While newsletters and one-off email campaigns will always have a place in your email marketing strategy, today more and course marketers are setting up customer journeys. These journeys send emails automatically based off triggers defined in their Teesnap Campaigns email marketing tool.
This shift is happening because automated emails are generally more personalized and effective than a one-off campaign – as they’re triggered to send based on something unique to each of your customers.
In this introduction, we’ll first explain what marketing automation is, and why it’s an important strategy for your golf course. We’ll also share five customer journeys you can start sending today and show you how to build your own in Teesnap Campaigns.
What is Teesnap email marketing automation?
Marketing automation is when software automatically sends campaigns to your customers and prospects based on triggers you define. As opposed to newsletters and one-off campaigns that you create and send to a whole list of people in one go, customer journeys are set up once, and then sent out each time a subscriber meets your pre-defined trigger.
For example, imagine at your course you wanted to send new players to your facility a 20% offer to encourage them to make another purchase, on say lessons. They’ve clearly expressed interest in your facility, and a discount like this could get them to make another purchase in a different revenue stream.
It would be a huge waste of time to manually create and send a campaign to each new subscriber as they sign up. With Teesnap’s marketing automation, you can create the email once and have it automatically send to anybody who books a tee time and is new to the facility.
Not only is this a huge time saver, but these kinds of automated emails get results.
In fact, studies show that automated emails like the one described above get 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. (Emarketer, Experion, eConsultancy)
Five customer journeys you can start sending today
With so much potential to save time and grow revenue, it’s easy to be excited about marketing automation. But where do you begin?
To help you out, we’ve curated five of the most effective customer journeys we at Teesnap think you can utilize to grow revenues and improve your operations. While the sky’s the limit when it comes to different types of automated emails, these five are proven to help grow your sales & revenue.
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- Birthday Program – 14 days ahead of the customer date of birth, send the 1st birthday notification offer email. Wait 3 days and determine if the email was opened or not. If yes do nothing, if no send the offer again. Wait four more days and check to see if the second email sent was opened or not. If yes do nothing, if no send one last time. Using this method one client has seen an extra 28% and 20% open rates increasing the overall success of the campaign using the smart technology available in the automation tool.(see the image below for open rates)
Lets assume a clubs offer is a free round for your birthday with stipulation that you must bring 3 paying guests. Lets assume you can get 1,000 people redeem their birthday round. That’s potentially 3,000 more paid rounds in a year. Assuming on the low end the rounds are valued at $25 per that’s $75,000 in additional revenue generated on this one program! Dont you feel like implementing this program at your course? - Tee Time Reminders – Based on date of next reservation remind any customer that has a tee time in 5 days of his/her reservation. In the email include the date and time of tee time by inserting special fields from the master customer list.
- New member welcome email – When a course sells a new membership and adds the member into the database to a profile flagged as a member, during the nightly update if the club has a segment listening for new members, the new member will enter this segment. Journies can be triggered on when a customer enters a segment. The journey would be triggered at 12am the next day, we would delay 8 hours to send at 8am the next morning the welcome email with all of the clubs member benefits re-iterated. Then a follow-up email in this same journey after 1 month, 3 months…etc.
- No Show notification – Based on date of last no show, please send a kind reminder to the guest that they might call in next time the decide to miss a tee time that someone else could have utilized :)).
- Thank you Email – a sincere thank you with bounce back offer (to transient segments that have a future reservation = “N”), with surveys for regulars, to collect feedback – with good feedback click here to leave this google review, with bad feedback click here to talk directly to the manager! Configure based on your segments of customer profiles.
- Birthday Program – 14 days ahead of the customer date of birth, send the 1st birthday notification offer email. Wait 3 days and determine if the email was opened or not. If yes do nothing, if no send the offer again. Wait four more days and check to see if the second email sent was opened or not. If yes do nothing, if no send one last time. Using this method one client has seen an extra 28% and 20% open rates increasing the overall success of the campaign using the smart technology available in the automation tool.(see the image below for open rates)
OK – Here are a few extra ideas:
Club Credit notification – A Journey can quickly email all customers their club credit balance embedded in the email with club “rules of use” in the body content each quarter. With the last few emails of the journey near year end, warning the customer to come into the club and utilize with purchase or we are clearing out your balance at year end!
AR Balance Notification – If you would periodically like to remind customers that owe you money what their balance is, now you can do that with a marketing oriented email rather than just a statement. Personalized, branded and friendly – “Hey pay me my money!”
Defector program members – hey we miss you, haven’t seen you in three weeks, we hope your well.
Defector program daily fee – if your last played date has aged 30 days – send this, if the last played date is 60 days old send this (a little sweeter deal). If the last played date is 70+ days send them an incredible offer!
Segmenting based on Location – collecting zip codes allows you to group them together. 50+ minute drive time – DEEP DISCOUNT LIST!
How to set up a customer journey
Now that you understand what marketing automation is, and the kind of customer journeys you can be sent, let’s dive in and explore how you can set these up for your course.
Step 1: Define the goal
Before you start designing emails and writing copy, it’s important you understand and define what the goal of the automated email series is. Is it trying to convert new players into regulars? Ist it to remind customers of important dates at the club. Or is it to re-engage lost customers that have not been to your course in a few months time.
Step 2: Ensure you have the right data
Teesnap has already developed the connected data feed from your application customer database, and Teesnap campaigns. There are currently 39 fields of data related to your customers that refresh nightly from the activity from the prior day’s business. All of the customers’ demographic information, spending, date of last tee time, date of next reservation, Tee time of next reservation, whether they have a future reservation, member=”Y/N”….etc. If you wish to collect other data, create subscription forms that write to the Master Customer List to start collecting it such as Birthday and other attributes. We will show you how to do this! If you haven’t been collecting birthdays this is a great way to start, build the form and embed on your Birthday page – then promote this page. The subscribers are matched on email – the primary key for all Teesnap data. The system will match them up. Now you have one database to market from, connected! NO MORE ETL hassles.
Step 3: Define the triggers and rules
With a clear goal for your automated emails, and the right data to power them, the next step is to define the trigger and rules.
Triggers refer to the criteria that start the automated journey—i.e. a person joins a list, anniversary of a date, etc. The rules define what happens during the automated journey—i.e. sending an email, waiting 3 days, sending another email.
Depending on the goal of your automated emails, the trigger, and associated rules could be different.
For instance, if your goal is to convert new subscribers into customers then your trigger would likely be ‘When someone joins a list,’ and your rules would be to send an email as soon as they join the list. On the other hand, if your goal is to send an automated birthday email, then the trigger would be the ‘anniversary of a date,’ and the rules would be to send an email on that date, or potentially a few days before if you’re offering them a voucher to dine at your clubs restaurant on their birthday.
Triggers look like this:
Step 4: Define the content and offers
Keeping in mind the goal you set in Step 1, it’s time to think through the content & offers you want to send in the automated emails.
If you’re trying to convert new subscribers into customers through a welcome email, then you’ll likely want to include content that thanks them for subscribing and offers them a discount on their first purchase.
Alternatively, if you’re trying to remind recipients to book a tee time or buy an ancillary service, then you’ll want to include content that makes it clear to them why they should play, when they should book, etc. and include a clear call to action button to make a booking.
At any time during a journey, these email templates can be changed, so if you plan on listing a few current events like the Chamber tournament you are hosting or the real estate association event remember that when these come near you have to keep the journey emails up to date with the proper events. Like: Mothers Day Brunch, Fathers Day Gift Cards, The Club Championship, League start dates….etc.
By taking a moment to plan out your offers & content in the context of the goal you set in step 1, you’ll help ensure you create a focused email that drives results for your course.
Step 5: Set it up in Teesnap Campaigns
With everything ready to go, the final step is to jump into your Teesnap Campaigns account and start setting everything up.
After naming the journey and selecting which list you want the emails to work off, you’ll be asked to select the trigger event for the automated emails.
The right selection here will depend on what you decided in the earlier steps. If you’re sending a welcome email, ‘Subscriber joins the list’ will be the trigger you want. For birthday emails, ‘Anniversary of a date’ is the right trigger.
Next, you’ll need to add steps to the journey to define what happens once the trigger conditions are met.
Within Teesnap Campaigns, you can send an email, wait a period of time, or create a condition that changes the course of the workflow (i.e., If Gender = Male then send them Email A, but if Gender = Female send Email B).
If you wanted to send a welcome email as soon as they joined the list, then you’d select the ‘Email’ step. If on the other hand, you wanted to send it a day or two later, you’d add the ‘Delay’ step followed by an ‘Email’ step.
Now, with the triggers and rules built, you’ll want to create the emails using the content you planned out earlier.
Just like standard campaigns, automated emails can be built using the intuitive drag and drop email builder which makes it super easy to create a beautiful, responsive email campaign.
Finally, since you’ve defined the trigger and rules and created the content for each email, you can turn the journey on and start driving results for your business.
In conclusion
Leveraging marketing automation technology to send customer journeys is an incredibly effective way to grow your golf business. Not only are these quick and easy to setup, but they generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. By using Teesnap Campaigns intuitive marketing automation features, golf course marketers like you can easily create automated emails that drive great results for your business.
So get started today! Email account management for more training!
OR I would like to take a DEMO!
