Trends Q: How many people on resort email lists are leads versus paying customers?

With the justifiably heavy focus on guest satisfaction, loyalty, and retention, sometimes the idea of converting leads into guests is overlooked. But how much potential is there? How many emailable people in a resort’s quiver haven’t yet transacted at the mountain? That was our question, this is what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we pulled transactional and email data from 40 U.S. mountain resorts. We decided to only include emailable guests so there was a clear way to move them from non-customer to customer. Then we divided those who had a transaction in the database (customers) from those who didn’t (leads).

From the resorts in this sample, the average split between these groups was 46% leads and 54% customers. Keep in mind that this does depend on factors like how/if data is gathered at the point of sale or multiple emails assigned to one customer through transactions, so if anything the “customer” stat may be slightly underreported.

What This Means
But even with a difference of a few percentage points, this still means there are potentially hundreds of thousands of leads at some resorts that could be moved toward a transaction.

It’s very rare, however, to see these non-customers segmented out and talk to directly. So perhaps they need a place of their own in your efforts or a series of campaigns that drops some of the assumptions of other communications. After all, if they haven’t spent money at your mountain yet, they may not know what they’re missing.

Round 106
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