First, welcome to the world of resort marketing.

The last 18 months have seen a huge wave of new faces joining the ranks as teams look to backfill positions lost from the early days of covid, the great resignation, and the natural ebbs and flows of folks coming and going.

I need to talk to you, though, about the marketing channels you rely on and the ones you’re inspired by.

Channels

Along our individual marketing journeys, we’ve all had moments of inspiration that motivated us to keep going, to push our personal limits, to strive for innovative campaigns and ideas. Things like:

• Companies who went big on YouTube and it paid off
• The forward thinking brands “killing it” on TikTok
• Twitter top brand tweets of 2021 list

This are all incredible bits of marketing. They’re creative, built on the shoulder of years of careful audience building and consistency, and deserve all the accolades they’ve received.

Nuts & Bolts

But some day in the future you’re gonna need to do some real, hard-nosed marketing stuff. Things like:

• Fill a week where occupancy is pacing well below normal
• Sell $50,000 worth of passes to hit your goal
• Drive midweek demand up a few percentage points the rest of the month

And you’re gonna need a channel that can deliver that on time, on budget, and on demand. And do you know what channel is able to that?

Email.

Email is Sexy

Email isn’t sexy because it gets the headlines, email is sexy because it works. It gets the right people from point A (their office, a couch, the bathroom, etc.) to point B (your sales page, booking engine, etc.) more effectively than any other channel.

Maybe you’ve poked fun at emails with your friends and embracing this channel would take eating a healthy serving of crow.

Eat it. Get over it. And start to embrace this channel.

Four Reasons

There are a lot of reasons email is so powerful, but here are four that hit home for me.

#1 One-to-One
The first is that everything from deliver to engagement is completely one-to-one. You can send a unique message to a specific person based on their exact profile and know exactly who opens it, when then click, what they click, etc. No other channel can touch this level of insight into marketing behavior and performance.

#2 Customer Preference
Time and time again, research shows that this is where consumers prefer to receive their marketing. Instead of fighting against desires on other channels, email allows you to work with those preferences.

#3 The ROI
When you look at industry averages, email brings in an average of $44 to every $1 spent. In our industry, it can actually be much, much higher. The revenue email generates and the speed at which is generates it is incredible.

#4 Automation
Finally, it can be completely automated to a level no other channel can. When automated, it’s one of the best companions to your guest-facing employees to increase satisfaction and loyalty.

Embrace It…

I’ll talk more about what I mean by “embrace it” tomorrow, but for now just take a moment to peel back the layers a bit and see if you have any bias you have toward email.

If you do, do some deep breathing and try to see it as the marketing workhorse it continues to be.

See you tomorrow.

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.