A few weeks ago I launched a survey around direct mail.

Part of this was an effort to tease out if there was a good story here for a SAM article, but part of it was genuine curiosity because I simply haven’t talked much about direct mail marketing in recent years.

The conversations and insights that come from the survey did in fact blossom into an article that will be in the next issue of SAM, but I also wanted to share this data quickly here.

“Has your resort sent any direct mail marketing in the last 12 months?”

To this question, 52% of marketers who responded said “yes” and 48% said “no”.

This was actually a bit higher than I expected. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this number end up around 25-35%.

“How much direct mail is your resort sending relative to 5 years ago?”

The responses here were 45% significantly less, 10% a little less, 21% about the same, 17% a little more, 7% significantly more.

I wasn’t surprised by that biggest slice, but I was very surprised to see that 25% of resorts are sending more direct mail today than they were 5 years ago.

Very intrigued…

As I talked with marketers, it was clear that the game had changed for direct mail but that it’s still alive and well.

I’ll dig into a bunch of ways resorts are using it in the SAM piece, but I think this quote (actually a mashup from two people who said almost the exact same thing) succinctly sums it up pretty well:

“Direct mail definitely has its place. It’s great for things like passholder communications but we have plenty of more affordable options to communicate with that group if budget becomes an issue.”

Really curious to see where direct mail goes from here. And if you’re doing any interesting campaigns at your resort, I’d love to see some photos or details of your mailers.

This one is harder to keep on top of so I’d appreciate the insight.

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.