Sponsored feature: An app to help you sell tee times

Horsham Golf Club has installed a marketing app designed to increase visitors to the club and the amount they spend while there. And it’s working out incredibly well.

As memberships are declining, ‘standard’ memberships are no longer meeting the financial requirements golf clubs require to survive. Many clubs are therefore searching for ways to connect more with casual golfers, which means focusing on selling tee times has become imperative for future success.

Heidi Bohrn, director of Pro Golf Digital, which specialises in creating bespoke golf club apps along with 3D flyovers and course guides, has created a solution. The company has released an app that has an ‘in-house marketing suite’ which also connects to your tee time booking system. It is designed to drive revenue for golf clubs via three strategies:

• Increase your number of players
• Increase the frequency of your players’ repurchases
• Increase the average transaction value.

One of the most powerful ways the app connects with golfers is by delivering push notifications – text messages from the club that are sent to the front interface of a smartphone and have a 97 per cent read rate.

The app also allows the club to segment its audience by user profiles / interests. Each user enables which communications they want to directly receive, making it GDPR compliant, allowing clubs to target messages based around specific customer criteria.

Horsham Golf Club implemented the Pro Golf Digital app at the beginning of January 2017 and so far there have been 2,432 downloads of it. Golfers are eager to access all the available tools such as a full GPS facility with pin positioning along with customised and accurately interactive 3D maps, whereby golfers can select any location and view yardage distances, along with high quality 3D flyovers with added features to assist the golfer such as ball tracing, fairway / hazard markers and green terrain grids. Once completing their interactive scorecard, the app can share their golfing profile statistics / graphs, allowing the golfer to look at their improvement and training requirements and feel connected to the game of golf, which increases the probability of them visiting the course again.

Mike Yorke, the pro at Horsham, said: “We sent a push regarding a special ‘In app offer’ for mid-week tee times. We reached 756 golfers who stated they were interested in tee time offers, achieving a 223 click rate response. That’s a 29.5 per cent success rate! This app is truly a powerful tool.”

Horsham owner Neil Burke stated: “It’s pretty impressive, we had no idea how well our app was being used until we started analysing the figures. Take Sunday, June 16 for instance – we had 43 tee time bookings with 13 groups using our app to keep score.”

The club has set up GEO notifications, sending 12,603 welcome messages in the last year to include information around events or special promotions. This includes messages just before the golfer reaches the half-way house to increase food orders and pop up messages as the golfer finishes their round to entice them to rebook again.

Another way the golf club is using the app to drive revenue is by providing ‘in app exclusive offers’ for tee times, pro shop promotions, lessons, food and beverage offers and ‘first time user offers’ which is linked to Facebook advertising to increase downloads. This has been very successful.

“The Pro Golf Digital app is truly a magnificent marketing tool,” Heidi stated. “We provide full analytics, so any club can see the direct results of all their marketing. Other clubs are successfully using our loyalty programmes to set up punch facility packages or a pre-purchased point system for social memberships.”

Want the app for FREE? For the remainder of 2018, Pro Golf Digital is looking for 10 golf clubs to showcase the app as a case study. For more information, visit www.progolfdigital.co.uk, email enquiries@progolfdigital.co.uk or tel 020 7205 4454