Logging On
Golfers are increasingly using the Internet to find and book rounds. Use online golf technology to keep your customers and gain new ones. Ged Stonehouse, owner of Stonehouse Marketing & Golf Group, recently booked some friends for a golf outing.
“I had friends coming from Ontario, and they wanted to play a couple of courses in the area and asked if I would recommend courses as well as book them,” he says. “I chose a couple of courses and went to their golf Web site as it was late in the evening.”
The first club had a link to their online booking system. “I was able to easily look at the dates my friends wanted, the times around what they wanted and booked them along with a power cart. Within minutes I printed off a written confirmation.”
Stonehouse couldn’t get through to the second club. He called back the next morning and “went through their telephone answering maze and after some time found out they had an event the day my friends wanted.” In this scenario one golf club is the clear winner. “Online booking is one of those things that will give you a little advantage over your competitors,” Stonehouse says. “Those courses that focus on the customer’s needs and wishes will be the winners.”
How Golfers Use the Internet
The Internet and golfers are a natural fit. “The golf consumer in general is a little better educated, often involved in business and more likely to be comfortable using the Internet in general, so this carries over to their passion for the game of golf,” Stonehouse says.
The National Golf Foundation recently released its Golf Consumer Profile 2005: Core Golfers, which showed that Internet use among golfers is definitely increasing. In addition, the research found that core golfers who are heavy golf-related Internet users are younger, more educated, more likely to be male, have higher incomes and are employed as professionals.
“Golfers are using the Internet to, No. 1, locate facilities,” says Jim Koppenhaver, owner of Pellucid Corp., an information and insight provider to the golf industry. “But more importantly, recently as more and more facilities are posting the ability to do tee times on the Internet, they are using it to book tee times.”
Information gathering is the largest area of usage, according to Stonehouse. But that is changing. “Online tee time booking is just coming into its own,” he says. “It has been available on the Internet in some of the simplest forms for almost 10 years. Golf Atlantic Canada was one of the first Web sites in the mid 90s that had 65 courses available online with a booking button that took you to the form to fill in and submit. It sent an e-mail to a clearing house that actually picked up the phone and called the club.”
During the last four years, many companies have worked on sites that are set up for the purpose of booking golf, according to Stonehouse. “Most were a little too complicated, and very few clubs gave immediate confirmation,” he explains. “Golfers just did not use it, and many clubs became frustrated and backed away.”
That has changed as technology has advanced over the last two years. “The technology has advanced significantly, and the companies that provide the software to the golf clubs have started providing online linkage providing instant live confirmations,” Stonehouse says.
With the right software, the golf courses now have the ability to catch up to the consumers. “Simplicity and immediacy seem to have been the key,” Stonehouse says. “We have golf courses marketing this service and are now receiving up to 40 percent of their bookings online. It is so easy and available 24/7.”
With the growth in online booking, the golf course owner should have a “decent” Web site in order to “get in the game,” according to Koppenhaver. “Spend some money on your Web site. Make it work, make it look nice, and put information out there that people want to come and look at. Also, allow people to make tee time reservations on your Web site. There are several software packages out there today to let you do that, and they run the gamut from inexpensive to very expensive.”
The Challenge
A third trend has emerged from golfers using the Internet, according to Koppenhaver, and this one is more challenging for the golf clubs.
“Golf consumers are using the Internet as they do in every other industry—to comparison shop,” he says. “They say they want to play 8:30 on Tuesday morning, and there are three courses they can play. They look up those three courses on the Internet, and if all of them have availability, they look at the different rates. If the three courses are deemed equal in the consumer’s mind, the least expensive course wins.”
In the past, doing that type of comparison shopping would have involved three different phone calls for the consumer, who probably would just call the first one and if the tee time was available, he would take it.
“So the golf course was just trying to be the one course the golfer would call,” Koppenhaver says. “Today, you have to be in the consideration set, and you have to have a good value relative to the other things they can find very quickly on the Internet.”
The answer, however, is not to run two-for-one specials or start deep discounting. “You don’t win with the ‘buy two, get two free’ newspaper ad,” Koppenhaver says. He calls it “stupid discounting.” Why? “Because they don’t know who their golfer is, and they don’t know their preferences,” he says. “They just gave their loyal customer an incentive to cut his cost in half.”
Knowing Your Customers
Online golf course marketing gives golf course operators a way to market to their customers that would be almost impossible— or too expensive—with direct mail or through other media. The problem is that many golf course operators are going about it in the wrong way, according to Koppenhaver.
“There are more people coming around to broadcast email,” he says. “The biggest challenge is that they are sending the same message to everybody. They try to get an email database of 10,000 golfers, and then they start blasting e-mails away.”
The advantage to broadcast e-mail is that the golf course can afford to send out 10,000 e-mails every two weeks, which is way to expensive to do with direct mail pieces. “What they don’t realize is that with everybody getting 20 emails a week now from five different golf courses, it’s not costing the golf course any money, but they are really not impacting anybody.”
Koppenhaver advocates using technology—and the passive collection of information—to really get to know your customers. “The final frontier is using technology for insight that drives better decision-making in both running your business and marketing it,” he says. “We can use the golf course's technology and their POS system to know things about their customers.”
In general, sophisticated software collects information about the customers. For example, the customer calls to book a reservation. The person who answers the phone takes the person’s phone number and puts the reservation in an electronic tee sheet. The tee sheet is integrated with the POS System, so when the golfer shows up to play and pays, his name and phone number get tied to all of his transactions. “When that phone number is captured, we can use that on the back end as an identifier that will now tie that person to every transaction he makes,” Koppenhaver says. “We will know that he’s been there, how much he spent and what he bought.”
From this information, the golf course operator can learn much more about his customers. “Most of the software will do a ranking report from highest spending customer to lowest spending customer,” Koppenhaver says. “Know who are the highest spending and make sure that you take care of the people that spend money at your facility.”
More detailed information and sophisticated analysis— such as who played frequently last year, but has not returned this year—generally requires consultants who can create computer programs to extract that information. Golf course operators may feel they know the answer to this question intuitively, but it’s not likely. “When we ask a golf course ‘how many of your players that played you once or more last year, and how many people do you think come back to your course year after year?’ Many say they think they get 80 to 85 percent,” Koppenhaver says. “We haven’t done an analysis yet where that number is higher than 50 percent.”
Analyzing the data allows the golf course to know who are the most valuable people who didn’t come back. The analysis also looks at how people play the facility.
“If you have somebody you have a history with, and they haven’t played a weekday in two years, there is probably a reason they can’t play on the weekdays,” Koppenhaver says. “So we can send them all the e-mails for weekday specials we want to, but at the end of the day, somebody’s play pattern tells me what they are likely to do.”
Using the Data to Talk to Customers
After the golf course has utilized technology to extract the pertinent data, the next step is to use it. One of Koppenhaver’s clients had a database of 4,000 customers with only 500 e-mail addresses. Over two months, they made it an objective to increase the number of e-mail addresses with such simple things as a bowl on the front desk that golfers could drop their business card into to win a free round of golf. The club has increased the number of e-mail
addresses to 900 with a goal of 1,000, and they are identifying and obtaining e-mail addresses for the top 20 percent of the club’s spenders.
The next step is to use email advertising to “remind” people about playing golf at that particular facility. “We are going to email defectors,” Koppenhaver says. The message is: “We missed you this year, we know you played last year and hope you had a great time, please come back and play.” The people that are current customers do not receive the e-mail.
“We are dividing this universe up,” Koppenhaver explains. “For the top 20 percent of customers, we are sending them e-mails, in some cases postcards and in some cases calling them.”
The message: “We know you’re a valued guest, we love you.” One of Koppenhaver’s golf course clients if even sending a limo out one Saturday morning to pick up the club’s top spender and three of his friends to play golf. “It’s all about human nature,” Koppenhaver says. “People like to be recognized, and they like to be stroked.”
The best way to do that is to know your customer, and then act upon that information. “We can talk to our customers in unique ways that our competition cannot,” Koppenhaver says. “And we need to take advantage of that. If we get our hands on one of the competition’s customers, we need to talk to their customers in unique ways too, because that is the way we win.”