When I am asking time to time, golf course marketing managers about what kind of communication channels do you use to reach golf club members or prospects, the answer is electronic direct mails (eDM), electronic newsletters. Few days ago I read the UK Email Marketing Benchmark study of a UK based company called Sign-up.to. The study tells us that in Sport/Leisure industry the opening ratio of electronic direct mails is 19.96%. This nice and good, but if we check the clicking ratio (clicking on links within the email), we see a depressing figure: 2.96%.
The red color in the picture refers to bounce rate; the green is the opening of emails and the purple is the clicking. Since this study is based on 216 million emails, we can start to think is it beneficial to keep on sending direct mails to our golf club members and prospects. Certainly not, or on lower scale.
As the opportunity to choose between format, timing and place of media consumption is flaring/widening, people will refuse to pay attention to such kind of marketing materials as direct mails. At the very same time, do we have time to read all of our direct mails that we receive every day? I have doubt about it. A possible break-out is utilizing social networking places to generate buzz about our golf course's events and services. I have already met with golf clubs' profiles on Twitter.