How to Convert Your 3rd Party Bookings to Direct Bookings

If your golf course accepts bookings from 3rd Parties, you should be actively working on turning each and every one of those golfers into ‘direct customers’ through the use of a bounce-back offer, that includes online booking promotion codes, and targeted email marketing. If you follow these steps, it will be simple to accomplish and you can track and measure your success.

Six Simple Steps:

This campaign should be simple. Identifying where your 3rd Party customers come from will allow for you to easily transform them into direct customers.

Step 1: Understand Importance of Growing Direct Customers

If you know the name, email address, and purchasing history of your customers you are able to build targeted email marketing campaigns that nurture relationships and lead to additional business. If you are not always trying to grow your email database and regularly email your customers, you are leaving the marketing of your golf course in the hands of others.

Step 2: Set Goals, Track Performance, Incentivize Staff, Review and Adjust

What gets measured, gets done. You can quantify how many rounds are coming via the 3rd Party booking engine. You see them on your tee sheet every day. You know when the golfer walks through the door. You see them again after their round. You and your staff have plenty of opportunities to meet and greet these customers.

Goal #1 – Hand a promotion code to every golfer who books through a 3rd Party offering an incentive to try a direct booking on your website. If you see 200 rounds of 3rd Party rounds a week you should be handing out 200 promotional codes a week.
Goal #2 – Associate every customer who booked with that unique promotion code to a dedicated list in your email marketing database. This will enable you to track conversions. What percentage of the 3rd Party customers booked with you directly?
Goal #3 – Regularly email or text this group of customers with contextually relevant messages and offers to see if you can nurture them to become more loyal to booking directly with you.

Step 3: Create an Offer

The offer doesn’t have to be over the moon, but it should be compelling enough so the next time they think of playing golf, they think of your course and they remember to book directly. The offer should include a unique promotion code they can insert into the booking engine on your website so you can clearly identify this customer came from your 3rd Party conversion promotion.

Step 4: Set Up Your Booking Engine

Set up the booking engine on your website to accept the unique promotion code. You want to make sure your customer has a great experience and is rewarded for sharing information with you.

Step 5: Set Up Email Database and Messaging

Maintaining the conversation and awareness of your company with your customers is a continuous cycle. You want your customer to think of your company when they think of playing golf because of your email messages. These messages can also be set-up to go out every week/month so its automatic.

Step 6: Promote your own Daily Deals

Offer the best price on your own website with our Daily Deals tee time widget. Powered by TruDemand technology, the widget only promotes tee times that aren’t filling up like they should. The Forecaddie Widget becomes part of your website and uses your brand colors and logo.

CONCLUSION:

It pays to have customer’s booking directly through your booking engine. When you gather information on your customers, you have a higher chance of creating a loyal customer who will come back time and time again.