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.

Every action in marketing has two parts: an actor an at least one theme.

For example, let’s say you see this photo on Twitter and click “favorite”. You were the actor, and the theme was “mountain biking”.

Bike Park now open daily! Season passes still available. 5 mountains in 3 states for $349: http://t.co/9zm50w3XGb pic.twitter.com/SB96gMK3qy

— Northstar California (@SkiNorthstar) June 27, 2014

What can we assume about you? Well, obviously, there’s a chance you like mountain biking.

Now that’s not very convincing evidence but, then again, that’s not your only interaction. You’ve liked a few other things as well:

• A photo of a new feature in the bike park (mountain biking)
• A video shared of last year’s Red Bull Rampage (mountain biking)
• A post about a new craft beer (beer)
• A photo of a quiet morning in the village (peace & quiet)

Suddenly we start to see a web of both actions (mountain biking, beer, etc.) and motivations (peace & quiet, etc.) for you as an individual.

But it’s not just a list, by aggregating and counting these interactions, patterns start to develop around which ones are most important to you.

Dots Are Everywhere
When I first joined Ryan Solutions my secret mission quickly became finding a way to match who John Doe is in the database to who he is on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Between those data points, as well as others we can track and tie to an individual, we begin to see these dots everywhere that connect an actor to a theme and start filling out this model.

• Email opens
• Email clicks
• Facebook likes
• Facebook comments
• Facebook clicks
• Twitter favorites
• Twitter retweets
• Twitter clicks
• Website pageviews
• Website clicks

By placing each interaction into this model, we slowly start to see WHAT someone might want to do at your resort and, perhaps more importantly, WHY they’d want to do it.

The Switch
As we start to see these patterns develop, a potential shift in the approach of social media also begins to emerge.

Instead of trying to get engagement for the sake of engagement, you are trying to get specific people to engage on specific things. You’re trying to get individuals not just to act, but act in a way that would signal their interest in a topic.

Perhaps, instead of a photo album of random images, it’s a photo album with one image to represent each reason someone might come so every engagement tells us something about the engager.

The Key: Words
The big key here is distilling specific ideas down into words. Then dividing those words into the two categories we started with: actions and reasons.

There are many ways we could take this idea from where it is now, but those two pieces are the building blocks I’ll use to highlight a simple path that has the potential to not only be effective, but also very actionable.

That’s tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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.