Tips
Spring season pass sales season is nearly here and virtually every ski resort is looking to sell as many passes as possible.
You’ve probably lined up big launch emails, consistent social posts, influencer outreach, video ads, direct mail, and a handful of other promotions designed to get your skiers to commit. However, if you’re not including email automations in that plan you could be leaving a lot of revenue on the table.
Here are six examples of pass-related email automations every resort should consider.
With passes, guests aren’t actively building a cart, they’re studying and browsing. They may be *this close* to buying yet still have nothing in their cart. This is why abandoned browse campaigns are so effective. Even better, they use just two simple data points.
Before you begin, find out why shoppers aren’t committing and build your message around those hassles. For example, Les Sommets leaned into the idea that skiers weren’t buying because of unanswered questions. Their campaign simply offered help and saw 3x their usual open rate and $30.96 revenue per email as a result (you can read their full story here→).
Recommending other products for a recent customer to purchase may be more intuitive for someone buying a one-time activity, but there’s a lot of untapped potential for season pass purchases are well. These offers could be a long list of things.
Don’t think of this campaign as a one-and-done. Automate this email to go out a couple days after someone purchases their season pass and again later as a reminder perhaps with different products than the first. It’s a simple but effective way to increase spend from every passholder.
On average, the more days a passholder spends on the mountain, the more likely they are to renew. Start by identifying low-visit cohorts and the number of visits you’d like each of those groups will reach before the season ends. Next, create a series of rewards that encourage skiers to keep visiting and use email automations to both promote and fulfill these rewards.
Eldora Mountain Resort created a series of perks based on how many times a passholder visited in March in an effort to keep more passholders coming later into the season. Once a rider had reached each visitation tier, an email was automatically triggered with details about how to claim their reward. The result was a huge bump in spring visitation (you can read their full story here→).
Many resorts have additional steps that need to be completed before a pass is ready to be printed or scanned. This data should be available in your guest database and can be used to trigger an automated reminder for passholders to take care of these items before they head to the lift.
Part of the reason this is so effective is because every negative experience can impact renewal rate. The anticipation of opening day can quickly be spoiled when an excited skier is stuck in a long line waiting to have their photo taken or sign a waiver. Campaigns like this help avoid those frustrating moments with your resort.
Dig into your data and you’ll likely see cohorts of passholders who book around the same time season after season. Keep in mind that it doesn’t take much more than a nudge to get these pass holders to renew. All you need is three data points:
Mt. Bachelor does a great job of capitalizing on these buying cycles with their Renewal Reminder campaign. With this data as the trigger, the email simply reminds each guest that it’s time renew. In the first month this campaign drove $265,000 in revenue (you can read the full story here).
Bounce back offers are great for getting people to repeat something they recently enjoyed, but adding a little bit of upsell to the mix gives us a perfect strategy for season pass sales. Create an automation that offers recent day-ticket skiers the chance to come back as many times as they’d like by upgrading to a season pass.
Recognizing how the cost of their day ticket may be perceived once they have unlimited access, you may want to sweeten the deal by allowing some of what they spent on their day ticket to be applied toward their season pass.
Looking for a more ideas of marketing automations your resort can spin up for season passes or other experience you offer? Read our free Ultimate Guide to Resort Marketing Automation. It’s packed full of 25 marketing automation ideas complete with triggers, illustrations, strategies, and tips from our team of resort CRM experts.
Grab a free PDF or printed copy at the link below:
https://corp.inntopia.com/tools/ultimate-guide-to-resort-marketing-automation/
Start selling more of everything your resort has to offer.
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