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Getting your Emails Opened (part 2)

In part 1 I talked about tune-out. Sending the same email with discounted rates time after time will just get your emails sent to the round file. Your emails need to have good content. Content designed to build up the relationship with your facility and enhance customer loyalty.

But how do you get your emails opened?

I am sure everyone has a friend or acquaintance, that when they send you an e-mail you immediately open the e-mail. You can’t wait to see what they sent you, is it a joke or an interesting news item they found, whatever it is, if you are like me, you drop almost everything to open it up. Well what do you think would happen to your business if all of the golfers on your list dropped everything and opened your e-mail? What if instead of an offer you included a funny video, or a great joke. What if it was a great inspirational story, or a giveaway to the first 50 gofers that signed up for something.

Your subject line should reflect the interesting nature of your content. The subject line could be a question, a statement, a how-to, a top-5 list, or any number of lead-ins that pique the reader’s interest and curiosity. I am sure many of you can come up with some great ideas, if you just go back through your own e-mail inbox and find those people that you always open their e-mails and see what kind of interesting types of content you can find. Then go back and also include a video golf tip, or a link to an instructional e-book, and pretty soon your golfers will be opening up your e-mails as fast as you can send them.

So let’s review. It is OK to send an offer, just not the same one or same type over and over. If you do send out an offer alone, make sure you send another e-mail out (maybe a few days later) that is nothing but good, current, fun, and enjoyable content. Also take the time to look at what content you think will connect with your golfer so that he will drop everything to open up your e-mail and make sure that you always have some type of content like that in every e-mail that you send.

In part 3  I will go further into the types of content that you should use to ensure the success of your e-mail campaigns and what resources you can use to find great content for your e-mails.

As always if you have any questions or comments please leave me a note at the end of the post and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

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Tags: Email Best Practices, How To, Tips and Tools, Web-Based Marketing for Golf Courses and Golf Professionals by Al.W
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Are you sending the right e-mails to your golfers (part 1)?

I am continually educating myself on technology so that I can keep my clients up to speed on the latest trends and best practices. Since most golf course operators have their hands full managing day-to-day issues, my goal is to serve as a resource, doing the research and passing along the knowledge so they don’t have to.

One of the ways I keep in touch is by subscribing to golf course email lists. I subscribe because I like to know what the golf courses are up to, and because sometimes I see interesting approaches that I can then pass along to my clients.

One of the things I can tell you right off the bat is that most golf courses don’t do a very good job of letting me know what is going on. Are there big tournaments coming up or just completed? A wedding? Greens aerated or in great shape? Special meals or events? Any news about the course or the staff? Any new videos or articles or tips posted on the site? Keeping your readership informed of what is going on at your facility helps them stay closer to the facility, and being closer improves customer loyalty. The more loyal they are to your facility, the more likely they are to spend time and money there. Your email is a perfect tool to build customer loyalty.

Is your email going to give me good information, or will it be just another tired discount offer? I can tell very quickly if the golfers on your list are going to open the e-mail or not based on nothing more than the subject line.

This brings up 2 key points:
1. When is sending out only an offer or a regular offer too often to where the golfer starts to tune out your e-mails? and
2. How can you ensure that your golfers want to open your e-mail.

Let’s look at the first point first: tune-out.
If you need rounds, and your best source of marketing to your golfers is your e-mail list then fine. But what I see a lot of is the same dreary e-mail with the same look, and basically the same pricing, hours that you can book the special, and the same days of the week. It comes out virtually the same time every week, and guess what, it is boring the heck out of your golfers who you are trying to get to your course. The only time they will look at your e-mail is if that week they have decided they want to play your course, and they remember that your e-mail has the specials on it. Other than that it will find its way to the deleted file every time without even being opened!
If you need to send out a weekly offer, you must either add content to the e-mail that gets the golfer to open and read the e-mail or send out another e-mail during the week that does not have an offer attached but has good content that gets your golfers engaged in reading the e-mail.

Look for Part 2 – Getting your emails opened – in the next post

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Tags: Email Best Practices, How To, Tips and Tools by Al.W
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Here is the Social Media Marketing, Web 2.0 Marketing, & Email Best Practices PowerPoint slide show presented by Eric Jones, Al Weinhold, and Rick Laforet to the Northern California PGA Section on October 12, 2009.  The seminar was video-taped, and the video presentation will also be available on this site shortly.

Please feel free share this info with your fellow PGA pros!

The feedback we received from the Pros who attended was fantastic! We really appreciate it. We’d like to do a follow-on seminar that will get into the nitty-gritty, get-your-hands-dirty, how-do-we-actually-do-this, applied part of social media and web 2.0. Let us know if that would be something of interest to you and your fellow NorCal PGA members.

But perhaps more importantly, we’ve already heard stories of Pros who have TAKEN ACTION to implement some of the ideas. That’s awesome!

Please post your experiences of implementing some of the concepts here as a way to share best practices with other PGA Pros.

This presentation is 132 slides long and has the Social Media Marketing component by Eric Jones, the Email Best Practices by Rick Laforet, and the Web 2.0 Marketing by Al Weinhold.

It may be a little small when viewed in the WordPress post, so if you would like to see a full-screen version, look carefully in the lower right hand column for the “full screen” icon. When you are done, hit “escape” to return to the normal viewing mode.

Please post a comment in the box below. We’d love to hear from you!

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Tags: Demand Based Pricing, Email Best Practices, How To, Social Media Marketing, Tee Time Optimization, Tips and Tools, Uncategorized, Web Site Design, Web-Based Marketing for Golf Courses and Golf Professionals by Eric.J
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Here is a quick video showing the Flip Camera I use to capture spot videos and instantly upload them to the web.

The Flip video camera is small, easy to use, and web-friendly.  In the video you can see that the Flip is about the size of my cell phone, so it is easy to tote around.

The controls are super simple. Basically an on/off switch, a single red button that is used to start and stop recording, a few simple playback controls, and a very handy, built-in USB connector. You can shoot a video, plug the camera into your computer’s USB port, upload the video to a site like YouTube, and then pull it back down to your blog post just like this!

Viola!

I recommend you pick up your own Flip camera and use it to shoot current events, golfer testimonials, course shots, and any thing else live and current that would be of interest to your readers.

Look for another post that details the instructions for how to upload the video to YouTube and then pull it back down to a blog post just as was done in this post.  Then look for another post detailing how to capture a snapshot from your video, paste it into an email, attach a link, and then drive traffic to your post.

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Tags: How To, Tips and Tools by Eric.J
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