1) You're not Segmenting
From what we’ve seen in the industry, courses are offering discounts on their website, on groupon, over mass email, on Facebook, and even posted right in their pro shop.
The problem with unsegmented discounts is that when you target everyone, you target no one. They have the overall goal of driving more revenue. But revenue from whom? Most of the time it’s from your normal, full price paying customers.
2) You're not Restricting
On top of not segmenting out customers, we’ve seen courses put unrestricted big discounts out there.
What’s it going to feel like when someone with a $30 discount takes the slot of someone paying full price?
The name of the game is revenue management and unrestricted discounts are bad revenue management.
**We will admit that they are a powerful tool and have their place in the marketing world but only if it’s attached to a specific goal.
3) Letting the distributor dictate the terms
One of the more depressing things we’ve experienced (yes, we fell for it too) is when we paid someone to distribute our discounts.
It feels like a double whammy because we’re spending money upfront AND we’re lowering our averages on the backend.
Or, you could do a revenue share on top of your discount. What’s 50% of 50%? Sounds fair, right?
The distributor’s argument is going to be: if you’re paying us to distribute, the best way we can make it worthwhile is to appeal to the broadest population possible.
Translation, remove restrictions and give a big discount. They want it to be easy for themselves. Heaven forbid if they have to go out and target the right people!
The Right Way - Planning and Hard Work
Let’s be real, discounts are an easy tool to use, but more difficult to use correctly. It’s be like handing someone a saw and telling them to cut down enough trees to prevent a forest fire. That’s why if you’re doing discounts for your golf course, the only solution to avoid the pitfalls is to put in the work to create a plan, put in the work to execute, then put in more work to track.
Your plan should include details on:
- The goal for the campaign
- Who you’re targeting specifically to reach that goal
- What to offer to the target audience to get them to take action
- When to implement
- How to implement (what marketing channels)
- and most imporantly, how to measure success and ROI
It’s a lot of work and one of the reasons discounts get a bad rep in the industry. People don’t put in the work so discounts are written off as a failure and bad for business.
Instead, Let us do the Work for free
Yep, that’s right. Free. $0. Zilch. No revenue shares. No upfront costs. No ongoing costs.
Our profits are made on the consumer side when someone joins our membership.
And because we are restricted to the last 24 hours, we’re not right for every golfer out there – only a segment, which means we’re good for our partner courses. 30 years of service and long running partnerships have proven that!