It’s pass sales season. Maybe you heard. Or maybe you’re in a darkness retreat trying to plan your next career move.

So being, we’re seeing a lot of the classic “buy a pass now, ski free this spring” sort of campaigns. It’s a great way to get folks to switch, to commit, to come back, or just finally pull the trigger on a pass.

But I wanted to highlight something Cherry Peak tried this year that does something similar with a little less commitment up front. It’s a 3-step process.

1) Extended Deadline

The first is that they extended their deadline. This planted a very specific day in the minds of folks and also decreased the likelihood someone will just say “oh, they’ll probably extend.”

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2) $10 Night Skiing for Other Passholders

Next, they offered passholders of others mountains an awesome deal. It was lightweight, easy to say yes to, and available to folks who are highly likely to buy a season pass because…well…they already have (just to a different mountain).

3) Apply Toward a Season Pass

But the nice little layer they added onto this offer was that whatever they spend on this ticket could be applied toward a season pass if they end up seeing the light.

Primed

Perks for passholders at other mountains are a thing, so are perks for skiing during the spring tied to buying a pass for next season.

What Cherry Peak did was simply weave these two ideas together.

Now, $10 isn’t much to apply toward a pass. Sure, $50 would make a bigger difference. But what $10 does is get many more people to bite. And if they bite, they’re going to do with a little seed planted in their mind that, if they have a great time, they could grab a slightly discounted pass to the mountain they’re skiing. All of which sets them up for a nice little follow up campaign sometime before this next deadline to try to convert a handful of those people to passholders.

Good stuff.

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.