Collecting quality customer data has to become a culture at your club. Teesnap transactional data and consumer behavioral data is useless unless you can act on it with a good email address for your customers. This culture is the engine that can drive many marketing campaigns for your club and grow revenues.
Over the last few years working with our courses, this has come up more than once: “We try to get email addresses and fill in demographic info in the customer database, BUT when it gets busy…” Collecting quality customer data has to be a culture at your club; staff members at all levels must know that this is a valuable asset for the growth and survival of the facility. They need to know that this could be one of the single most important things that they do on a daily basis.
Let’s face it: your golf professionals and clerks interact with your customers more than anyone else on the property. Your front-line employees have to know their importance in this process. They can make or break the programs you run at your course.
Take this case in point: “I’m a 26-year-old in the workforce and I happen to not work for you as an assistant golf professional. I work for XYZ National cell phone company. Working for XYZ cell phone company, I have a monthly sales quota. I have a quota of phones that I need to sell on a monthly basis that I am measured against. I am judged against my quota quite clearly and transparently. This has been explained to me and I am well aware of the not-so-nice outcomes that if, in fact, I don’t meet my quota. (I have heard that employees that don’t meet their quota after a few months get replaced).”
So why do golf courses allow the behavior of “Well, our counter gets busy and we can’t ask for emails sometimes”? This is baloney.
This last winter I made some tee times for guests and myself in Orlando at:
Grand Cypress Resort – High-end
Streamsong – Mosaic Property
Grand Pines – Marriott Property
So you are not alone, because not one of them asked me for my email address on the booking up front or at time of check-in. This is a wasted opportunity. By now, any one of these properties could have invited me back or informed me about golf activities at their clubs. Instead, I have not received anything from any of them.
You might know that in the Teesnap architecture, a customer’s email address is the primary key in the database, following the design of most high-volume online businesses these days. This will enable us long-term to develop some awesome functionality for you, like single sign-on to your courses’ platform to view statements, pay online, view activity and so on. So start building good data now for the future. Do not allow your line level employees to add FALSE emails into the system to just get people out the door. This is poor operations and poor marketing.
Did you know that we have a report designed to show you your staff’s performance on collecting data?
The report is designed to show you a snapshot of what your data quality looks like. It shows you how your staff is doing at collecting good data associated with his/her transactions. Below is from one of our new clients, starting off with a relatively small database. You can see quite quickly where they need to focus.
In this report, it becomes quite clear which of your staff is getting the data on a daily basis and which ones just are not cutting it. Call a staff meeting and show them the data. Set some goals and fire up the engine that can help you get more rounds, more participants in events, more gift card sales during the holidays, more lessons for your professional staff and more repeat business!
Find and use this report: “Customer Data Transparency” in Teesnap Reports.
Opportunities to collect good data.
Online bookings – Slam dunk. Promote booking online at all times.
Include the link to your online tee time engine in:
Email blasts
All print and collateral materials
Blog Posts
Social Media
Print Ads… etc
Tee Time Creation – Create the culture at your club.
Time of check-in – Check the customer record to double-check.
At time of leaving the pro shop – Ask your guests if they are in the database and able to receive club promotions and communications.
At the first tee / bag drop – this is a great time for communication. With Teesnap being mobile, your starter or bag drop staff can be trained to log the info.
In the bar – again, just ask; have your bartenders trained to use the customer database.
After operating two semi-private courses in Orlando for almost 12 years, we had obtained 90,000 email addresses. We learned that each year we had about 6-8k customers visit us that made up the 38-45,000 rounds that we did at each of our courses. Breaking it down, we learned that 5k of the 8k were transient golfers that played us once or twice while in town.
Of the 3k left over, there were about 2k players that played multiple rounds. The bulk of our rounds came from that last 500-1,000 customers – our core customers. These customers loved our courses and our services. Most lived near the facilities and spent the majority of their golfing discretionary income with us. These were the players that played in all of our events, leagues and attended our social activities. We knew their golf games, we knew their families, we played with many of them and we cultivated them. We had their data and more we knew them. We could market to them.
Start the culture now at your club
Pull up the Customer Data Transparency report and see how your data looks. Take a look at your staff members and print this report out. Have it for a meeting or a one-on-one talk with them to get them excited about this aspect of their performance.
