Showcasing your Inventory
In our first post in this series, we highlighted some principles for optimizing your booking engine to grow revenue. Here, we’ll dive deeper into how to display inventory in a way that captivates and converts customers before they go somewhere else.
Your customers have options
Meet Melissa. Melissa and her friends are planning to golf next Thursday, sometime in the late morning. She lands on your course’s homepage, and just clicked “Book Now”. She makes a 4 or 5 clicks to set up the filters for her search, and then she sees your available inventory. finds only a 7:10am and 2:40pm tee time. Not ideal.
What happens next? Does Melissa…
…book a less-than-optimal tee time at your course?
…change her plans so she could book on a date where you had better inventory available?
…book at some other course?
Unless she has extreme loyalty or a strong interest in booking your course, Melissa and her friends probably played a round with your competition. It’s critical to remember that you are always competing for your customer’s hard-earned money and time.
With this in mind, let’s explore a few practices that can help you convert more golfers:
Reduce unnecessary decisions
Asking golfers to set a few search parameters before seeing inventory might feel like the right first step. After all, if you have lots of open inventory (we hope not), setting filters should lead your customer to find the inventory that suits them best. But in practice, all those extra clicks up front weigh on the customer, and make it less likely to commit to a tee time. Worse yet, all those filters hide good inventory your customer might have been interested in, had they seen it. The most iconic ecommerce brands of today let you buy without searching at all. When you land on Airbnb or Amazon’s home page, the inventory is right there for you to discover and engage with, and with some filters you can personalize the results. Golf courses can use a similar approach to engage golfers by exposing inventory first, and letting golfers refine their search later.
Give customers more relevant options
The most common and infuriating text we see on most tee time booking engines is “There are no tee times available on this date.” It’s not a helpful thing to tell a customer who was interested in giving you their money. If your local deli ran out of roast beef, they would sell you pastrami. As a golf course owner, you have similar inventory (i.e. same time tomorrow, same time next week, etc) that you can sell when your most desirable inventory is unavailable on a given day. Sell pastrami.
Continue selling until they’re sold
Most golf course web experiences separate the product (the course) from the inventory (available tee times). The result is a disjointed experience, or a missed opportunity to show your customer your best side. Instead, pitch customers while they browse your inventory. Let customers scroll through photos and reviews to build trust while they book.
Prioritize selling the best inventory
When supply exceeds demand, your booking engine’s job is to convert, convert, convert. If you’re going to “push” a tee time to customers, don’t push your worst inventory in hopes that customers might just book it. This one is counterintuitive, so we’ll address three common rebuttals:
“If the best inventory will sell itself, shouldn’t I try to get rid of my worst inventory first?” If you have the luxury of having an extremely full tee sheet, then you might only have less desirable inventory to sell. But if you’re among the 90% of public courses that aren’t selling out most days, it’s a bad idea to push your least-desired inventory on customers. Here’s an analogy: let’s say you sold apples at a roadside stand. You’re not sure how much traffic you’ll have, but you know you won’t sell out, and some fruit will perish. You wouldn’t maximize sales by setting out bruised and overripened fruit up front (though you might discount it for customers who are looking for a deal on less desirable inventory - more on that in another post). Instead, you’d showcase your best inventory to give yourself the best chance of attracting and converting each customer that stopped by. If traffic to your business is limited, and you aren’t selling out, then be hyper-focused on converting each customer by giving them what they came for.
“There’s no such thing as ‘the best inventory’ - every golfer is different.” True! When we say “best inventory”, we mean for you to promote the best inventory for most customers in a given situation. For customers just browsing for available tee times, the best inventory is the tee time inventory that gets booked up the quickest. If a customer has told you they’re interested in booking morning tee times on Saturday, that’s the best inventory for that customer.
“You can’t show inventory you don’t have.” This is also true, and what a great problem to have! If you’re constantly at capacity, consider letting customers book further into the future. More on that below.
Manufacturing scarcity will result in lost sales
If you aggressively limit how far into the future customers can book, then customers who want to book with you can’t book with you. Of course, there are good reasons to limit how far into the future a golfer can book (one great reason is to reduce the chance the golfer cancels before their tee time), however it’s important balance your cancellation rate with your conversion rate. If you want real scarcity, create it by generating more traffic, converting customers at a higher rate, and delivering an experience that drives repeat business.
Next up: Matching Supply with Demand