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Customer Stories How Boreal used Inntopia and Purple Wifi to turn free internet into their #1 source of database growth.

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When you run a mountain resort, two things quickly become challenges.

Problem #1

The first is your guests’ ability to stay connected. Wifi is quickly becoming an expectation among travelers even when cell service is good, so in mountainous destinations where coverage is limited at best, this service becomes critical.

Problem #2

The other challenge is gathering emails from visitors that may only come for the day. If you ask for emails at the ticket window? Lines get long, errors are frequent, and nobody is happy. And not all customers even need to stop by the window. But you need those emails in order to bring those guests back again and again, so what do you do?

If you’re like Boreal Mountain California, you start with Purple Wifi.

Gated Wifi Access

Purple Wifi makes it incredibly easy to require an email or social sign-on to access the free wifi your business provides. And because wifi is so ubiquitous, that ease-of-use for both the marketer and the guest translated into the addition of more than 41,000 email addresses over a period of just 18 months with nearly ⅓ coming from guests logging in via social media.

According to Tucker Norred, Boreal’s Marketing Communications Manager,

“Simply put Purple wifi is our best form of email sign ups. We get the most data on the customer, we can hyper target, and we are getting valid data. When customers use the social media option to log in we are getting their actual email address that they use for that social profile, as well as many more fields that we would not get if they had simply purchased a product online.”

From there, Boreal uses Purple Wifi’s more advanced tools to retarget people by IP address, social media ID, and more. And with their proximity to warmer climates and cities like San Francisco and Oakland, they use the sign-in confirmation screen to serve unique messaging that converts people who just came to experience snow into first time skiers and snowboarders.

Integrated with CRM Profiles

But the last thing a resort like Boreal wants is siloed data. And as long-time users of Inntopia Marketing Cloud as their CRM, they needed a way to bridge the two.

Thanks to a powerful API from Purple Wifi, Inntopia was able to quickly build an integration that pulled all those new contacts into Boreal’s CRM. And with Inntopia’s 3-stage cleansing and matching process, they were automatically matched to households, previous transactions, lifetime spend, and more. Boreal could then use all of those datapoints for automated email follow up to compliment the retargeting and other outreach enabled by Purple Wifi.

More Emails + Better Profiles

So not only is Boreal getting tens of thousands of new email addresses every season thanks to Purple Wifi, they’re able to get those contacts and their on-premise behaviors right next to everything else they know about their guests thanks to Inntopia.

The result has been massive growth to their database and better targeted marketing messages to drive revenue and customer satisfaction.


Check out Purple Wifi’s version of this case study on their website.

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Tyler Maynard
SVP of Business Development
Ski / Golf / Destination Research
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Doug Kellogg
Director of Business Development
Hospitality / Attractions
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