Ken Morton Jr. is the vice president of retail for Morton Golf Management LLC, which manages a number of golf facilities including Haggin Oaks Golf Complex, in Sacramento, California.
Ken Morton Jr on the importance of personalizing email and social media campaigns:
We’re lucky because we have a large customer base and have a lot data on our customers, including who they worked with on a certain sale or lesson and what they purchased. We leverage that information the best we can and only send out specific promotions to specific customers who worked with specific personnel. In other words, if you worked with a sales person named Jim and bought Titleist merchandise, you received a personalized message from Jim promoting the newest Titleist products or our next Titleist demo day. This served another purpose: in a sea of never ending television and digital advertisements and promotions being thrown at you left and right, this was a way to personalize the overture, which we hoped would make people more sympathetic to what we were putting out there.
Ken Morton Jr on the business impact of personalizing email and social media campaigns:
The results have been extraordinary. Our open rates on emails are nearing 100 percent from people enthused about the personal greeting and excited enough to tell their friends about it. One of our teaching professionals sent out a mailer to 10 students who he hasn’t seen in over a year asking what would it take to get them back, and he heard from all 10 of them! We have three full-time employees solely for this “data-mining” operation who have allowed us to make sure that the person you heard from is someone you know, like, and are familiar with. That makes it a personalized greeting and makes the customer much more likely to read it and follow through. We’re extending this to all facets of our facility – not just retail – and hope that the results carry over long into the future.
If you would like to contact the author of this Best Practice directly, please email kmortonjr@hagginoaks.com
