I am smitten by Squaw’s new website. Yes, it’s beautifully designed. Yes, it’s wonderfully responsive. Yes, it’s easy to get around. But what I want to highlight this week is the marketing BEHIND all that. Because that, my friends, is the best I’ve ever seen. Huge kudos to Squaw and Origin.

The first thing I noticed, unsurprisingly, was a reflection of my love for a good, high-priority email capture system on a website.

A few weeks back I ranted about these:

And how it was like putting “food” on a menu instead of a “Bleu-Cheese Bacon Smokehouse Burger from 100% Angus Beef.”

This is no new ideas, but I was pumped to see Squaw turn their “newsletter” form into something much, much more attractive and appealing.

The Form
The form go full, 100% width real estate and featured a “SEND ME DEALS” headline followed by this copy:

Ready to earn the title of Parent of the Year? Sign up here and we’ll send you everything you need to plan your family’s best winter vacation. Plus, we’ll enter you in our weekly drawing to win two Squaw | Alpine adult lift tickets.

Get deals, helpful info, and a chance to win free tickets? A 1, 2, 3 punch that is bound to lead to many more email opt-ins from their website than they’ve ever had.

But wait, there’s more.

The Next (Better) Page
When you opt-in, you find yourself on a “complete my profile” page like you see on other sites, but there’s one difference.

You’re already opted-in.

This isn’t some dummy form that leads to a bigger form (which is more common than you think), it captures the opt-in and then asks for more. Not everyone will fill out a complete profile, but for those that don’t there’s no loss…they’re already in the system and, so being, you can follow up later and try to get them to fill out a few more details then…or another time…or a year later…which is only possible if you capture first and ask later.

Last Words
I love this site. The design is incredible, but the marketing is even better.

Sure there are things they could change, tweak, test, improve. But the core, the principles behind the scenes, are all there.

And, as such, I’m calling it right now: this is the best resort website I’ve ever seen.

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.