More Golfers
During the unprecedented times of the pandemic things have not been all bad for golf. Golf courses were one of the first recreational activities to open and stay open and the people came, in a big way. All kinds of people. Avid golfers, occasional golfers and new golfers all flocked to any golf course they could get a tee time at. Many occasional golfers or those who hadn’t played the game for years played a lot of rounds the last two years. New golfers came out in unprecedented numbers. Who ever thought that it would be hard to keep clubs or balls on golf shop shelves?

Database Building
All of these golfers represent a terrific opportunity to really grow your database.

By taking tee times online you can make it mandatory that all golfers playing provide their name and an email address. They are already used to providing contact information when making a reservation for dinner, getting a haircut or staying in a hotel, why shouldn’t this be mandatory at the golf course as well? And not just for one player in a group – for all four! We’ve been stressing this with all the golf courses we work with. It is so important, and now is the time. Building your database is a fast and cheap way get new customers into your sales funnel.

Set a Goal
If you take a good portion of bookings by phone then have your Golf Shop Team come together to buy-in and set a goal. What percentage of golfers on the tee sheet have an email address in our database? Ideally it’s 100% but in reality it’s more like 60% (if online tee times are not mandatory). We do however, have one group we work with who has managed to acquire 96% of the email address from golfers playing their courses this year. Impressive, yes, but everyone should be reporting numbers like that. Once other recreational opportunities open up you will be glad to have a strong email database in your digital marketing tool kit.

Off Season Work

The off-season is a perfect time to extract the email addresses you have collected through your POS and your mobile app and to import them into your email database. Your POS will likely be able to spit out a great deal of information but depending on how good your staff are at data collection all you really need is an email address. If you have the staff resources to dig deeper into database management and customer segmentation so that you can send targeted emails, we are all for it, but not every course can, and that’s OK.

You can do this once a year, but we suggest that you take the time to actually do it on a monthly basis.

  • Export emails from your POS and mobile app on the 1st of each month.
  • Date each database with the month and year and where they came from.
  • Upload the new database and delete the one that is 24 months old to keep you CASL compliant.

Add this process to your 2022 monthly to do list.

We, Jeff and Tara Ciecko of CK Golf write two blogs, one is our 19th Hole Blog where we share personal experiences and the other an Industry Blog where we comment on general business and internet marketing best practices, sales strategies and give golf industry related opinions. We have owned CK Golf  for 14+ years and provide business services to the golf and other industries. We have recently started hosted online video chats on current topics and issues facing the industry. You can watch Golf Industry Conversations here. As of July 31, 2016 our life and our business became ‘location independent’. Our 19th Hole Blog is about the places we visit and the things we do. If you have any questions or comments, or happen to be in the same location as us please reach out and contact us anytime.

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