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we booked $1.2 Million worth of bookings through the app across our three championship courses which equates to 27,291 rounds – approximately 20% of our overall bookings.
“We drove approximately $50K worth of additional revenue into under-utilized times in just 9 months of using the app. We have about 7000 users currently subscribed to the app. Our goal is to increase our app bookings to 35% of our overall booking stream.”
MOBILE WEBSITES
Golf courses have a tremendous opportunity to leverage this tech- nology and realize similar benefits. The good news is there are simple options to accomplish this. Golf courses can focus on mobile web and mobile apps.
Mobile websites serve as a sales tool to attract customers and initiate the transaction. Mobile apps create opportunity for more intimate and meaningful engage- ment with customers.
Having a mobile website for your golf course is vital. Google uses the mobile-friendliness of sites as a ranking factor in their search results. This means that mobile friendly websites are more likely to be seen by potential customers.
When thinking about best practices in mobile web design, keep it simple. What is the action you want someone to take when they visit your website? Whatever it is, make it the primary call to action, and make it front and center on the landing page of your site.
If you want people to book a tee time, put a big button that says “Book a Tee Time” right in front of their face. Do not overwhelm them with too much information or force them to navigate around the site to find your tee time booking button. Mobile users want simple, quick, and easy.
MOBILE APPS
A mobile app is an extremely powerful customer engagement tool that goes beyond your website. Your app provides an enhanced experience for your customers that is fun and useful. Make sure you have features incorporated into your mobile app strategy that meet these expectations. Give golfers instant access to book a tee time or login as a member right on the homepage. When your app icon
lives right on their smartphone screen, they are one finger tap away from accessing your tee times.
Your customers are spending 4-6 hours at your facility per visit, so use your app to interact with them and improve their experience on the course. Provide a digital scoring feature that allows them to track games with friends and post their scores.
The app is also a great way to provide a digital yardage guide with pro tips, hole imagery, and video. Create in-app messaging to drive other on-course revenue such as food & beverage, your golf academy, pro shop merchandise, etc. The app can be a brand promotion tool as well with social sharing that will boost awareness of your club, who’s playing, and drive word of mouth advertising.
What if your mobile app could power your club’s loyalty program? The golfer benefits because they don’t have to carry around an additional “players card” in their wallet, and they have immediate access to their loyalty rewards balance. The course benefits because you are able to manage your program from anywhere, and get more intelligent data on how customers are using it.
PUSH NOTIFICATIONS
Once your app is installed onto the customer’s device, you have unique engagement tools at your disposal to interact with them, both on and off the course. Push Notifications are essentially instant messages that you can send to your app users in real time. There are dozens of applications for Push Notifications.
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