Customer Stories How Les Sommets used Inntopia Marketing Cloud to Turn Abandoned Shoppers into New Passholders

Nestled in the heart of Quebec’s beautiful Laurentian Mountains sits a group of five ski areas known as Les Sommets.

A strong brand spanning all four seasons, Les Sommets’ singular mission is to get people to move, to get outside, and to enjoy the camping, skiing, water park, golf, mountain coasters, and other activities on offer in this idyllic setting only an hour from Montreal.

Challenge 1

Despite the four-season model, ski season is still one of the anchors of their business. Which means one of the most critical periods for Les Sommets is fall season pass sales. Season passes lock in revenue and loyalty long before the snow flies, but the window to capitalize is short and competition is fierce. Every deadline counts.

Challenge 2

Les Sommets’ conversion rates were good, but there were thousands of people who shopped for passes, compared their options, but ultimately failed to purchase. They needed a better way to get these people to commit.

The solution was an abandoned browse campaign. Here’s how Kendall Wilson, the Inntopia Account Manager who works with Les Sommets, describes it:

“While abandoned cart campaigns are great at targeting people who are very close to purchasing, we want to also be able to target contacts that are still a step or two away from actually putting an item in their cart. Browsing behavior is an important indicator of intent to purchase, and that’s where abandoned browse campaigns comes in.”

Les Sommets + Inntopia

Inntopia Marketing Cloud is designed to eliminate silos so data from different systems can work seamlessly together, and this is a perfect example of why that is so important. Les Sommets created a campaign that tied together browsing behavior from the website, transactions from the database, and email behavior from their ESP to target anyone that:

1. Visited the season pass page on Les Sommets’ website within the last 24 hours (WEB)
2. Had not yet purchased a 2018/19 season pass (TRANSACTIONAL)
3. Had not received an abandoned browse email in the last 14 days (EMAIL)

Rather than make this a hard sell, Les Sommets recognized these people were already interested and simply focused on being helpful. The subject line read:

“Need help deciding?”

The email campaign kept this theme throughout:

The results were impressive. Here’s what Les Sommets’ Marie-Pier Gauthier said:

“This email generated a significant increase in our sales of season passes before the cut-off date. It also helped us reach our ecommerce goals.”

A few specifics.

3x Open Rate
The average open rate of these campaigns was a whopping 68.6%, three times that of a typically pass promotion email.

$30.96 Revenue per Email
Every email that went out generated on average more than $30 in revenue. Revenue that, previously, was often lost to other mountains or indecision.

Overwhelming Response
Another fascinating result was the number of personal email replies they received from contacts asking which pass would best meet their needs. They saw so many of these, in fact, that Les Sommets eventually changed the reply address to their customer service team.

Strategy + Unified Data

With a smart strategy, a not-very-salesy message, and all their guest data working together, Les Sommets was able to capitalize on this critical phase of their season with an extremely effective automated campaign and then measure their results in real time.