Ken Morton Jr. is the vice president of retail for Morton Golf LLC in Sacramento, California.
Ken Morton Jr. on the importance of running targeted and personalized email and social media campaigns:
We’re lucky because we’re an extremely popular facility, have a large customer base and have a lot of 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 running targeted and personalized 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! For a wedge promotion, we had a unique promotion where we bought hats off clearance from the company and gave them away to everyone who simply demoed that brand of wedge, which resulted in the giveaway of a couple hundred hats within 48 hours. We also did short game clinics that cost $150 and lasted 2.5 hours and gave a complimentary wedge for anyone who came. We sold 70 wedges just through the clinics, 100 total in the first weekend and 140 in the first 10 days, which would normally have taken us three months. 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 email the author of this Best Practice directly, please email kmortonjr@hagginoaks.com
