Customer Stories
With some of the world’s most stunning scenery, The Lake Louise Ski Resort in beautiful Alberta, Canada is an iconic destination. Going into the 2025/26 ski season, they had a unique opportunity that’s rare even for a resort like theirs. Thanks to a new terrain addition and lift, Lake Louise is set to become the second largest resort in Canada.
Here’s how the resort’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Emmett McPartlin, described what this moment meant for their team.
“As a resort, we’re committed deeply to investing in the guest experience. This new addition, Richardson’s Ridge, includes our fourth new lift in five years and takes our skiing experience to a level we’ve never had before. We really wanted to capitalize on this story and momentum.”
At the center of that experience is a unique, accessible zone of low-angle, gladed skiing that is incredibly rare on Alberta’s tightly-wooded slopes. Served by a new high-speed quad and moving them just one rung from being Canada’s largest resort, they had one of their strongest marketing stories in years.
Luckily, a smaller moment was also aligning for their team.
As this addition was ramping up, Lake Louise was entering their second year on the Inntopia Marketing Cloud platform. After getting all their guest data centralized, householded, and cleansed in a single database, they had built a solid foundation of data and marketing strategy around those insights and were ready to take it to the next level just as the news around Richardson’s Ridge was falling into place.
For them, that next level meant analyzing how specific guests were engaging with their marketing to ensure everyone was aware of the incredible new terrain that was coming. As they did, the team noticed something important in the data. Here’s how Kevin Gardner, the resort’s Website Manager, put it.
“Email is a key pillar in our marketing foundation and now we have really granular data around performance so we could see exactly which of our most important guests weren’t opening or clicking. Inntopia gave us the ability to identify a key segment of guests that wasn’t engaging, which in turn allowed us to reach them on other channels to ensure they knew about the new terrain and new lift.”
Together with Inntopia’s Account Services Director, Lindsay Haller, the group started brainstorming the best way to reach this important, but unengaged audience. Using that guest data and the team’s experience, they settled on a clever, overlooked channel: direct mail.
Direct mail isn’t cheap, so the Lake Louise team used Inntopia to further refine that list to only their most valuable guests that they felt were most likely to engage. Emmett and the team combined the compelling visuals around the Richardson’s Ridge expansion with inviting, action-oriented language to create a postcard that was neatly-aligned to the group of households they were targeting.
And the results? Here’s what Emmett said about both this initial campaign and what they plan to do next.
“This data-driven campaign worked so well that we’re already planning on another similar campaign later this fall, targeting a different segment. We’ve already identified a couple things to improve and think it will be a perfect way to keep the momentum strong around all the exciting things happening around the mountain. A more accessible and usable database of guests is proving to be a key factor in our evolving multi-channel strategy.”
With a long list of mountain improvements to share with their audience, a database marketing platform to help them ensure that every guest hears the news, and a talented team behind the scenes to make the most of both of those resources, The Lake Louise Ski Resort is in a solid position heading into the 2025/26 season.
Learn more about Lake Louise:
https://www.skilouise.com/
Learn more about Inntopia Marketing Cloud:
https://corp.inntopia.com/marketing/
