At present, there is a significant focus on the financial penalties that a business could incur should they have a data protection breach.

GDPR, what is it?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will come into force on 25th May 2018. The legislation will impact on any golf and leisure business that is either based in, or do business in, the EU. Citizens will have great individual rights and controls, including rights to access, correction and deletion of personal data.

Do You Know What Personal Data your Golf Business collects?

One very early myth to bust is the belief that the GDPR does not apply to your golf club. If you collect, store and move personal information on members (including children), employees, patrons or suppliers in membership database(s), booking management systems, HR database(s) and paper; finance and accounting systems; health records (on employees and members), marketing systems (Customer Relationship Management system) and CCTV or other digital imagery, the regulation applies to you.

Who Should be Involved?

As you will have gathered already, implementing GDPR compliance cannot simply be the responsibility of IT or HR, it needs to be an organisational approach, one that has the full support of the management team, golf club committee and all levels of Directorship.

Where should I start?

A good first step is to complete the Information Commissioner’s Office online GDPR self-assessment (https://eur.pe/2r5wNXU). This will provide you a clear overview of what tasks you need to complete before 25th May 2018.

What other steps should I consider?

• Conduct a Data Protection audit to determine what personal data is held by your organisation and identify where it is located, justify your reason for holding it, how long you hold it for and how you would permanently delete the record.
• Raising awareness across the business and training your staff should be high up on your list of priorities. Consider engaging expert help and then start to develop processes and procedures which will ensure that your business is managing and protecting personal data according to the requirements of the regulation.

But should I quickly get my current customers to “opt-in” again so I’m compliant?

Stop!

There certainly is a lot of ‘hype’ surrounding GDPR and lots of advice coming from many different sources. What this appears to have created is almost a panic amongst some golf club’s – mostly surrounding their current database of customers and prospects. Group emails are flying out in an attempt to gain “consent” to communicate using this medium by asking customers to “opt-in”.

One club recently went through this very process and reduced their database by 99% – yes, only 1% of customers re-confirmed their consent to be sent emails from the club. However, it’s highly unlikely that 99% of customers were simply not interested in the club any more. It’s more likely that a high percentage just didn’t respond and that could be for any number of reasons, nothing to do with their desire to cease communications with the club via email.

Hopefully, seeking “Consent” in this way doesn’t amount to commercial suicide for some clubs – because in many cases it may not be necessary. The new legislation offers potential alternatives, including a legal basis for continuing to email customers called “Legitimate Interests”. The legislation goes further to even highlight some examples of what this may be, and Direct Marketing is listed.

If you would like to learn more about GDPR or want to train your staff on their responsibilities to the new legislation, Promote Training, in partnership with data-specialists Databasix, has launched two new courses that will help achieve this.

• GDPR in Golf
• GDPR for Staff

Promote Training are also offering ‘Confederation of Professional Golf’ readers a limited-time-only offer of 20% off these two GDPR courses. Use the coupon code “CPG1” during the online checkout. (Offer expires 31st May 2018)

Find out more www.promotetraining.co.uk/fundamental-principles-data-protection.

It is difficult to talk of driving green fee revenues in a group-booking context without talking about variable pricing strategies. And you can’t talk about variable pricing strategies without talking about yield management. According to Wikipedia yield management is:

“…a variable pricing strategy, based on understanding, anticipating and influencing consumer behavior in order to maximise revenue or profits from a fixed, perishable resource”

Understanding, anticipating and influencing your customers starts with the analysis of the correct data – a statistical trawl of what’s going on within the business, especially on the golf course. The depth and level of the data we can derive and the analysis thereof drives the criteria we can use to vary our pricing points.

Month

Many clubs are operating a basic variable pricing strategy already – they charge a lower amount for winter group bookings knowing they’re a ‘harder sell’. Conversely, some coastal clubs with great drainage actually charge a premium.

Day of the Week

Again, some clubs are already doing this. At its most basic, they are charging a premium to play at the weekends. Some charge slightly more to play on a Friday as well. In most cases, Monday to Thursday is lumped in together and priced the same.

Number of Participants

This one is less practiced in the UK industry and a significant opportunity. A group booking of 120 people is extremely precious and quite rare (in most clubs) – why wouldn’t you price it accordingly? You probably wouldn’t get 120 paying visitors if the group booking didn’t exist – so you can afford to lower the price and still be significantly better off. Conversely, a group booking of 8 people isn’t as lucrative in terms of monetary value and may restrict a larger booking enquiry coming in afterwards – isn’t that something that should be charged at a premium?

An important additional point to your terms and conditions are needed here – “If any discounted or agreed price is on the basis of a minimum number, this set price will only apply if on the day the set number of participants attend”. A golf day arriving with less than the number confirmed could push the price up – that’s not something easily communicated to the organiser if they didn’t know it could happen.

Tee Times Booked

All clubs have popular and unpopular tee times. Unfortunately, many clubs only have a gut feeling as to when they are. Knowing precisely what your peak and off-peak tee times are allows you to vary the price for group bookings. If 2pm is usually very quiet, why wouldn’t you offer a discount? If 9am is usually very busy, why wouldn’t you charge a premium?

Sales Window

We’ve already spoken about our desire to increase the sales window – to encourage organisers to book early so we understand the future group booking trends earlier and can take action as required. A variable pricing strategy that encompasses this criterion can help shift the window.

Exceptions

This is a slightly different criterion but something that needs to be considered carefully – those odd days that confound our data-driven criteria. For instance, Mondays in April may be quiet – but what about Easter Monday? That has the potential to be quite popular. Fridays in September may be quite busy – but what about the week the Head Greenkeeper is doing his biannual hollow coring and top dressing? Should you be charging a premium on this Friday for a course in less than perfect condition?

No Catering

It’s probably an unfortunate consequence of a wider society change that in many clubs, group bookings are choosing to have less and less catering elements to their event. Where once the majority of bookings had a sit-down 3-course meal at the end of the day – at many clubs today they are in the minority. So, can we box a little clever here and add a silent ‘No Catering’ surcharge to the events that have little or no food? There’s nothing more frustrating than an enquiry coming in afterwards that want the full 3-course presentation dinner included but can’t get the tee times because a booking with no food at all has already confirmed.

The word “silent” in this instance means that the organiser doesn’t get to know they’ve been charged it – it simply gets added onto the green fee. Keeping it silent in this way provides a great opportunity to offer a discounted catering up-sell nearer the date of the event. It will be perceived as a discount by the organiser but won’t actually be a discount for the club – it will simply be the removal of the no-catering surcharge.

A variable pricing strategy based on just these seven criteria can have a dramatic impact on a golf clubs’ group booking revenues. In some instances many prices will be discounted – sometimes quite aggressively. In other cases, by understanding when we’re busy prices will be increased. But in both circumstances, they will be priced on a fixed criteria derived from historical fact. From a quantitative perspective, that’s something difficult to argue against.

Promote Training give away a Group Booking Pricing Tool with their “Driving Green Fee Revenues” eLearning course. Visit www.promotetraining.co.uk to learn more about this, and other strategies to grow your club’s green fee revenues.

Image Components by Freepik

The first and arguably most important green fee promotion to implement are the promotions that encourage loyalty and repeat-play at your course.

There are broadly three themes to increasing any green fee revenue:

1. Attracting new golfers
2. Encouraging repeat golfers
3. Increasing average value

If you plough straight into a promotional campaign that aims to attract first-time golfers to your club, you won’t have the benefit of the incentive mechanism to encourage their repeat custom after they’ve played the course.

Let’s take a look at one great promotion that encourages repeat-play and customer loyalty – the green fee Loyalty Card.

Loyalty Card Concept

Loyalty cards are not a new concept in either the golf industry or wider retail and hospitality sectors. I’m sure many people have a loyalty card or two tucked away in their wallets or purses!

The concept is simple – buy a product or service multiple times and after x number of purchases, receive one for free.

A well implemented, on going loyalty card scheme can work extremely well for any golf course – either pay and play or semi-private.

An effective loyalty card can be the backbone of your green fee marketing strategy.

There are, however, key issues to consider very carefully prior to creating your card. These issues almost exclusively revolve around the terms and conditions.

Expiry Dates

The biggest realistic target audience for our visitor green fee product is the nomadic golfer. The make-up of this profile of golfer suggests they play on average up to 2 times per month. By offering them a loyalty card what are we trying to achieve?

• We want them to play more than twice a month
• We want them to play at our golf club more often

A loyalty card without an expiry date doesn’t encourage the customer to play at your golf course more often. It doesn’t even give a reason to play golf more often. That’s because it has no timescale attached that breaks their habit of playing twice a month.

In most cases where a loyalty card doesn’t have an expiry date, the golfer plays as many times as they ever did. They also play your course as often as they ever did. Except this time, after x number of rounds, they get a free one. 

No expiry date = no urgency to play your course = no change in their normal pattern of play

When to expire a loyalty card will depend very much on how generous the loyalty is in the first instance and what time of year it’s being offered.

Our nomadic golfer plays, on average, twice a month – but that won’t necessarily be a consistent twice a month, every month. Golf is a seasonal game and we know that the weather has a huge impact on the number of rounds on our golf course.

We could make an assumption therefore, that our target nomadic golfer may play:

• Once a month between November and March
• Twice a month in April and October
• Three times a month between May and September

A card that offers the 6th round free and starts in November with a 3-month expiry date is a little optimistic. Our golfer may only normally play once a month during the winter – so the free round would be perceived as unachievable.

On the opposite end of the scale, a loyalty card that offers the 4th round free and is released in May, with an expiry date of the 30th September, is extremely generous. It could be that it’s giving too much away.

Exclude Discounted or Free Rounds

“Stamps not issued for free rounds of golf” – this is an important condition to remember when creating your loyalty card.

“Offer excludes Twilight rates, pre-paid or free green fee vouchers” – this option is very much down to the club to decide. Clearly, a loyalty card offering stamps for discounted twilight rounds may be giving away free rounds during peak times in return.

In Conjunction with Other Offers

Ensuring the loyalty card cannot be used in conjunction with any other offers is probably a condition worth mentioning on all green fee promotions. In fact, it’s one to mention on all promotions throughout the club.

Golf Society Days

“Not to be used in conjunction with any group booking above four players”

Again, it’s down to the individual clubs to decide whether they want to allow stamps, or redemption of the free round, to golf society day participants or not. There are arguments both for and against it and these need to be considered before making a decision.

Remove Peak Tee Times

You may want to consider limiting stamps, or certainly the free round redemption, based on the tee time.

Many clubs would want to limit the number of free rounds redeemed at the weekend. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they would want to limit the number of stamps given at the weekend. A full loyalty card of stamps received for weekend play logically deserves a free midweek round as much as any other (more so in fact).

There are also peak times of the year to consider – the week between Christmas and New Year for instance. Often, this period can be quite busy for golf courses and it’s something to consider if you’re intending to run a loyalty card over the December month.

Promote Training’s “Driving Green Fee Revenues” eLearning course is packed with ideas and strategies to encourage repeat-play and also attract new visitors to your club. Visit www.promotetraining.co.uk to learn more about this innovative eLearning course.

Membership referrals are simply new members who have been introduced to the club by current members.

The concept of referral marketing is nothing new – indeed, there has been plenty of research on the subject with many studies professing the virtues of referred custom as opposed to new custom from complete strangers.

So why is the concept of ‘referral’ so potentially rewarding for our club?

Benefits of Referrals

The power of recommendation

People trust the opinion of other people in their lives that they respect – family members, friends or work colleagues. For instance, we’ve all watched a television programme that we’ve heard other people talking about – that’s exactly the same referral principle. We heard it from people we know therefore we trust their opinion.

Targeted marketing

Unlike many other forms of marketing, referral is laser targeting at its most effective. Members know their friends, family and/or work colleagues pretty well. They can spread your membership message to the very audience you want to target.

Data quality

Due to the nature of referral the quality of the data is more likely to be correct, without false email addresses or such like.

A trusted sales pitch

We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of being on the receiving end of a door-to-door sales person. No doubt most of us didn’t buy anything from them based on issues of trust. How could you be sure those products they were selling are genuine? How do you know they’re going to work? How do you know they’ve not “fallen off the back of a lorry”?!

“Trust” is an important part of the buying decision for any consumer. We are far more likely to buy from someone we trust – so to encourage members to perform our ‘sales pitch’ for us will be making full use of a perceived trustworthy communication channel.

See the research below conducted in the Nielsen Global Survey of Trust in Advertising. Powerful proof indeed.

Huge volumes of people

Not just huge – the entire world! Certainly the entire world if you are to believe in the theory of six degrees of separation. This is the notion that everyone is six steps away, by way of introduction, from every other person in the world. It’s the underlying principle of social media in many ways. You know six people, who each know another six people, who each know another six people – and by the time you do that six times you have a connection with, well, absolutely everyone.

Golfers like to talk golf

It’s true in many cases that golfers like to talk about golf. It stands to reason – golf is their pastime and their leisure pursuit of choice. It also seems that the sport itself has a lot of conversational ingredients. It almost sparks debate and conversation, perhaps as golfers try to rationalize exactly why they play like they do and/or why Rory McIlroy plays like he does. In any event, if you invite a golfer to talk about their golf they usually have a fair amount to say.

It attracts the same types of people

It is often the case that people get on better with other people ‘of the same type’ as them – “birds of a feather flock together”. When you are encouraging members to refer people to the club – you are encouraging people with similar characteristics to them. They may be similar in terms of political persuasion, affluence, professional background, age range and/or in terms of social attitudes. This then helps create a membership body that mixes well with each other, encouraging a happy and harmonious group of customers.

Referred members are less likely to leave

We like to call it “stickability”. It is in the dictionary:

“A person’s ability to persevere with something; staying power”

This is the notion that someone can be more ‘attached’ to a club and therefore less likely to leave. It’s a topic that plays more of a part in our membership retention course, but it’s worth mentioning as a benefit to referred members. As soon as they join they know at least one person at the club, which gives them an instant familiarity and makes integration into the club’s day-to-day happenings a lot easier. This often means they’re a lot less likely to leave in the immediate future as they are socially tied to the club.

Placating Members with Referral Opportunities

It seems some golf club members believe that commercial common sense and financial prudence ends at the gates to the club. They want their club to remain a largely exclusive hideaway from the outside world – to be a hidden sanctuary from society. The very same members are usually the first knocking on the Managers door with incredulity at seeing external advertising of the latest membership promotion.

This is where a pro-active, highly-valued and visible referral campaign within a club can go a long way to placating such members, who rightly or wrongly feel aggrieved at any external membership promotions.

In itself, it won’t convince them of the need for the club to grow the number of members – but it may help convince them that they also have an opportunity to personally benefit from the growth if they refer new members to the club.

In fact, it’s true to say that the preferred route to growing a club’s membership base is through referral, for all the reasons already given. As such, there doesn’t appear to be any logical reason why a club wouldn’t implement a member referral initiative if it were also advertising externally for new members.

Referrals are the lowest hanging fruit – they’re the easiest to pick.

To learn how you can create a referral culture within your golf club, along with other membership lead generation tactics, visit www.promotetraining.co.uk and discover more about the “Generating Membership Leads” eLearning course by Promote Training.