CASE STUDY #2: Manly Golf Club

‘Our key objectives were to improve our communication style to members, increase yield and external function revenue.
Dovetail has helped the Club utilise our BI platform to provide members with information relative to their interests and in turn increase yield. Automated marketing programs have assisted with our member engagement whilst refreshing of our weddings microsite and associated marketing programs has increased the number of leads in that business segment.
From a business management standpoint it is also very comforting to be creating easily measured marketing activities.’

Nigel Gibson, General Manager
Manly Golf Club

Situation

After MGC’s adoption of Dovetail’s assessment and the marketing automation platform, SharpSpring, Dovetail continued to work closely with MGC to execute the various items of recommendations. The plan was to drive additional value from alternative revenue streams, specifically from weddings and corporate events but in addition to this increase member engagement and Golf Shop traffic.

Challenges

• Multiple internal systems housing lots of valuable data but making it difficult to effectively access for marketing purposes.
• Limited marketing resources and knowledge in the specialisation of data-driven marketing automation. Adopting a modern approach to marketing will require some change management and training.

Solution

After additional investigation, we uncovered that MGC had a sophisticated 3rd Party business analytics system, which provided some rich insight to the membership and spending habits of its members.

• With the support of the existing analytics team we created a single-view data solution within SharpSpring, which enabled us to build and automate new and recurring communications more easily
• In addition to this we designed and implemented consistently themed monthly newsletters, new introductory member programs; automated tracking and response emails to online wedding and function enquiries plus targeted product and service offers to members.

Key Insights

• Through a dedicated tracking pixel on all communications the Club can now achieve deeper insight to what members are looking at when receiving newsletters, thus enabling them to include more engaging content each time.
• Introducing a Welcome Program for all Introductory Members enabled the Club to have an automated, consistent and timely communication sent at 3, 6 & 9 month intervals.
• We’ve introduced monthly performance reporting on all aspects of prospect and member engagement

Future goals:

Dovetail continues to work with MGC to:

• Introduce continuity with all Member communication.
• Drive change with a more modern approach to capturing prospective Clients for weddings, corporate and private function
• Commit and dedicate time to test and refine various data-driven, personalised and targeted member communications that will drive engagement and revenues – e.g. food and drink offers based on member’s existing behaviour and spending patterns would create instant appeal for further spend.

Results

• Special Offer Campaigns –
  • First campaign saw a significant spike of purchase behaviour in the Golf Shop. 100% clearance of special offer within a few days.

• Member Credit Accounts –
  • Reduced member credit by almost 10%, which was actually increasing prior to introducing programs to advise members of their credit status.

• Newsletters –
  • Open Rates – Avg: 58% (previously unknown)
  • Click-throughs – Avg: 21% (previously unknown)
• Welcome Programs –
  • Encouraging results thus far seen through engagement of each new Introductory Member, leading to higher conversion to full membership following their introductory period.
• Up-skilling Staff
  • We have worked closely with staff to up-skill the knowledge of modern marketing and SharpSpring, to ensure ROI is realised.
• Designed & built ‘Weddings’ [only] microsite
  • Enabled the club to have a more dedicated experience for prospective clients incl. analytics associated specifically to the performance of that site.