What do you get when you take piles of resort marketing data and an excuse to dig through it every week to find something cool? One happy me. Over at Ryan Solutions, I’ve been doing just that. Every week we come up with some tough-to-answer resort marketing question and dig through the data to find an answer.

With a couple months of such shenanigans in the books, I thought I’d share a few of my favorites and at least let you know about it so you can keep up with what’s going on over there with what we call the “Stash”.

Social Activity vs RFM Scores
RFM is a way to segment or rate the value of a guest by how often they come, how recent last visit was, and how much they spend at your resort. The higher the RFM the more valuable they are to your bottom line.

The takeaway was pretty clear: social media messages have a better chance of reaching your low RFM guests than those with high RFM.
http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/social-rfm-are-your-most-valuable-guests-active-on-social-media/

Effects of Specific Words on Email Open Rates
You’ll have to click the link below for the full list (too long to share here), but well worth your time. One simple takeaway is that weather related words get 25% more opens than promotional words.
http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/what-effect-do-specific-words-have-on-ski-resort-email-open-rates/

Season Pass Renewal Rate vs Scan Count
This was a question I always wanted to chase and, though it took a while to make it happen, really provided some interesting insights.

http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/q-if-someone-uses-their-season-pass-x-times-whats-the-likelihood-theyll-renew-their-pass/

Low Snow Total vs. Affluent Guests
Wealthy guests shouldn’t worry about wasting money on less-than-perfect skiing, right? That’s not what we found. In 2011/2012, wealthy destinations guests dropped by 43% for the resorts we looked at. Everyone else only dropped by 7%.

http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/q-did-affluent-destination-guests-change-their-habits-during-a-low-snow-year/

Yearly Email Open / Click Trends
Forget this month-by-month stuff, we looked at daily open and click rates for ski resorts for every day of the year.


http://www.ryansolutions.com/blog/2012/q-how-does-ski-resort-email-performance-fluctuate-throughout-the-year/

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.