Q: Skiers love their snow, but do storms actually influence skier behavior?

Without snow, the ski industry wouldn’t exist. Diehards live, pray, and dream of the white stuff, but does the fact it’s snowing at your resort today and not tomorrow impact the way skiers behave on any given day? A challenging question, but one we certainly weren’t going to back down from. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
The key here was to identify a common behavior that we could correlate to days that it did or did not snow at a resort. The metric we chose was email open rates. Much more common than cash transactions, open rates would help us see if snowfall would increase the relevancy of a ski resort’s message to a skier and thus the reaction to it.

We took snowfall history for a 100 day stretch during the 2011/2012 season, provided by Weather Underground, for the city each resort’s address is listed in. If any snow fell from midnight to midnight, that day was marked as a “snow day”. We used three message types for the analysis:

• Email newsletters/blasts: to see if something broadcast to a wide audience would be affected
• Daily snow reports: to see if people who find daily/weekly snow reports relevant enough to act on them would be affected
• Recurring messages like pre-arrival or post-departure emails: to see if people close to a ski vacation would be affected

Here’s what we found.

And here are the actual open rate percentages:

• News/Blasts – Snow: 28.55% – No Snow: 27.92% (+0.64 pct pts, +2.28% overall)
• Snow Reports – Snow: 29.37% – No Snow: 28.00% (+1.37 pct pts, +4.88% overall)
• Recurring – Snow: 52.77% – No Snow: 52.27% (+0.50 pct pts, +0.95% overall)

What This Means
The first takeaway is the obvious one: snow does appear to have a positive impact on skier behavior. While the differences aren’t drastic, keep in mind that many of these people aren’t local and haven’t run into a social post or news report that told them it’s snowing at your mountain. There’s a good chance these factors are slightly diluting the actual effect of the snowfall.

Snow reports, an email that locals are more likely to subscribe to, might show a truer number with their 4.9% increase in click rates overall. The bottom line is this: snowfall at your resort does make your resort’s marketing more relevant to your skiers. It may not be much depending on the type and reach of the message, but when the storms roll through, take full advantage.

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