Looking around our site you will see that we offer a wide range of personalised golf items. We very much pride ourselves on the finish of the artwork that we do and each product range has different options.

A good example is our personalised golf shoe bag range.
We can do a variety of bags with different types of finish e.g. uses our silk screen printing process.

The personalised golf shoe bag embroidered option provides a multi colour stitching finish and we have our full colour printing with the personalised golf shoe bag full colour

It is quite difficult to get across the possibilities available on a website. We always love it when a customer picks up the phone and actually speaks to us. It can be the difference between a good gift and a great gift.

Enjoy your day either on the course or elsewhere

We are reworking our site a little at the moment.  We’d like to make the point that for a lot of our products we offer the almost unique opportunity to purchase tiny quantities, sometimes as few as 1 such as sets of our logo golf balls and personalised golf umbrellas.   As you can hopefully appreciate it can be tricky to get across all of the options available to a customer, and also difficult to configure our shop to easily offer a buy online experience for everything we do. 

We are striving to enable our shop to be truly buy online but we still hope that customers will call us.  Why ?  Well again and again we do get calls from people that want something specifically, but once we understand their requirements and offer the benefit of our experience, we can often suggest something that is better suited. 

Watch out for more products becoming enabled to buy online but don’t forget we are a friendly bunch and like to talk

Whilst Spectrum Golf has been serving the personalised golf industry for more than 25 years, we admit that it has taking us a little time to get our website where we want it to be.  We sometimes even surprise ourselves with the size of the range of products we offer, so getting everything online has been a big project for us.  Some of what we supply can be bought online via our shopping cart, and some you need to call us about simply because the products and the customisation options are quite complex.  

Having said all that we are just putting the finishing touches to our range of logo golf balls which no doubt you will be aware are the most commonly seen types of personalised golf gifts you’ll find online.  We have the most popular manufacturers available to buy.  You can upload on the site your logo images or even personal photos to be imprinted onto whichever golf ball you choose. 

We are not unique with this offering but one thing that we are very proud of, and which is pretty unique, are our range of golf gift sets.  You can ask us to create a golf gift set for you using your choice of ball plus other items from a range of golfing pieces such as pitch repairers, tees, ball markers, towels etc.  So why not check out your preferred golf ball manufacturer and then browse our golf sets for some very cool ideas that we can build around your golf ball choice.

Well as the saying goes the devil is in the detail.  I was just reading someones post online and it makes a good point that choosing a golf ball for an individual person or people in a group is not necessarily straight forward.  In the context of corporate golf events the issue is similar, in that you want the golfers invited to the event to perform to the best of their ability, and providing suitable golf balls requires a bit of research into their ability as players. 

However most events have a strict budget and handing out Nike balls rather than Pinnacles may result in the food budget being squeezed to just a packet of crisps.  Giving the same cheap ball to the guest company’s boss whom is a very good golfer as the office junior who can’t swing a club to save his life is to be avoided.  As ever there is a trade off and the decent event organiser will help you decide the best strategy which won’t leave your guests insulted and still money in the bank.  If you want to give out personalised golf gifts without getting egg-on-face give us a call.

Inspired by http://www.promoslogos.com/weblog/promotional-golf-balls/

We believe the key to maximising the success of any corporate golf event is to truly put it into the context of being a marketing tool and customer retention tool.  They need to be planned and executed as carefully and as purposefully as any marketing campaign.  We love the idea that if done the right way you can build a communication channel with your customer than can be used again and again after the event has long finished.

Social media anyone? 

Find out more here about Spectrum Golf’s Corporate Golf Events

Successful businesses are effective at building communication channels with their customers and their prospects and it is a highly recommended strategy.  However any business that intends engaging in PR and customer relationship management through some sort of community event, either online or offline, needs to tread carefully.

The nature of some successfully run businesses is that there is good management at the helm and often it is the view of this management that marketing, PR, CRM etc is best done in house.  Or at least the planning side of it.   Call it ego if you will but this must be resisted.  Even the most successful businesses have a trail of failures in their history which is part of the deal in becoming successful.  Once you are successful there is no need to introduce unnecessary risk onto an important business project such as customer retention or prospect conversion.

Other successful businesses exhibit the art of leverage to their advantage.  They understand what specifically to keep in house and what to outsource.  Unless the business is itself directly involved in event planning, this activity should almost always be outsourced to a specialist event planner and organiser.

The effort required in planning and running projects such as a corporate golf events is not to be taken lightly.  If the event is deemed important enough to be running then it is likely to be important enough to be outsourced to an experienced and professional supplier.

It must be stated that the concept of outsourcing is a fairly fluid term and there should always be a connection and degree of communication between the business and the oursource company.  The skill in outsourcing is to define exactly the contract between the customer and the supplier so that the business can be confident everything is being covered, however they themselves are not having to invest significant time in the project. 

A good quality event management organisation will know how and at what level to engage with a business, and whilst they are able to provide standardised event planning solutions they are sensitive to the needs of the customer business to stay engaged with the process.  Possibly most important of all is a well defined outsourcing contract has a project plan that never has the customer on the critical path.  If this happens the whole project is at risk because they will always be diverted onto other things. 

So once a business has decided to outsource the event planning and execution to a supplier what is the first step in engagement? 

In our experience one important aspect of event planning that is often missed or ignored is something that should have happened right at the very beginning of things.  When the idea to have an event was born what was the exact reason for the event? 

Obviously business networking and customer retention are often quoted reasons but your rationale needs to be more detailed and specific than that.  What exactly do you want out of the day?  If you can have your customers and guests leave with a specific message in their minds that is a real bonus.  If they can be educated as to why it is a great idea to continue to do business with you that is a huge plus. 

A good idea is to combine the customer retention benefits of a golfing event with a specific business feature.  If you have a new product version coming out then make that a focal point of the day by integrating the message onto the logo on your golf umbrellas.  If you are changing your customer support capability to help your customers then make that a theme of the event. 

During the build up to the event using social media tools like facebook to build a conversation on a topic.  For example ask the invited guests what their biggest challenges are in their market place in relation to your product. Then you can tailor the event to address those issues.  Obviously one must be wary of selling during a social event, but giving free and useful information that helps them understand your business better is always a good thing.

Speak to us here at Spectrum Golf http://www.SpectrumGolf.co.uk about how your business should approach your event planning to maximise the return on investment.

Whatever stage of the economic cycle whether in boom or bust customers are key to your business.  However when times are tough and customers are getting more difficult to come by that is the time when companies with good customer retention strategies can survive, coming through to the other side in better shape than their less able competitors.  Remembering to "fix the roof when the sun is shining" is good advice so when times are good and customers a plenty put in place a customer retention strategy to keep them, and keep them when times get tough. 

It is safe to say that few companies have any idea of the cost of gaining a new customer and it can be an expensive game and a totally uneccessary one.  But what can be even bigger benefit than reducing costs?  Existing customers can spend more money and a customer that has just purchased from you could continue to spend for years to come.  So putting a customer retention strategy in place is important and never too late to start. 

So where does one begin? 

Take a good look at your customer base and try to identify the key features that makes them a good customer.  Even better is identifying which customers are repeat customers; what is it about them that makes them stick with your business and not wander off to another? .  Not only will that tell you which customers to focus on with your retention strategy but also what sort of new customers you should be looking for.  It might be the case that 5 new customers of the ‘loyal’ type are more valuable than 10 of the ‘disloyal’ type. 

In future posts we will be going into more detail on specific and effective customer retention tactics.  One simple example of a customer retention tactic is to create a loyalty program .  For example a restaurant should keep a customer database and for irregular but potentially more lucrative visitor send a discount voucher or reward card.  But targeting which of those customers might be most lucrative is important.

Once you have identified some suitable retention tactics you must segment your customers into groups so that those that exhibit the features of loyal customers can be actively ‘retained’.  It is only wise to spend your precious budget on customers that are worth retaining.  You should even consider ignoring those customers that do not exhibit those precious repeat business attributes.  You could find something similar to the 80/20 rule at play here with 80% of your profit coming from just 20% of your customer base.  Banks apply this strategy all the time however it is often rumoured that they deliberatly try to get rid of unprofitable customers. We are not saying you should behave ungraciously to your customers, rather you should focus your budgets only on those that affect your longer term bottom line.

Having identified your high value segment(s) that is where you focus your customer retention budget.  If the value of customer segment supports such cost it can be a good idea to build more personal relationships with such customers.  Build a relationship in the real world.  An excellent way of enforcing the quality of the relationship is to run company or corporate events.  Corporate golf days are good examples of such events and the associated promotional golf gifts that a business gives out to the invited customers can be branded in a way that exhibits a business’ ideals.   Then the business has one further technique for keep those customers close to the fold well into the future.

With more than 25 years experience in customised golf equipment and corporate event consultancy Spectrum Golf are the people to speak to if you want to use golf days to really work your bottom line. Call us for truly expert advice.