B2C - Hospitality / Vacation Industry:
Anyone who has taken a Florida vacation knows that after a few days at the beach, there are other fun activities like mini golf that you can count on to fill your time having fun in the sun. Smugglers Cove Adventure Golf has 5 mini golf courses from Tampa to Fort Myers along Florida’s west coast. In November of 2020, Smugglers approached our team because they were ready to take control of their digital marketing and understand how it was performing for them. After making it through the Covid crisis and as the tourist season of 2021 was approaching, they were ready to get it right and have the numbers to prove it.
The Challenge: Reporting on Digital Marketing Success for Transactional B2C Brick and Mortar Business
Because mini golf is a transactional business model, the biggest challenge was providing data to prove that their digital marketing efforts were bringing in more revenue. Once we redesigned their website on the HubSpot CMS, we were able to transition them away from disparate systems and into a unified platform, but that still only showed visits and leads coming to their website. It did not indicate how those leads were turning into customers.
With the help of HubSpot’s marketing automation engine, Workflows, we were able to change that.
The Solution: Workflows, Custom Properties, Integrations, and More
Prior to working with our team and using HubSpot, Smugglers had a discount code offer on their website. Anyone who came to the site and filled out the form got $1 off their round of mini golf. At the time, with a site hosted on Wordpress and an external landing page on Constant Contact for the discount code, they could tell that the discount code was effective because their email list continued to grow, but they knew nothing more about the success. With their site moved to HubSpot and the landing page under their domain, we can help them analyze what sources are driving the most conversions through the discount code.
Getting back to our use of HubSpot’s Workflows, once a contact downloads the discount code, the following happens:
- A workflow copies the contact’s assigned Contact ID into a custom contact property called Discount Code
- The contact is sent a follow up email including the unique discount code they were assigned using a personalization token in the email
When the person visits a Smugglers course, they are asked to provide their discount code, which the Smugglers team logs in a spreadsheet along with party size so we can see how many people were in the group. The Smugglers team shares that information with us and we use Insycle to match the Discount Codes to the individual contacts in HubSpot. Typically, the only way you can match contacts in HubSpot is by using their email address. Using Insycle, which is a member of the HubSpot App Ecosystem, expands our options by allowing us to match contact data using any piece of information. Having a tool like Insycle in Smuggler’s tech stack turned this process of matching discount codes from manual to instant.
Using this information, we can do closed-loop reporting. We help Smugglers see not only how many visits are coming to their website and how many discount code downloads they are getting, but also how many of those discount code downloaders came in and played a round of golf.
Since we implemented this process in March of 2021, we have seen that 12.8% of people who downloaded the discount code came in and played a round of golf. There have been 1,091 customers closed through this discount code process. With an average party size of 4 golfers and the average cost per customer of $14, this amounts to $61,096 in revenue. In the case of a mini golf establishment, this is significant proof of ROI from one campaign.
*At this time, we only have Discount Code information for four out of the five locations.
By having the information from this process, we are more prepared than ever going into the next busy season for Smugglers. We will be able to help them make decisions on where to best allocate their marketing dollars based on the data we have on which sources are bringing them the most customers.
Other Indications of Success: Increase in Website Traffic, Lead Conversion, and Email List Growth
Outside of the discount code campaign, we have also seen an increase in site traffic and lead conversions. Before we started working together, the only tracking in place for Smugglers website was Google Analytics.
With 2020 being a difficult and unprecedented year for all businesses, we decided to compare 2019 and 2021 traffic. With the new website live, a content strategy, and paid ads through Facebook and Google underway, so far, sessions are up 70%.
*Google Analytics 2019 (orange) vs 2021 (blue) traffic
We installed the HubSpot tracking code on the old website while we were working on building the new site in the HubSpot CMS so we could see what their visit to lead conversion rate was. From December 3rd to January 20th, on their old website, Smugglers received a 0.41% visit to lead conversion rate.
Following that same period of time, roughly 7 weeks, from January 21st to March 4th, the visit to lead conversion rate was 9.23% after the new website went live. The conversion rate has consistently remained over 9% since.
*New contact growth old website (12/1/2020 - 1/19/21) vs new website (1/20/21 - Present)
This significant increase in lead conversion rate helped continue to grow their email marketing list that they use to send out promotional offers. Coming into our partnership, Smugglers had a list of around 68,000 contacts that they had gathered over years. From February to June of 2021, we helped them grow their list by 7,034 contacts. This is a 9.3% increase in subscribers in 4 months.
Plans For Future Success: Continuing to Leverage the HubSpot Platform and Integration Partners
Looking forward, we are excited to continue helping Smugglers embrace the HubSpot platform.
Right now, all email marketing campaigns outside of the initial Workflow are sent through Mailchimp. We are using HubSpot’s Operations Hub to push new contacts from HubSpot to Mailchimp to keep the list up to date. In the future, we hope to bring all email marketing into HubSpot.
Another initiative that we hope to optimize is their gift card system. As it stands now, when someone wants to purchase a gift card online, they are taken to Paypal to complete the transaction. In the future, we hope to use HubSpot’s integration with Stripe to bring that process into the HubSpot platform as well.
Thanks to creative solutions by our team, the vast integration platform on the HubSpot Ecosystem, and continuous updates to the HubSpot platform, there are plenty of opportunities to continue to help the Smugglers team grow better with HubSpot.
Smugglers Cove Video Testimonial:
George Schiavone - President: Smugglers Cove Adventure Golf
