Happy Christmas

We are wrapping up the year with a few good marketing ideas, a bit of positive thinking, a couple of things to look forward to in 2012, our ‘Christmas quiz’ and an opportunity to get your business greater visibility.

We also have a festive message for you from the ‘GC Elves’ which you can see at the end of this post.

Well before CocaCola painted Santa red and the Christmas card industry had yet to be invented people celebrated the Winter solstice with a feast to mark the fact that they had survived the first half of winter and things now would start to get better.

Whatever 2012 may bring, we deserve to kick back and relax and celebrate our achievements over the last year.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that it’s hard to see into the future and that those who forecast doom and gloom can sometimes get it wrong.

The weathermen all said that this winter would be the worst in living memory and so far – touch wood – they couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Perhaps the climate in 2012 will be brighter than we are being led to believe?

Five gold rings…

Next summer, London will be hosting the Olympics. OK, the rings aren’t all gold but aside from the economic jolt that the games are supposed to give the country, there will be hours and hours of swimming and diving on our TV screens and that can do our industry nothing but good.

You can also bet that a lot of the marketing and media buzz around the Games will focus on health and fitness – qualities that lie at the heart of all the sectors that make up the wet leisure industry.

It all makes for an opportunity to look forward to and to plan for.

All I want for Christmas is..?

Katherine Whitehorn, the journalist, once said, ‘From a commercial point of view, if Christmas did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.’

Perhaps we tend to see this time of year as our off season but the people who rightly love their pool, sauna or spa will have friends and family desperate to find gift ideas for them.

If you offer gift vouchers and certificates then they can be spent on accessories, toys or even chemicals. Gift cards and certificates make up about 10% of all spending on Christmas presents and making them available for people to buy and give as gifts needn’t cost you much effort or money.

Did we send everyone a card?

Over the next few weeks everyone’s inbox and letterbox are going to be inundated with festive messages from friends, family and total strangers.

(Did you click on the link at the top of the newsletter and see our festive message?)

If you have a customer database and a customer relationship management program or you are active on Social Media it might seem that it’s mandatory to wish all your customers a happy Christmas.

The choice is down to you, of course, but including a good, relevant piece of news or an offer – the idea of gift certificates for instance – will make it much more worthwhile than simply wishing them well and being lost in the clutter.

If you do have some spare time, then using it to up-date your database ready for next year would certainly be a profitable way to spend it.

Your Christmas quiz.

I hope that, for all of us, there’ll be plenty of eating, drinking and merry making with friends and family. I’m sure that there will be plenty of rubbish on TV and more than a handful of repeats.

If you want to get out of doing the washing up or escape from a particularly embarrassing or boring party game, then I have just the ticket.

Take a couple of minutes to complete our survey and help us gauge how well the industry is doing at the moment.

The survey is anonymous; so don’t be afraid of speaking your mind.

We are all in this industry together and the more information on the true size of our market and what lies ahead, the easier it will be for all of us to plan accordingly.

Other industries and markets have facts, figures and statistics that are available to all and they help people make better decisions and grow better businesses. We should be the same.

The results will be announced at SPATEX and then made available, free of charge, to everyone in the wet leisure industry.

We have had a good response already; so don’t think that you are going to be the first or indeed the only person who fills in the questionnaire. To get to the form, just follow this link.

YourIndustry.co

By the time you read this, we will have launched two new websites – YourSpa and YourSauna – that compliment YourPool, which we launched earlier this year.

The idea behind these sites is to promote each aspect of our industry to the consumer with articles, links and information that will sell the benefits of the wet leisure industry and therefore hopefully grow the business for all of us.

Don’t forget to get yourself registered on WetLeisure.co because all of our Golden Coast customers will have their information displayed, without any cost to you, on each of the consumer sites – YourPool, YourSpa and YourSauna.

If you have any thoughts you’d like to share about any issues raised in this newsletter then please use the comment box below.

Once again, wishing you a happy Christmas and prosperous New Year from everyone at Golden Coast and if  you haven’t see it already, make sure to watch the elves Christmas message to you –  just click the banner at the top of the newsletter or click here

 

Tags: 2012, christmas, database, Katherine Whitehorn, news letter, olympics, pool, sauna, spa, SPATEX, survey, wet leisure, wetleisure, yourpool, yoursauna, yourspa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Industry Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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