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COVID-19 Support Fund – England Golf

England Golf have announced the availability of a Covid-19 support fund of up to £10,000 per club to help ‘develop a resilient business strategy and then plan for future sustainability.’ Applications for the grants must be submitted by 31st July 2020 and require clubs to justify how they will spend the funds to strengthen their business.

The fund must be used for future expenditure and clubs will need to show how the money will make an impact to their business and how it will help future sustainability.

Ideas given for expenditure include:

Promotion of membership and playing opportunities to lapsed or current golfers
Ways to keep vulnerable and under-represented groups, including young people, engaged with golf and your club in order to support their retention and wellbeing
Support from appropriate partners and organisations to support the business
Changes to the way services are provided, for example moving onto digital platforms

As an England Golf supplier we can help golf clubs in all of these areas. The key focus of our service is to generate additional revenue through sales (visitors, new members and societies) and reduce costs by operating smarter online.

The Revenue Club is fully accredited by Google, Facebook Business & HubSpot (CRM). We operate with 140 golf courses across the UK and are the industry’s biggest online marketing agency.

We can help prepare your application to England Golf and can evidence how the funding would fit their criteria to deliver increases in revenue. From a practical perspective, the funds could be used for but not limited to:

Membership lead generation campaigns on social media channels
A more comprehensive online booking platform
The installation of a new customer relationship management system to process member and society leads more efficiently.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented some considerable challenges to the industry and an unprecedented demand for golf in recent months. We always evidence the impact and success of our service/digital marketing campaigns in our reporting suite, REPORTS.GOLF.

If you would like to talk about how to make the most of this opportunity, please feel free to get in touch.

Post lockdown statistics in golf

Jun 18, 2020 1 min read

We teamed up with the 59 Club and the Professional Golfers Association to provide some key insights around golf post lockdown utilising our reporting tool, REPORTS.GOLF.

Check out the video and infographic below.

PGA Live Webinar – Green Fee Digital Marketing and Revenue Management

May 15, 2020 1 min read

Find out more about using online tee sheets to their full potential in our webinar on Digital Marketing and Revenue Management with the PGA in their series of live broadcasts.

How can email help your golf course re-open after the pandemic?

Apr 30, 2020 2 min read

Obviously Covid-19 is grabbing all of the headlines at the moment, however it feels that the golf industry is gearing up to re-open. Here at The Revenue Club we have been planning out how to help our golf course partners market themselves once we are allowed to play golf again.

Email will be one of our main communication tools to help golf clubs attract those looking to play golf. With that in mind, we have created a check-list for golf clubs to ensure they are getting the most out of their email marketing, now and in the future.

Data Collection

Best collected at the point of sale. Online in advance ideally or completed on a data capture form on arrival for offline sales.
Having a booking system with an email tool is ideal as the database is updated live with recent bookers added instantly.

GDPR

Ensure everyone on the contact list has opted in to receiving marketing communications.
They must have the option to unsubscribe on every email they are sent.
Data must be kept secure, not shared with anyone and the user should only receive emails that are relevant to what they have opted in to receive.

Design

This is an opportunity to showcase the course. Ensure there are two or three images that show off the venue and clubhouse.
Avoid repetitive use of images and keep them at a resolution that is easy for slower internet speeds and doesn’t overload email inboxes.
Don’t make it too text heavy, this will be unappealing to the reader and the message may be lost.
Ensure the email is mobile responsive.
Include direct, trackable links to the correct destination of your website so that interested customers can go directly to where they need to.

Content

Use a title/subject/pre-header that captures interest and isn’t deleted before it is opened.
Include an offer as often as possible. Subscribers will be more likely to remain on the mailing list if they feel they are receiving exclusive offers for being a valued customer.
Make the content engaging. Steer away from routine messages – capture the interest of the consumer through creativity.
Make it relevant for the time of year and conditions i.e. don’t try to market green fees when the forecast is bad or the course is not in good conditions.
Consider timeliness. An email around bank holidays is likely to get a higher rate of engagement.

Reporting

Review email performance a few days after sending. Look at open rates, click rates and unsubscribes.
For golf courses, fortnightly emails work well to keep open rates high and unsubscribes low.
Review what customers are clicking on and refine future emails for improved performance.

#Email

How will the coronavirus pandemic impact the visitor golf market?

Apr 3, 2020

At the time of writing, the length of the restrictions that are in place is still unknown. However, the shockwaves that have been sent through our society will be felt right across the golf industry regardless of the time we remain in a lockdown situation. Anyone working in this area is looking ahead with a huge amount of uncertainty and surmising their own hypotheses of the possible implications. Here are a few from the perspective of the visitor market.

Courses will be very busy when they reopen

In the lead up to the lockdown, there was a week of good weather where there was a huge surge in demand for our courses, indicated by a significant increase in web traffic to booking engines and subsequent green fee sales. If the restrictions are lifted to allow golfers to play again in the summer, the level of pent up demand will be huge. Most big sporting events have been called off, and individuals may choose to steer clear of pubs and restaurants. Golf could fill the social and sporting void that many golfers will have been yearning for over weeks of isolation indoors.

The number of your competitors may reduce

One of the issues that is regularly discussed across the industry is the oversupply of golf courses versus the number of participants. The pandemic may intensify this economic situation and clubs with high ground rent and an ageing customer base are likely to suffer the most. It is possible that more vulnerable elderly members may not renew this year, if at all, and they form a vital financial base for many clubs. The virus has hit the UK at the worst possible time for clubs whose renewals are in the Spring and it may be that a large proportion of member golfers will take a year’s sabbatical on their membership, particularly if their own income is uncertain.

Member to visitor shift

What’s almost certain is that former members will continue to play, and this may lead to a rise in demand for green fees. Golf clubs could find themselves with more capacity in traditional ‘member times’ and could fill the void by allowing visitors to play at these peak times. This is often a point for debate and would need to be carefully managed in order to keep the committed member base happy, which could be achieved with careful pricing and management of the booking window.

Visitor friendly venues will prosper

Golf courses that have a strong focus on welcoming visitors and that market themselves effectively will find themselves in high demand. The shift to online sales will only be accelerated through a continued requirement for social distancing at the point of sale. This will give the upper hand to venues with a strong online presence and slick customer journey to booking a tee time. There is a lot to be said for keeping in touch with the local golfing market during the lockdown to continue to build demand.

No golf on the BBC

There are windows of the golfing season when most courses experience an uplift in demand following the major championships that are televised on terrestrial TV. The absence of these this season means that golf clubs will have to work hard to generate that interest themselves through creative marketing that goes far beyond their existing customer base. That said, other sporting events have been cancelled which often provide a distraction for golfers and this could work in the industry’s favour.

Requirement for diversification in the off season

If there is a considerable reduction in annual membership renewals, courses will be even quieter in the winter than normal, particularly if there is another challenging period of poor weather. Many courses are reliant on their member base to sustain them in the winter so clubs will have to innovate to ensure they continue to generate revenue through this period.

The pausing of the golf season has offered a unique opportunity for organisations to take stock and look at their business models to ensure they are in a stronger position for the challenges that lie ahead. We are looking at many different ways to support our customer base of 130 clubs to ensure they are in the best possible position to take advantage of the new situation we will find ourselves in in the coming months. It is time for the industry to innovate and adapt, and what better opportunity than right now?

#covid19 #coronavirus #golfmarketing

2020 UK green fee market overview

Jan 12 2 min read

Online sales at UK courses finished the year 234% up on 2019 on average, despite four to five months being lost to the weather and lockdown restrictions. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought about some ground-breaking changes to the industry and online bookings in particular. Not only was there an increase in visitor sales that has not been witnessed before but on average more than half of the bookings are now being made online, making it the primary method that visitors are using to reserve a tee time.

The average green fee has increased to £23.27 from £19.62 in 2019. Although many courses have increased their prices, the volume of member play has been much greater leaving little access to the peak times, making the increase even more significant than the £3.65 suggests. Average booking value has risen by £6.54 and although this should have increased in line with the average green fee, the two ball limitations at certain times of the year, along with unprecedented demand prevented further growth as the average group size fell from 2.31 to 2.22 players per booking. It is important to note that some courses have enabled pairing up of golfers and therefore the actual revenue per tee time may be greater.

Outside of the lockdown periods, average web traffic has consistently been three to four time greater than 2019 which illustrates the sharp rise in demand and an indication that the UK visitor golf market has increased in size.

Looking forward to 2021, the initial demand at the end of the current lockdown is likely to be extremely high. With increased daylight and hopefully better weather coinciding with a lifting of restrictions at some point in the spring, the level of pent-up demand will be unprecedented, we predict more than after lockdown 1.0.

Further limitations on social gathering will almost certainly continue well into the year which should work in the industry’s favour. Golf courses will experience high volumes of sales that should be at least in keeping with 2020 as long as the current lockdown finishes in February/March, and there is no reversion to a full lockdown later in the year.

Happy New Reports!

Dec 3, 2019 3 min read

Whilst reflecting on what has been a really busy 2019, the team have pulled together an infographic to show some of the key booking trends.

We also wanted to thank everyone who has supported us through the year. For us, it has been great to work with 100+ golf courses across the country and ‘behind the scenes’ we have been hard at work creating a reporting suite ‘REPORTS.GOLF’, probably our biggest achievement of the year!

This new tool helps us to aggregate data across all of our partner courses and make smart, data driven decisions for each golf course. REPORTS.GOLF, is available to a golf course who does not work with us to access an in depth summary of their green fee performance.

You can find out more here.

We hope you will have an excellent New Years Party (or night in!) and we wish you every success for 2020.

The challenge(s) of implementing a dynamic green fee pricing

Oct 30, 2019 3 min read

As the golfing season draws to a close we have begun to reflect on the challenges faced over this golfing season and since launching The Revenue Club a couple of years ago when it comes to implementing dynamic pricing in golf. There is no doubt that dynamic pricing as part of a green fee revenue management strategy increases green fee sales, however, if you are thinking of taking the plunge and implementing this type of pricing then please have a read of the challenges we have come across in the past few years:

Skillset – the revenue management role requires a set of specialised skills and a good understanding of the wider business. As such identifying the right skills and how to improve them is key. Revenue Management is a relatively new concept to golf, so looking to other industries to learn is a good place to start.

Technology – the golf industry falls someway short of other industries when it comes to technology and how it can assist ‘revenue managers’. Many industries have automation and algorithms to maximise yield, this is yet to reach the golf industry on any scale. That said, you can make the existing technology work for you, the key is to make sure you are maximising the efficiency of using technology where possible and avoiding issues where two or more tech solutions do not talk with each other.

Communication – we have spoken about about this in previous blog’s, and it is possibly one of our greatest learnings since starting The Revenue Club. It is virtually pointless delivering a pricing change, and not getting the message to market. It is crucial to share information internally, so the relavent messaging can reach the most important person, the golfer. In short, if you make a price change, shout about it!

Distribution Costs – distribution costs must be measured completely. As a revenue manager it is important to fully understand the costs associated with each channel. This might be direct booking costs and include the cost of digital advertising, through to the third parties and their associated costs such as barter tee times, booking fees and/or commissions. Third parties are still on the rise, and it is a complicated landscape with various commercial deals available making it more difficult to generate direct sales. Fortunately good marketing can help, an email campaign is a good place to start directing golfers to book directly with you (and its free, aside from a bit of time and effort). Running on-going digital advertising that includes your golf club name will help with overall awareness and should increase all aspects of your business ranging from membership enquiries, society bookings right through to the offline tee time sales.

Pricing – There are various factors which can affect pricing, some within our control and some outside of it. The important factor is to react to these changes. For example if the golf course is in excellent condition, make sure you market that and hold your price high. A great KPI for checking that your overall pricing strategy is working is conversion This measures the number of golfers looking at the booking engine that go on to book. Unfortunately this often has to be manually calculated and i would refer you back to our point about technology! The bottom line is you need to base your pricing decisions on data. Another factor to pay close attention to is other revenue streams which are affected by the price of your green fee, this can include members and society bookers, the key is to provide value for all, whilst maximising utilisation and yield. Don’t forget rather than discounting you can include items such as buggies or food/drink in the price of a tee time to make it more appealing, just make sure your tech provider can offer this. Finally, it would be unfair to talk about pricing without making mention of lead time, which plays a significant role in what golfers pay to book/play the course.

‘Golf Clubs’ – Golf courses outside of a brand or multi-course operator are ideally placed to be even more flexible with their pricing strategy. An individual golf club can deliver personal experiences which create real loyalty. This is how independent coffee shops survive against the marketing clout of Costa or Starbucks.

Speaking of coffee, if you are interested in implementing a new pricing structure in 2020 but not sure where to start, then please do give us a shout and invite us to your club for a coffee… we are happy to have a chat about what could work for your golf course!

Make sure your digital marketing delivers direct to you!

Jul 31, 2019 4 min read

Most golfers start their search for a tee time on a search engine, namely Google. While this is useful information the question remains, how does your golf club reach those golfers?

Lightbulb moment = digital marketing.

There is no doubt the 3rd parties in the golf market place are superb at digital marketing and it could be argued they do a good job of getting a golfer off the couch and onto a golf course, and with their near seamless booking process, abundance of choice, and some of the best priced tee times in the market there is no wonder 3rd parties book c.1 million rounds of golf in the UK a year. One of the main reasons for their success is there ability to sit at the top of a Google search when a golfer types ‘tee times at….’, the best prices and booking process wouldn’t matter if a golfer never saw the website.

If you can use your digital marketing strategy to get the attention of these golfers, the golf club will benefit. This brings us back to the question; how do you create a digital marketing strategy that ‘hooks’ golfers in and doesn’t let them ‘fade’ off to other websites (see what we did there). Here are a few tips to get you are started… and continuing with the golf puns…

Set some targets (Bushnell), measure them (Scorecard), then iron out the problems (lesson from the PGA Pro)

Can you imagine Tiger Woods getting to the first tee and not knowing which direction to hit the ball, what club to hit and what the tournament was? It would be a nightmare not to have an end goal and a rough idea of how to get there, and it’s the same if you have no goal(s) for your digital marketing.

Knowing how much you have to spend is vital if you want to make sure you’re putting the right amount of time, effort, and money into the right marketing activities. For example, if you’re running Facebook Ads to attract new golfers to your booking engine, can you track how many of them convert into bookings/enquiries so you can understand the ROI. It could well be that Google Ads is a far more lucrative platform to advertise on and therefore you should invest more (time, effort and money) in this than Facebook.

For golf clubs, seasonal campaigns are a must, in the UK there is little point advertising membership at the end of the season (unless your course drains extremely well), this is where you should focus your attention on group bookings for next year, plus scoop up the remaining tee time business if the weather is still favourable. It is also worth considering that you may need to spend more at the start of a campaign as you will be trying to prospect a new audience, but once engagement starts you can ease off the budget a little.

Make sure you figure your KPI’s out at the start. Going back to Tiger, he will know virtually every statistic of his game, both instinctively and from a detailed analysis of his round. He will know how many fairways he’s hit and how many putts he’s taken etc. You should know the same for your digital campaigns, for example, in the tee time world how many impressions does it take to get a click (Click Through Rate), how many clicks does it take to get a booking and what is the value of that booking (Conversion) and which platform/medium is therefore most likely to convert are just a few of the stats we look at here at The Revenue Club.

It is important to look at past data, alot of website providers will have likely installed a Google Analytics code for you from the start. The data contained in this is invaluable and can help you determine what activities have worked in the past! It is also important to monitor performance and you should set out how often you intend on doing this to allow the marketing campaigns they need to influence the market. The key is to use every avenue you can to make the connection, this will help the golfer remember you if they see your golf club in an email, they then visit a certain page or section on your website and are then re-targeted with a specific advert relating to the pages they visited on social media and within the Google Display network.

Monitoring and then improving each campaign is all about how you can best optimise the activity, it’s important to remember you can change more than the campaign itself. Items such as the landing page, overall website and of course the price which will affect conversion!

In summary, there is undoubtedly a growing amount of golf being booked online, not to mention the society and membership enquiries. At The Revenue Club we see some of our partner clubs receive over 50% of their casual green fee revenue online. It has always been important to be in the place where the customers wants to buy, 15 years ago it was by the telephone ready to answer it, now it’s important your golf club is on social media, Google, third parties or indeed any other digital platform golfers access if you don’t want to miss out.

The Value of Monthly Data

Jul 11, 2019 3 min read

Here at The Revenue Club we have always tried to base our pricing decisions on data and thus take the emotion out of any green fee pricing decisions.

Unfortunately, not all data is created equal, and having a trusted source is only part of it. Data is only as good as it is timely. For means of demonstrating this point, consider cryptanalysis, or codebreaking. During World War II, the Allied forces used cryptanalysis to decode radio communications that had been enciphered by the Axis powers. Intercepting and decrypting these communications was fundamental to the Allied victory.

Imagine that this data was collected, but, rather than made actionable in a timely fashion, was only shared and consulted once a year. The arc of history could have bent in a different direction.

Data is only valuable if it is acted upon.

In the golf industry, accurate data about anything is tough to get, tough to verify and tough to compare across the market, this is particularly true when it comes to green fee data. For example do members guests count as visitor green fee income? How do you slice and dice the allocation of green fees in society packages? Is it all recorded accurately across the tee sheet and till?

Like any business, a golf course’s success or failure is measured by profit and loss: the ability to maximise revenues while simultaneously containing costs. In the case of members clubs any surplus is often re-invested into the facilities. Regardless of the type of golf club the owners, operators and committees need detailed, robust and actionable data that they can use to make the right decisions.

In the case of green fee benchmarking, it is not enough to see annual results. It is only by examining monthly numbers that golf courses can make decisions that will impact the bottom line before the golfing season slips away. At The Revenue Club we compile regular forecasts which helps us decide on the best strategy to take. At the end of each month we complete an in depth analysis of green fee related KPI’s, ranging from average booking value to analytics of the golf course’s website and booking engine. If the values aren’t hitting the projected levels, we take the necessary action in order to meet the desired goals.

More than a century ago, oil became the hottest commodity to sweep the globe. It powered much of everyday life and continues to help drive modern society. Like the oil boom, a new digital era gave rise to today’s most transformative and valuable resource: data. It powers our decisions, helping to remove guesswork from the equation. Data is the new oil. But you have to tap the well more than once a year to extract its true value.

Here at The Revenue Club we have developed an in depth report which gives you access to the vital data you need to enable you to make informed decisions about your green fee business. This is currently only available to our existing customers so give us a call and find out how our innovative approach can help you.