Stevenage Golf & Conference Centre

In January 2018, Stevenage Golf & Conference Centre (Stevenage GCC) contracted The Revenue Club to assist with generating additional green fee business through online channels and support with implementing a new booking system. Prior to working with The Revenue Club, Stevenage GCC had very little online presence for selling visitor tee times.

Stevenage took the decision to move away from their leisure based booking system and take advantage of the partnership between The Revenue Club & IntelligentGolf to power their visitor bookings. IntelligentGolf provided the club with some key tools to effectively market  and sell their tee times online:

• A mobile responsive online booking engine.
• The ability to quickly and easily alter price with all the necessary features In the modern market such as multi player pricing, the ability to apply promo codes, partial bookings and the possibity to channel manage ensuring that customers can always obtain the best rates direct.
• Commission free online bookings with no booking fees for customers.
• Automated confirmation emails and follow up emails following golfers rounds
• The abilty to capture players data and easily communicate to them with built In tools

The Revenue Club then used the tools provided to revenue manage, market and report on sales. The reporting provided by The Revenue Club allows a golf course to easily establish KPI’s ranging from average price per person and booking value through to a detailed understanding of the web traffic they are generating from utilising the free tools provided by Google Analytics.

What We Did

Direct and Third Party Bookings

The first step was to make the online tee booking process easier and more visible on the website. We did this through using the adding additional links to the IntelligentGolf booking engine and making the existing links/buttons stand out, when doing this it was important to consider both the desktop and mobile customer journey as on average over 60% of traffic to a visitor tee time booking engine is on a mobile device.

Dynamic Pricing

In order to capitalise on digital interest, it is important to ensure that green fee pricing is pitched at the right level, so a full review of the price structure was carried out, based primarily on historic sales, course utilisation and local competition. The existing pricing structure was already well considered so there was little need for change and interestingly our recommendations were to increase the price during peak time periods.. Once this new pricing structure was loaded we found that an effective tool for changing the price was to use the promo code functionality with in the IntelligentGolf tee sheet. This also linked in well with the digital marketing.

Digital Marketing

To encourage more direct business, we deliver weekly marketing activity across Google, Facebook, Twitter and email. We use the IntelligentGolf email tool which means the database of golfers grows as more people book direct and optin to receive the marketing email

Within this fortnightly email we choose relavent content which can be themed on a variety of factors including weather or golf events along with highlighting the best deals of the week including the promotional codes we implement from the dynamic pricing.. We then closely monitor the impact this has on the web traffic and adjust the strategy accordingly.

Reporting

We use a combination of Google Analytics and KPI’s from the online and offline green fee revenue to ensure that the pricing and marketing strategy are working hand in hand to deliver the very best results. This includes a detailed monthly report and a mid-month pace report.

What the Matt Bannister, Head Pro at Stevenage GCC said…

“We knew that there was an opportunity to increase our green fee sales from online business, however we didn’t have the systems or time to take advantage of the online market.

We worked with the third parties but had no real option to book direct with us. Chris and I knew each other from previous positions so already had a great working relationship making it easy to get everything setup. The Revenue Club supported with the implementation of the intelligentgolf tee sheet, and then helped us get the book direct message to market. We have worked with them for nearly 2 years now and are about to have our biggest month of online green fee sales ever! The consistent marketing message and yield management has helped us to maximise sales.”