Yesterday i was talking about kids and playgrounds and the little things that can help families not only make the trip to your resort but have an awesome time when they do.

Among other things, I suggested resorts write a blog post about their playgrounds and then:

“..jump into your guest database / CRM and find all the families with young kids. Maybe toss in a drive radius to focus on families that could make a road trip of it and then…send it to them in an email to generate some immediate bookings and traffic.”

But I wanted to ask a question around that email that I think is one we need to be asking more often.

Repeatable?

For the last couple years I’ve had email automation on the brain. It’s why I worked with the account managers at Inntopia to write an entire book on the subject. The question I ask with campaigns like the one I outlined above is simply this:

“How different would that campaign look if I sent it again next year around the same time?”

Chances are:

• The copy could be the same
• The timing could be the same
• The traits I’m using to build my audience could be the same
• The template could be the same

Which makes me wonder; what if that campaign were built as an annual automation instead of a one-off send. It may take, maybe, 20% more time, but it would deliver value for years to come without any additional work.

Different Mindset

On the one hand, you may have already made a mental list of all the emails that couldn’t be automated as easily because, for example, pass deadlines and prices and such are always changing and events are always different. But you’ve also likely thought of other situations where you tend to deliver the same campaigns to the same groups with roughly the same message every year.

And you’ve also likely thought of how the mindset around emails would need to change. For example, marketing calendars would have to account for more of these already scheduled, ongoing messages.

But like so many parts of marketing, new ideas start by asking questions and that’s what I’m hoping to do here – just get the wheels spinning in a new direction and see where they take us. Maybe they will take us to a dead end, but maybe…just maybe…there’s a kernel in there worth some time.

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.