid green fees as part of their overall marketing strategy. Contact Mike at mike@underpar.com or call 888.363.1693.
If changing the sign at the entrance to your golf course meant 50 additional golfers turned into your driveway every day, would you do it? Your email marketing initiatives act like the sign at the end of your internet driveway. The consumer will look at your email, and decide whether to turn in and pay to play your course.
411 ON EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is used increasingly because it enables you to sell golf directly to your customers. It is a tremendous tool for selling golf on demand.
But to be successful, and get your customers to open their wallets, requires a degree of email marketing knowledge that can be learned by most any computer literate person. If you don’t market emails wisely, you risk alienating your customers, but mainly you’re missing an opportunity to dramatically increase your revenue.
The following is an example of one golf course’s email marketing results for two separate email campaigns that offered pre-paid green fees to its database of 15,000 customers.
Turn Your Email Marketing
Emails Sent
Open Rate Click-Through Rate Conversion Rate Order Size Revenue
15,000 15,000 10% 20% 20% 25% 5% 41% $260 $260 $3900 $79,950
Into More Revenue
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Golf Business Canada
The first column shows the results of the first campaign, and the second column shows the results of the second email after the course operator started taking email marketing seriously. Note that the owner sent the same number of emails, but the results are wildly different.
Here’s what you need to know if you want your customers to turn into your internet driveway and buy your tee times.
GENERATING REvENuE
In email marketing, there are three key email-marketing metrics (or, if you prefer, measures). You can remember them with the acronym OTC.
O: Open your email
T: Click-Through Rate (CTR) from your email to your website C: Convert (or take the promoted action) on the website
As you embark into this world of email marketing, you will learn your average open rates, CTR, and conversion rates. This will allow you to predict how subsequent emails will perform when they are sent to your database.