Whittington Heath – Generating Additional Revenue in Off Peak Times

Having worked with us in a previous role at Notts Hollinwell the newly appointed GM, Oliver Baines, reached out to us to ask for help with growing their overall visitor sales. Historically the club hadn’t generated much income via routine green fees, despite having a highly regarded, well-draining, playable year round course. After an initial analysis it became apparent that outside of the member-only times, there were a good amount of tee-times going unused, ideal when looking to grow pay and play revenue.

What we did

Activated Online Bookings

Historically, visitors would book via calling either the office or the pro-shop. To improve the booking process we agreed that the best thing to do would be to drive golfers to the online booking system (Intelligent Golf). Not only has this saved staff members time, it has also helped with data collection and allowed for us to track their web traffic.

Dynamic Pricing

Previously in the Summer season, the club charged a flat green fee rate of £90, irrespective of the time/day of the week. From our experience, no matter how high the demand maybe it would always be a struggle to sell these tee-times, especially in the off-peak times (where the majority of the visitor availability is). Using historical sales data, course utilisation and a local competitor analysis, we were then well equipped to implement seasonal pricing structures which ensured that the club began to charge the correct prices. After making sure that Oliver and his board of directors were happy with our suggested rate structures, we then went ahead and uploaded these into Intelligent Golf.

Digital Marketing

Our marketing team swiftly got to work on increasing the club’s social media presence, this included weekly social media posts and bi-weekly email campaigns to the visitor database. As a result of historically poor data collection and very few online bookings, the visitor database contained the details of only 300 historic visitors. To ensure that our emails were as effective as possible, we knew that we needed to grow this database as quickly as possible. To do so, we decided to run a lead generation campaign to engage with golfers within a two hour’s radius. It also became apparent that web traffic to the booking engine was much lower than we had anticipated, so to help boost this we built and ran a Google ad which helped to raise overall awareness of the club.

Results

• Despite this year’s overall poor weather conditions, direct sales are 75% up compared to last year versus a market average of +8%. This came from an additional 100+ visiting golfers that did not disrupt member times.
• We have built a visitor email database of over 1.5k visitors who know to book directly with the club using its new, smoother, and customer friendly booking system – Intelligent Golf.
• The course utilisation data contained in Intelligent Golf has enabled us to build comprehensive reports of visitor play that are used to make data led decisions around the dynamic pricing model.

“Whittington Heath GC recently employed the services of The Revenue Club, and instantly saw the return on investment. They have provided a strong foundation to expand upon, greatly increasing traffic through the online booking engine and establishing tactful email marketing communication. This is reflected in the increase in monthly green fee revenue, and overall visitor engagement.”

Oliver Baines, General Manager