By Steve Eubanks, Contributor, Golf Business
.ubanks
You dread it every morning. Whether it’s your phone, laptop, or desktop once you get into the office, your first task always involves taking a deep breath and attacking emails. With some practice, you can click through and delete scores if not hundreds at a time.
Most owners and operators understand this. They dread the morning email purge as much as anyone. And, yet they don’t understand why the emails they send – the ones announcing the results of the weekly dogfight or the Mother’s Day brunch menu – don’t get opened and read.
According to Robbie Wooten, founder and CEO of Golf Creative Co. a golf-specific marketing firm that has been helping owners since the late 90s, “We are all accustomed to tuning out and deleting 90% of what comes in, which is sad because there might be some relevant stuff in there. But relevant stuff is bound to get lost in the ocean that hits your inbox. There’s just too much of it. Email sucks three or four hours of everyone’s day. Most people can’t let it consume any more of their time. If you’re spending more than three hours on emails, that’s devaluing your business and you as an individual.”
Cynicism runs deep when it comes to digital communications. You know that an email marked URGENT is probably a fundraiser or sales pitch. Same with anything that has “I know you’re busy” in the subject line. All it takes is one irrelevant email and you default to deleting everything from that sender.
So, why are club owners surprised when, after consistently sending three, four, often as many as five emails a week, their open rates plummet and engagement wanes?
“It’s the world we’re in,” Wooten said. “What we tell clubs is that you want one weekly email with all the important news and events. You only supplement that if you have important information going to a specific audience. So, if you have the senior club championship registration closing in a couple of days, you might send out a reminder about that. But you wouldn’t send it to women or juniors. Anything beyond your weekly email needs to be specific and targeted. If you blanket your database with information that’s not relevant, eventually they tune out.
“We had a (client) club in South Carolina that wanted to handle emails themselves,” Wooten said. “They might have sent two a day, three or four times a week. Of course, the open rates nosedived. You can’t send that many notifications to people. It’s annoying, even if you know the information is important. Put yourself in their shoes. How many emails a week do you get from the same person and company before you turn them off? With that club, their responses were next to nothing, and their tournament registrations and dinner reservations were soft because it was too much.”
The problem is often twofold. If email communication is left up to the golf pro or general manager, it’s probably number 21 on their daily priority list. Almost no one got into golf operations because of their extensive digital marketing skills. So, when they see that they have soft signups for the club championship or that the Thursday afternoon tee sheet isn’t as booked as normal, the response is, let me fire off an email and see if I can fix the problem.
“Too often in the club world, it’s impulsive,” Wooten said. “You have people who say, ‘Oh my gosh, I forgot to send a notice about the member-guest. I’ll just send an email.’ Or ‘Oh gosh, we’ve got Valentine’s dinner and we don’t have enough reservations, I better send another email.’ People are reactive rather than planning it out and making sure they put everything in one concise email that people look forward to reading.
“The problem in the golf world is that you have club managers, owners, or golf pros who are wearing a hundred different hats. They have so much going on that they don’t think ahead.”
That often leads to a second challenge. Operators recognize they could benefit from marketing support and bring someone on to help. In many cases, that role naturally leans into frequent outreach—emails, promotions, and well-designed flyers highlighting drink specials or new merchandise in the pro shop.
Over time, though, that increased volume can have the unintended effect of making it harder for individual messages to stand out, and engagement may begin to taper off.
“You need to train your members to open the emails so they don’t miss important events, but the way you do that is not to overwhelm them,” Wooten said. “That takes planning. I tell all these clubs to start working out their calendars 60 to 90 days in advance and compile a list of things you need to inform people about in that timeframe. That way you can assemble everything in one email. That trains your members to open and read it.”
As a sport, golf operates on a weekly rhythm. Ladies Golf Association Day is Tuesday; PGA Junior League is Wednesday; the couples’ scramble is Friday afternoon; the regular men’s group plays on Saturday morning; the professional tours finish on Sundays, so everyone checks the results Sunday night or Monday morning. Sending weekly emails that arrive at the same time on the same day every week conditions people to a rhythm they already accept as normal.
“To get an email open, it needs to have value,” Wooten said. “And something that comes every day or twice a day does not have value.”
The laws of economics remain undefeated, even in marketing. Scarcity drives demand.
“In the old days everybody used to do a printed newsletter,” Wooten said. “It had value because that was the only communication you had with your club. People got it in the mail and read every word. Creating the weekly, digital equivalent of that is the way to go. In fact, it’s the only way to get the open rates and responses that you need to drive your business.”