Fore! Marketing Best Practices

Utilize these Best Practices to maximize the marketing features included with your Fore! Marketing product.

Tablet Kiosk Best Practices

Fore! Reservations is excited to announce our NEW tablet kiosk. With this advanced technology, collecting data from customers has never been more convenient! Utilize these best practices to ensure you are maximizing the new technology.

Advantages of using a tablet device:

Great for mobility! Send a tablet kiosk out with your beverage cart to capture customer emails while they wait for a tasty beverage or mingle with one another while waiting on the tee. Make it mandatory that your starter capture every customer’s email address before teeing off on the first hole. The possibilities are endless! Be sure to think about all areas and aspects of your business (i.e. bar & grill, practice range, outings, etc…)

Added face time with the customer! The tablet kiosk adds an extra personal touch and gives you the opportunity to speak individually with a customer, making them feel like they are more than just a number.

Wow factor! With the ever-changing world of technology, iPads and other tablet devices are peaking the interests of consumers everywhere.

Apple iPad & iPad 2

Operating System: The new iPad 2 comes equipped with the latest iOS 5 operating system, however, this operating system is available to the original iPad design. Simply log into your iTunes account to update your software and operating system. Click here to learn more about iOS 5.

Security: While iOS 5 is a highly secured system, guard the privacy of your iPad by setting a pass code lock to prevent unauthorized access to your device. On your tablet go to: Settings | General | Pass code Lock | Turn Pass code On | Enter 4-Digit Pass code

Find my iPad: In the case you lose, misplace or have your iPad stolen, Apple offers a free built-in service called “Find my iPad.” This app allows you to locate your iPad, display a message or play a sound to help you find it, remotely set a pass code lock and protect your privacy with a remote wipe of data. Setting up iCloud must be activated to use this app.

iCloud: Apple has developed an automatic, seamless way to back up and store the contents on your iPad. Activating the iCloud is necessary to run “Find my iPad.” Click here for more information.

Screen Protector: Fore! Reservations encourages protecting your iPad’s screen with a protective shield. There are many options to choose from, click here for more information and our recommended screen protector.

Casing: While keeping the screen protected is very important, we also recommend finding a durable case to house your iPad. Click here to view purchasing options online.

Touch Screen Kiosk Best Practices

To maximize your Touch Screen Kiosk and get the greatest data collection results, make sure to follow these best practices.

Best Practices

Place kiosk on pro shop counter, do not place kiosk far away from pro shop counter where customer traffic is the highest
Place kiosk next to or in front of register at chest to eye level, do not hide kiosk from customer view
Hold staff meeting to stress importance of kiosk and make employees regularly aware of all new promotions
Have an employee script: "Are you interested in today's offer on the kiosk in front of you? (point to kiosk) Simply enter your e-mail and you're eligible for today's special offer."
Hold staff accountable to promote kiosk
Incentivize staff to promote kiosk
Make the kiosk offer immediately useful
Do not offer group specials of more than four players that exceed your promotional limitations - make offers reasonalbe for you and your customers
Make the kiosk offer enticing for the golfer, do not make offers redeemable at inconvenient times - stick to weekend and twilight weekday specials
Track monthly success rates with reports found on the Internet Dashboard

Implementation Tips

For assistance setting up the Touch Screen Kiosk or to make a change to your current kiosk offer, please contact the Marketing Team at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 630.789.9784 x2.

E-mail Design Best Practices

At Fore! Reservations, our best practice for e-mail marketing is simple: always brand your course, your website and your tee time booking interface. In order to create an effective e-mail marketing campaign, follow these tips from the Fore! Reservations Marketing Team.

Best Practices

1. Always include your logo in the e-mail design. Have your website designer create a standard logo or e-mail header that you will use in every e-mail marketing piece. Think of the e-mails that you receive from national marketers such as Amazon or Apple. Do their e-mails ever lack a logo? No. Be sure that your customer knows that it’s your facility e-mailing them. The goal is that your customer will know it is your facility e-mailing them before reading the content!

2. Create specific links that the customer will always see. Use quick links to your website, booking a tee time online, birthday club, etc. Always lead customers to your facebook and twitter pages, website and tee time booking page.

3. Try to use a consistent font for brand management. Although fonts come in all shapes and sizes, part of branding your facility is based on what font you are using. Ask your web or logo designer the font used in your facilities logo and use that in each e-mail you send and each flyer you create.

4. Do not use bright colors or highlight colors that will make your e-mail unreadable. Customers are more prone to read an e-mail if it is easy to read both on a computer screen and mobile device. Highlighting is not the way to get your customers to read your e-mail – if their eyes are on it then they are reading not because it is highlighted but because they are interested in reading what you have to say. Think of other ways to attract your customer to read the e-mail, such as a good subject line and fantastic content.

5. Give the customer the option to book online in every e-mail you send. Your specials should be as easy to book as ever with your Internet Specials Calendar. If you are promoting a special rate through your e-mail, give the customer the option to book online now instead of printing the e-mail and bringing it to the counter staff. You will know that the customer received the e-mail because he or she booked through the online specials calendar.

6. Always test your e-mail to yourself before sending it your customers. Add yourself to your customer database in Fore! Reservations or use the preview e-mail button in the On Demand Wizard. Check the photo and font sizes, links and spelling before the e-mail goes out to your customers.

7. Keep the e-mails fresh and full of great content. Create e-mails based off of the time of year, holiday and promotional events. Almost every weekend or weekday of the year has a “special” day attached to it. Do a quick Google search to find out the day you are promoting, don’t just blast out special rates.

8. Focus on your subject line. Always create an enticing subject line for your e-mail. Instead of the subject line “weekend specials” create a more specific statement, such as “Golf as low as $50 this weekend” or “Have a free weekend? Take advantage of our golf specials.” The subject line is the one place to get your point across to your customer without even having to open it.

9. Target Market. Use the Fore! Reservations e-marketing tool and On Demand wizard to target market your customers. When sending out a last minute special, choose customers based on the state or city your facility is in. If you are in Florida, do not send a last minute special to someone who lives in California! You can also target market based on customer type, category and spending habits.

10. Think Ahead! The off season is the perfect time to develop a marketing plan and e-mail designs for the season! Do some research on creative topics, run reports in Fore! Reservations on how well your holidays and promotions did in the previous year, create a very specific calendar of events and use the scheduler in the Fore! Marketing Promotions Campaign to make the e-mail sending process easy during your busiest time of year!

11. Do not copy and paste straight from Word into any e-mail designer. If you prefer to create e-mail content in Word, do not directly copy and paste that content into any HTML e-mail editor. Always copy your content into a Notebook file (usually located in your accessories folder) and then copy into your e-mail. Word processing codes do not work in HTML and will cause some of your customers to not be able to load the text.

12. Always put a border of 0 on all images. Whenever you add an image to your e-mail, use the properties option to put a “0” border on all images. Internet based e-mail servers (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc) will put a blue border around an image if it is not marked as 0. This will help with the overall design of your e-mail.

13. Use the Fore! Reservations Listserv to generate ideas for your course. Is your e-mail registered with the Fore! Reservations Listserv? Discuss with courses all across the country on great ideas for specials and events at the course! Click here to register for the Listserv.

14. Can't Do It Alone? Seek our Help! By joining the Marketing Assistance Program, the talented Marketing Team creates all of your e-mail marketing campaigns that follow every best practice and are designed to make a real impact! Drive rounds and revenue with professionally designed e-mails that brand your golf course and promote your course happenings. Let us do the creative work for you and take your e-mail marketing to a higher level.

Implementation Tips

Questions? Please contact the Marketing Team at 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

On Demand Best Practices

Fore! Marketing On Demand is a tool that allows you to use our unlimited e-mail server, bouceback management and template library while targeting specific customer types, categories and other segmentation available in the software.

Best Practices

Use targeting filters to reach desired audience
Customer types and categories: members, default fee, leagues, etc.
City, state, county

A better tool to use for any last minute e-mails
Send an unlimited number of e-mails out
Use the template library to create professional looking e-mails in just minutes
Templates designed for many occasions: holidays, golf majors, seasons, newsletters, etc
Over 200+ templates in the template library
Use the template library to prime good promotional ideas
Customizable text for templates, personalize the text for your customer base

Use the history tab to access e-mail templates used in the past
Newsletter templates are saved and can be edited each month to add, change or delete information

Take advantage of our NEW Image Uploader to Upload photos (.jpeg or .png images) from your computer to our server to add them to e-mails
This is a great way to personalize e-mails sent to your customer base

Save your HTML code to access an unfinished e-mail blast later

Implementation Tips

How do I send an e-mail in Fore! Marketing On Demand?

General Settings and Setup Best Practices

Redesigned from the ground up, the latest version for Fore! Marketing gives your course ultimate control over automated e-mail marketing campaigns. Take advantage of this opportunity to personalize your course’s marketing and turn your software into a “money making machine.” As a course owner or operator, it is important to be knowledgeable about the current products you are running and to know how your customers are being contacted. Take some time to review your Fore! Marketing General Settings and familiarize yourself with the setup of your automated marketing campaigns. Login to your Internet Dashboard, go to Fore! Marketing and select Settings.

Best Practices

Why review your Fore! Marketing General Settings?

Confirm the correct Course Details are being used in your automated e-mails. These details will be used to customize the from address and contact information in all e-mails sent through the Fore! Marketing system.

Publish the Enrollment URL on your courses website to maximize the number of customers receiving e-mails from your course. Preview the URL by clicking on the link to confirm the Style Settings are configured correctly to best match your website and brand your course.

Fore! Marketing Enrollment URL:

style-settings-2

Make your life easier and enter a URL for a header image to use in your Fore! Marketing e-mails. This image will be added wherever you use the header image replacement tag when creating your Fore! Marketing e-mails.

When editing an e-mail message, select the drop down arrow in the Replacement Tag drop down box. Choose Header Image and this will insert the #!headerimage!# replacement tag for the header image you inserted on the General Settings page.

Add a little customization to your offer coupons while giving your offer coupons a unique feel and retaining the brand of your course. Remember the Coupon Header Image should be 536 x 90 pixels.

Promotion Campaign Best Practices

The Promotion Campaign sends out e-mails promoting a specific holiday or event at your facility. With this campaign you can select a template from our e-mail template library and schedule e-mails to send out in the future. This gives you the ability to set your entire e-mail marketing up before the season even begins!

Best Practices

Access to over 200+ templates in the template library
Use the template library to prime good promotional ideas

Use the option to attach offers to e-mails
Customers must bring in the coupon to redeem their offer
Use this as a way to bring customers out to the course
In order to obtain the coupon, the customer must fill out an online profile if they don’t have one – this guarantees you have all their information

Exclude customers with a reservation on the day you are promoting
Customers on the tee sheet will not receive an e-mail about a special rate

Be creative!
Promotions are a great way to draw people out to the course and entice them to play

Implementation Tips

For assistance setting up the Promotion Campaign, please contact the Marketing Team, 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Birthday Campaign Best Practices

This automated campaign sends out special promotions to your customers on their birthday. The Birthday Campaign encourages customers to come out to your facility at least once a year. It requires a one time set up, month by month, which gives the golf course the ability to customize offers, send dates and expiration dates. You now have the ability to define which customer types receive the offer as well.

Best Practices

Have a birthday offer that is appealing and makes sense to the customer
Make sure the offer will be beneficial to your business if every customer redeems the birthday offer
For example, four for the price of three, the birthday golfer gets a free round but you are still bringing in three full priced green fees
Choose an e-mail design that is in line with your facility’s image
The look and feel of the e-mail should match up
Our template library has many options for e-mail templates
The templates have the flexibility of changing the text
Change the text to match the voice of the facility

Northern or seasonal course considerations
Send the birthday offer while in season
Schedule the offer to be sent to the off-season birthdays:
a) At the beginning of the season for birthdays in the months before the season starts, ex. January, February, and March. These customers will be able to enjoy their birthday round once weather is nice and the course opens.
b) Or before the season ends for birthdays in the months after the season ends, ex. October, November, and December. These customers will be able to enjoy their birthday round before the course closes.
c) Or on customer’s half birthdays. Schedule offer to be sent 6 months after the customer’s birthday. Change the Subject line to say “Happy Half-Birthday”.
In season birthday offers can be sent and expire at your discretion, decide when do you want them to receive and use it.
Use the rolling expiration date
-Gives all golfers the same amount of time to claim their birthday offer
-Keep the amount of time short (14-30 days), to encourage your customers to use the coupon quickly and not forget they received it

Make a sales item and include it in your coupon for tracking purposes
Encourage as many people to join as possible to join the birthday club
-Have your website provider add the signup link to your website
-Add the signup link to other email blasts

Implementation Tips

For assistance setting up the Birthday Campaign, please contact the Marketing Team, 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Thank You Campaign Best Practices

Implement the Thank You campaign to increase your level of customer service and show your customers that you value their business. This campaign will help ensure your course is retaining more customers each golf season. The Thank You campaign sends e-mails to recent visitors of your facility. Thank you e-mails are sent at most once every week and are ideal for customer surveys, comeback offers, and customer relations. Login to your Fore! Internet Dashboard to access the Thank You campaign under “Automated Marketing” to setup your custom message.

Best Practices

Include a survey in your thank you messages in order to accumulate feedback from customers. This will allow you to analyze what your customers think you are doing well at and what you can improve. This also gives your customers a chance to feel like they are being heard which will strengthen your customer relationships.

Example: Survey Monkey offers free online survey services. Once created, a link can be included in your emails to direct customers to this survey.

Include a comeback offer to entice customers to come back quickly. This will get customers thinking about golfing at your course immediately after they just golfed there. The goal is to get customers to visit your course more frequently and to decrease the amount of time in between visits. The best way to do this is to provide them a comeback offer.

Example: Blockbuster offers comeback coupons to “Rent one DVD get one free on your next visit’.

Promote an upcoming event through your thank you e-mails. Thank you messages provide the perfect opportunity to inform customers about upcoming events. This will increase the amount of advertising for events drastically and will increase turnout and revenues for these events.

Simply thank your customers for their business. Extending this message will promote a high degree of customer appreciation and develop a sense of course loyalty. You can never thank someone too much! Therefore, we highly recommend implementing the Thank You campaign in order to show gratitude to your customers.

Implementation Tips

For assistance setting up the Thank You Campaign, please contact the Marketing Team, 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Defector Campaign Best Practices

This campaign automatically sends out e-mails to golfers who have not returned to your facility for a specific amount of days. These emails act as friendly reminders to your customers that let them know you miss them while offering a coupon to get them to come back. You have the ability to define how much time must pass without them returning to the facility for them to get the offer, how many times you want to e-mail them, which customer types will receive the offer or if you want to attach an offer at all. Fore! Marketing 2011 gives you the option to set up any level of defector that you want (15, 30, 45, 60, 90 day, etc).

You can also attach a specific sales item to the coupon they receive so your staff can simply scan the barcode on the coupon and the sales item will appear in the shopping cart. Numerous defector e-mail templates have been created for you to choose from or adjust to better fit your facility. Get your defector campaign up and running today!

Best Practices

Make the offer valuable/enticing for your customers.
-Increase the value of your offer per defector level
-Example: 30 day defector offer of a complimentary cart, 60 day defector offer of a 3 for 4 special

Set up at least 2 defectors (30 and 60 day recommended)
-How many defectors you run should be based on the months that you are open. If your facility is open all year you should have at least 3 defector levels.

Utilize Defector Campaign Statistics that are available in the Dashboard
-Reevaluate your defector campaign each month to see which campaigns are the most effective
-Statistics can show how many coupons were printed. You have the option to run a sales item report that includes how many defectors were redeemed.

Make a sales item and include it in your coupon for tracking purposes
-When running reports you will be able to see which offers included in the defector campaigns were the most successful

Include an offer that is not restricted to certain days/times

Do not state in email that the offer is a “30 day or 60 day defector.” The word defector should not be included in the body or subject line of the email.

In defector emails, include appropriate and important links
-Online booking page, upcoming events page, Facebook, Twitter, Birthday Club

Implementation Tips

For assistance setting up the Defector Campaign or to change your current offers, please contact the Marketing Team, 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

POS Coupon Best Practices

Tracking the success of your Fore! Marketing campaigns is now extremely easy with the help of linking Sales Items to your coupons. Once a promotional offer is created for a particular campaign, you can create a Sales Item within Fore! Reservations and link the Sales Item ID number to your offer details. To learn how much revenue your campaigns are generating, run the Sales Item Impact Report (found in Fore! Sell) for the Sales Item (i.e. 4th of July Coupon) associated with an e-mail promotion.

Best Practices

Train Staff on how to properly ring-in the coupon to ensure accurate results for tracking.
-This will also make sure that a customer isn’t using the coupon more than once.
-Make a customer pop up note when someone has already used the coupon to avoid re-use fraud.
Create Sales Items for each e-mail promotion you are running.
Add coupon terms and conditions and a course image to your coupons.

Implementation Tips

How do I create coupon terms and conditions? How do I attach a coupon to a Fore! Marketing offer? How do I properly ring-in coupons for optimal tracking?

Fore! Marketing Statistics Best Practices

Fore! Marketing Statistics gives your course the ability to view reports and statistics on your automated email marketing campaigns created through your Internet Dashboard. Your campaigns’ success or failure rates are illustrated within these reports. With easy-to-read graphs and charts, you can see real-time e-mail database and customer enrollment growth as well as the number of e-mails sent, offers sent and offers printed for each campaign. In order to access these reports login to your Internet Dashboard, go to Fore! Marketing and select Statistics.

Best Practices

Why review your Fore! Marketing Statistics?

Individually search your e-mail database to look up customers who claim they never received an e-mail. It’s also a great way to check which campaigns a customer is enrolled in and when they were last sent an automated e-mail message.

Use the E-mail Overview charts as a baseline to find out if your staff is collecting e-mail addresses. These charts give you the aggregate amount of mailable customers in your Fore! Marketing e-mail database as well as the amount of individual -emails collected for each marketing campaign.

Evaluate which programs are working, and which ones need more attention. These statistics will give your course an aerial view of your Fore! Marketing e-mail campaigns and their individual success rates over a given time period.

Bounce Back Management Best Practices

The Fore! Marketing system automatically manages e-mail bounce backs for customers within your Fore! Marketing database. An e-mail bounce back is an e-mail that was never successfully delivered to your customer. Fore! Marketing will only remove bounce backs that were caused by nonexistent or misspelled e-mail addresses.

When the Fore! Marketing system detects that a bounce back has occurred, the e-mail address will be removed from your Fore! Marketing system automatically and added to a list on your Internet Dashboard.

Best Practices

We encourage you to review this list periodically and contact those customers regarding their invalid e-mail accounts.
Proper bounce back management will help assure you have the most accurate and reliable e-mail database.
Export e-mail addresses that bounced from the Fore! Marketing system and import them into your core Fore! Reservations product. This export will be presented to you as a database patch which you must run manually on your database. Click here for directions to run the patch on Windows XP or here for Windows 7 and Vista.
Fore! Reservations recommends you select the option to “add a pop up note to the bounced customer’s profile.” This option will allow your staff the opportunity to quickly and easily update misspelled e-mail addresses and remind them to collect the correct address from the customer.
It is recommended you run the bounceback database patch every 2-4 weeks or after your monthly eblast in order to keep your database up to date, allowing you to maximize your e-mail marketing efforts.

Implementation Tips

For additional assistance with e-mail bounce back management, please contact the Marketing Team at 630.789.9784 x2, or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Fore! Outing Best Practices

Fore! Outing is a tool that is designed to not only make your life or your outing coordinators life easier, but to also grow your customer database. Be sure to follow Fore! Reservation’s best practices when using the Fore! Outing product.

Best Practices

1. Become an expert on the Fore! Outing product. Watch our software videos and read our procedures so you can sell a coordinator to host his or her outing at your facility because of this great product! Fore! Outing is a product that no other golf course can top!

2. Encourage the outing coordinator to use each tool in Fore! Outing. If used properly, Fore! Outing should encourage coordinators to come back year after year to host their outing because of the ease of the outing product. Check up on your outing coordinator throughout the process to ensure that everything is going properly and encourage your coordinator to use all of the functions of the product.

3. Incentivize the Outing Coordinator to retrieve all data. On the Fore! Internet Dashboard, you are able to view statistics on how well the coordinator is doing at collecting e-mails. Encourage the outing coordinator to retrieve at least 70% of emails from their event. Then, reward the coordinator with a discount on the outing, merchandise or outingdatascoring

another promotion! At the end of the process, all of this data is consider yours and is in Fore! Reservations. Make sure it is accurate data that you will be able to use in the future.
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4. Use the customer import list on the dashboard. In order to create a streamlined process for your coordinator, use the “Customer Import List” on the Fore! Internet Dashboard to import possible participants of the outing. The coordinator can send you his or her Excel File of names and you can easily get that data on the Internet for him or her!

Implementation Tips

Would you like to activate the Fore! Outing product at your facility? Contact the Marketing Team, 630.789.9784 x2 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .