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At Inntopia, we live our core values every day: innovation, partnership, collaboration, efficiency, partnership, and accountability. Our partners (unofficially) live them, too. As the strategic account manager for SkiBig3, a destination marketing organization based in Canada’s Banff National Park, I have a front row seat to the innovative approaches they take to eCommerce and marketing.
With a long ski season, a well-established sales strategy, and a savvy team of veteran Inntopia Commerce and Marketing Cloud users, SkiBig3 is in an ideal position to experiment. Last year Chis Lamothe, eCommerce Manager at SkiBig3, shared a case study of lessons learned from a quantity-based ticket sale implemented in 2017. Take a look!
As you read and think about your promotions and sales strategies, consider these basic, but invaluable, principles:
When approaching a new sale, as the SkiBig3 team did, consider your current benchmark and your goals. Has your past strategy been successful and you want to further that success? Has a certain type of promotion worked, but only for certain products or times of year? Have your promotion results been, as Chris eloquently wrote, “meh”?
Consider your audience and your timing, too. Does your resort appeal most to those with significant vacation lead time? Do you want to try to entice day trippers? Vice versa? Knowing your consistently slow dates (or days of the week), promotions targeting those periods make sense.
An example of how ad creative can evolve and improve as performance data comes in.
Define your options: if you have known slow periods and an audience you haven’t had much success with before, trying a new promotion or sale strategy should be seen as an opportunity. Brainstorm with your creative team! Deep discounts and limited inventory on one product aren’t the only ways to offer value. Utilize product bundling and offer a gift card for use in-resort, a free helmet rental with equipment, or a discount on a lift ticket and a spa upsell.
Most importantly, use the promotion results to set a benchmark. Did the sale achieve your revenue goals? If not, could you see why? What could you tweak in the next round?
As we at Inntopia know, innovation is an iterative process, so if your first attempt at a new promotion or sale doesn’t hit your goals, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t valuable!
Start selling more of everything your resort has to offer.
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