This week I’m temporarily returning to my daily-posting roots to share my vision of how I see the future of resort email marketing. Enjoy.

When we found out that Kim was pregnant, we decided to tell our families in person at Thanksgiving. Problem was, we found out in early October.

So for two months conversations with our families centered on the mundane, the usual, while the news of our impending parenthood secretly bubbled under the surface.

That’s how I feel about an idea I’ve been playing with for the better part of a year and a half.

Strengths and Not-So-Strengths
Let’s start simple. One of the biggest problems with today’s information age is volume. Though a bit of news may be critically important, it’s quickly buried under fresh stories yearning for eyeballs and, before too long, any specialness is lost.

Such is the case with a small tidbit published two years ago by Exact Target. In effect, their question was simply:

“Preferred Channel for Promotional Messages From Companies Whom I Have Granted Permission to Send Me Ongoing Information”

And this is what respondents said:

Source: Convince & Convert

This highlights one, critical principle that sports coaches have understood for years: success often depends on creating a system that maximizes the strengths of your key players.

So what are our key web marketing players best at? Let’s quickly discuss.

Social Media
Social is good at getting people to interact with your brand and see typically generic, one-size-fits-all content. It’s also good at driving traffic to websites (including your own).

Email
Email is great at delivering unique content to unique people. According to the survey mentioned above, that’s also where people want to see offers. And email is awesome at creating traffic for specific, “next step” pages on your website.

Website
Websites are great at sealing the deal. This is where people are accustomed to handing over a credit card. This is where transactions can take place.

The Idea
The idea I’ll elaborate on this week plays to the strengths of each channel.

It has the potential to change the way we think about social media, the types of content you share there and the reasons you do so. It also holds the ability to tap into the full potential of both email and websites.

You might call it something like “a guest-centric approach to web marketing”, but I’m going to call it the future. Buckle up.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.