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11 | 04 | 08 How to get visitor email addresses and what to do with them when you have got them.

The internet has given us a massive new way to get to our potential customers. No matter what type of business you are, the World Wide Web is changing the way we do business. Web Sites are the modern brochures and emails have replaced the mail shot.

The big advantage to this is the cost. Web Sites may cost as much as brochures to create but cost very little to display unlike brochures that cost a fortune to print. Web sites are also much cheaper to amend and keep up to date. The mail shot is almost becoming a thing of the past, the speed and price of email is taking over and of course the advantage is that it arrives straight to the recipients desk.

The issue is, how do we capture peoples email addresses without them feeling they are about to get bombarded with junk.

Data capture is something that most businesses are bad at. For a golf club, the main point of capture is the pro shop and we all know that isn’t conducive to organised administration. The corporate groups are paranoid about capture and drill into the staff how important it is but in smaller clubs it’s no so easy. Even the clubs that do have registration cards for visitors to complete often end up with a stock pile of cards and no one to key them in or even the case of not sure where to key them in to.

Somehow there needs to be a way of getting the customers themselves to key in there own information without the onus on the club or the staff. Well how about this for an idea.

The web site can be used to do this. Why not have a facility on your site that allows customers to register and indeed give them an incentive to do so. The pro shop can just hand out cards with all the details of how to get onto the site and what to do. This means they only have to hand out a card. (Even they should be able to do that.) Yes the customers need an incentive but why not promote a free round of golf. Even enter a draw for a free fourball once a month to all those who register that month. It costs you nothing and the potential rewards are huge. A collection of email addresses that can be used to promote your course and facilities.

One of the best ideas for promotion is to offer a fourball for the price of three, however each member of the fourball has to bring in a voucher. This means that you get all 4 email addresses rather than just the one. Think about it!

Of course the next thing is working out what to do with the emails once you have them. Yes you could put them into Outlook and send group emails but it is not very elegant and they only exist on your machine.

We recommend that you use a company like “constant contacts”. They are a web based business that allows you to upload your newly acquired email addresses and then you can create really nice emails that are formatted and easy to produce and then send them out regularly. They charge based on the size of your database so they make it really easy and they handle all the unsubscribe functionality that is needed these days.

You can add extra emails to the lists, it filters out any duplicates and also tracks invalid email addresses. It even gives you reports on how many have been opened and read. This facility is currently in use by thousands of companies and works extremely well.

If you want more information please feel free to give us a call and we are happy to help!

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