See You in December: E-Mail Helps Ski Resort Stay in Touch
(Direct) Just because winter is over doesn’t mean the marketing has stopped at luxury ski resort operator Intrawest.
The firm stays in touch with skiers even during off months through a CRM program in which e-mail messages are tailored to their profiles. And, as is the case every May, its marketing department is busy promoting summer products and activities.
“Most of our resorts have a robust summer program where there’s mountain biking, hiking and golf activities going on,” says Randy Cuff, Intrawest’s director of CRM and e-mail marketing. “Part of our strategy is to have four-season resorts.”
Intrawest, which operates hot North American resorts like Whistler Blackcomb, Squaw Valley and Winter Park, does between 1,600 and 1,800 e-mail blasts per year.
Among these are weekly countdown e-mails or customized “get ready for your vacation” messages to people who are soon to visit. Every Tuesday, the firm pulls the names of anyone who has a reservation at any of its sites in the following seven to 14 days.
The purpose? To remind recipients how many days until their vacation begins and include information to make their stay easier.
Intrawest tailors its e-mail by automatically drawing from more than 750 pieces of dynamic content — like whether the person is a first-time or repeat visitor, or if he or she lives in the area of the resort they’ve booked.
Those who live in the area won’t need directions. And they won’t get them. But the e-mails are much more than customer service vehicles — they’re also aimed at cross-selling other services.
“For example, if they haven’t booked a ski lesson we will suggest that in the welcoming e-mail,” Cuff says.
At one point, Intrawest sent multiple countdown e-mails to customers but found that they offered no real benefit.
“We used to do two pre-arrival messages. We did some analysis and found there’s no uptick compared to when we tested it against one,” says Cuff. “When we launched the program we actually started with three, if you can believe it, but we found that if we have one message that’s well executed and very succinct, it will perform.”
The e-mails also promote retail outlets at the resort and link to the local weather forecast.
“The big thing Intrawest does is it understands critical events across the customer life cycle,” says Scott Olrich, chief marketing officer for Responsys, which facilitates the customized messages with its Interact software. “Intrawest’s e-mail comes off as very services-oriented marketing, but it’s ultimately driving substantial cross-selling.”
For example, though Intrawest may own the resort the customer is visiting, there’s still quite a bit of competition for the money they’ll spend while there, according to Olrich.
“If Intrawest can get you to stay at its resort, plus get you to go to its ski rental place, go to its restaurants and masseuses and use its gyms, it makes a lot more money,” he says.
An added benefit to the e-mail welcome program is that it answers a lot of frequently asked questions, taking some of the load off the firm’s teleservices group.
While exact numbers are hard to quantify, the e-mails have led to a significant drop in non revenue-generating calls, if not actual call volume, Cuff says.
“The calls still come in, but some of them are now revenue generating,” he continues. “For example, we’ve promoted the notion of ‘Rent your skis before you get here.'”
Intrawest also uses e-mail in an innovative way to get people who’ve taken one ski lesson to sign up for another, says Olrich.
The company has determined that people who take only one ski lesson tend not to come back. However, people who take two often become lifelong skiers, he says.
As a result, the instructor takes a photo of the rookie skier during the first session and later uploads it into an e-mail using Responsys’ Interact.
The teacher then e-mails the photo to the pupil with tips on how to improve and an invitation to sign up for the next lesson. The results from this program apparently are not in yet, but anecdotally it seems to be working, according to Olrich.
“They’re very smart about making customers feel that they’re very service oriented, but [they’re also] creating another touch point to talk to customers and upsell them,” Olrich says of Intrawest. “They figure out smart ways to use marketing to drive desired actions.”
Intrawest uses e-mail to cross-sell its different resorts.
“Our e-mail marketing is an extension of our CRM department,” says Cuff. He adds that all of Intrawest’s customer information sits in one central “data mart,” and that the company employs database marketing techniques like predictive modeling to determine who might be most responsive to a particular offer.
Intrawest e-mails its local audience as well, a group that isn’t necessarily as profitable as those who visit from afar but is a bread-and-butter revenue segment all the same.
Most of Intrawest’s resorts are near metropolitan areas with a population that’s passionate about skiing — like Denver, Montreal and Vancouver, British Columbia. So the firm has made custom snow reports available to the locals based on their preferences.
“Some people want to get a snow report every single day and see how much snow fell last night,” Cuff says. “Other people want to be notified when, say, 3 or 5 inches of snow fell.”
Intrawest’s resorts typically have tens of thousands of locals signed up to get e-mail snow-condition alerts, according to Cuff. As evidence of how valued the program is, Cuff recently learned of a delivery problem he had because subscribers complained. “We got a bunch of e-mails saying, ‘Hey, where’s my snow report?'”
But according to Cuff, this is not to say that Intrawest is abandoning direct mail for e-mail. “We sell experiences and there’s something to be said for getting a glossy brochure that has a beautiful shot of the big blue sky and the white, fresh powder on it that [recipients] may place on their coffee table or pass around to different family members. It’s [has a lot more impact] than getting everyone to stand around the computer and look at a PDF.”
