The Pellucid Perspective - June 2019 - 6

CUSTOMER
RELATIONSHIP

Your costumer is no longer your own
By Stuart Lindsay

n the rapidly evolving world of technology, customer relationships and privacy, we offer three maxims to consider for our
golf course owner/operator readers and, for that matter, any
small business in 2019 and beyond:
* Email is definitely not dead
* It's evolving and more important than ever
* Your customer contact info is fair game
Anybody who thinks email is a technology "antique" is not
paying attention. Not only is email usage projected to increase
24% over the next 5 years; 48% of GenZ (14-18) and 36% of
Millenials (19-34) report they intend to increase their email usage over that same timeframe (statista.com). They are apparently
finding out that email is a better form of communication for
certain correspondence than truncated Twitter messages, public photo sharing on Instagram or Snapchat and a host of other
business related functions.
More important is how email data is being "harvested" and
used. It goes way beyond communication - it is the "user name"
associated with social media accounts, e-commerce shopping
destinations, website registrations and more. All of that activity is
being tracked - clearing your history and/or private browsing are
basically "after the fact" functions. Google, your mobile providers
and other browsers still know where you go and are aggregating
what you do. Of course, they also know where you live.
The important issue is that email addresses are now being used
to create individual "profiles" - available for the estimated 245
Million email users in the US. The lid got blown off this dirty little
secret with the exposure of Cambridge Analytica and its supposed
mis-use of Facebook data in the 2016 presidential election. Congressional hearings and lipstick adjustments to privacy policies
cannot change that the fundamental revenue models for Google
and Facebook depend on the sale of their profile analytics.

6 The Pellucid PersPecTive

At the heart of the matter, we know email addresses are valuable. As we have pointed out over our data dissections of 100s
of golf courses - higher spending for those golfers in your email
database has ranged from $35 to $175 per player. The problem is
that the "harvesters" know your customer is a golfer, has visited
your course and will sell that information (email and/or social
media) to your competitor down the street.
An enterprising golf course using this type of "profiling" can
find a website registrant on Facebook and pay to have their ads
appear on that registrant's news feed. It gets worse from there
- another golf course can buy that "golf interest" and pay to get
their messages delivered, too. Guess what? As a Facebook user, I
can't block those messages.
At least on my email platform, I get some SPAM protection
and can block senders. The SPAM protection is OK in some cases; but sometimes identifies stuff I want to see or am expecting to
see. The blocking is only effective until the Nigerian prince uses
another email address; but it's better than what I get on Facebook
or YouTube.
Golf courses also get challenged by the anti-SPAM function.
Many courses have simply amassed a "master" email list over
some years - if they are not updated, the delivery process can
be hindered by "blacklists" assembled by Internet Service Providers and/or SPAM filters on individual email platforms. We
also suspect that some major email platforms get preferential delivery treatment compared to some of the smaller or integrated
email platforms commonly used in golf. We recently did a test
of a portion of Pellucid's current master distribution list and saw
dramatic delivery and open rate improvements by using one of
the major platforms.
This stuff is very sophisticated and increasingly complex. The
path of least resistance would be to keep doing things the way
June 2019

http://www.statista.com

The Pellucid Perspective - June 2019

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