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As my life plods along, I find myself speaking in absolutes less and less. The language of uncertainty, it seems, tends to suit me better than the confident proclamations of “i know” and “you must” and “definitely” and “have to” that are plenty common in marketing (and life) these days.

But you’ll notice a departure from that trend in the title of this post.

I’ve set the bar higher than I normally would for a topic, so let me do my best to back up that absolute with where my head is at when it comes to the intersection between resort marketing and marketing automation.

The Future…

Exactly one decade ago, in the summer of 2014, I published a 5-part series about what I saw as the future of email marketing (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). At the crux of what I felt coming down the road was a belief that we were only in chapter 2 of a 5 chapter story. Here’s how I said it in part 5 of that series:

“Instead of creating the same email for everyone (Chapter 1, newsletters) or manually trying to create multiple emails for different groups (Chapter 2, segmentation), or trying to personally send one-to-one emails to everyone in the database (Chapter 3), we let someone (a computer) discover a customer’s tastes and someone else (another computer) create a message to match. Then, our role is mainly to keep a fridge full of effective email pieces ready for the more common requests (Chapter 4).“

In other words, I believed that resort email marketing would progress to the point where, potentially, almost everything could be automated.

Are we there yet? No. But we have crossed an important milestone in this journey.

Not Just Satisfaction

In the early days of resort marketing automation (15+ years ago), campaigns – and marketers’ expectations for automation – were focused primarily on guest satisfaction. Pre arrival emails prevented trips from starting poorly, post departure emails quickly gauged whether a trip went well or not while there was still time to act, and variations of both helped guests between those two points.

Along the way (10-15 years ago) other transaction-related automations grew in popularity as upsell, cross-sell, and bounce-back emails started to actually generate measurable revenue from these hands-free messages.

In the last five years, however, all the lessons learned from those lodging-centric email automations have given rise to a whole series of pass- and ticket-related automations that take advantage of the same principle (trigger a key message based on a key behavior to increase retention or conversion), but deployed them at the scale season pass and ticket sales to generate not just a little, but significant revenue.

One simple example comes from a story I wrote about an automation that Mt Bachelor uses where they said:

“In the first month this campaign generated $265,000 in revenue. Even more, open rates are around 65% and click rates at 13%. It’s been a perfect compliment to all of our other season pass marketing.”

That last line – “a perfect compliment” – would be a great way to describe the last half-decade of automation. Marketing automation is now playing a key role alongside other, traditional campaigns in generating a meaningful share of resort revenue.

What’s even more important, however, is that these campaigns are no longer isolated exceptions. Resorts are seeing the same success for a long list of campaign types and products.

Taking Pressure Off

I think, however, we’re moving into a new chapter for resort marketing automation. I was documenting something internally at Inntopia when I finally found words for what I was seeing. To paraphrase without sharing too much, this is roughly what I wrote:

“Every time this resort connected the dots between a guest behavior that represented a key opportunity and a marketing automation matched to that opportunity, they generated a little bit more hands-free revenue. The more of these automations they turned on, the more pressure was taken off the marketing to always be delivering new campaigns.“

Marketing teams are often like a team of cooks in a kitchen. The moment you finish up one order, the next order is already waiting. This constant demand to always be delivering top-tier ideas and creative and campaigns can be exhausting which, in turn, can make that creativity harder to muster. This is especially true as team sizes stall (or shrink) and turnover remains a challenge.

But what I was describing was marketing automation that was playing such a significant role in terms of revenue generation that it was actually removing some of the on-demand pressure off those traditional campaigns.

Building Blocks, Not Band-Aids

Let me try to sum this up another way.

Sometimes we build our marketing strategies and think of automations after the fact. We plan our attack for the year and plug any holes or address pesky behavior with an automation along the way. What I’m referring to here is treating your marketing automations as a fundamental building block of your strategy. Bricks you can stack, one on top of another, to build almost a corner stone of your marketing foundation.

That’s a change in mindset and that requires automations to be prioritized at the same level as brand campaigns, content plan, ad buys, and social strategy. It’s where I’m seeing a few resorts going and where I’d expect more to go in the coming years.

If you haven’t put automations on that level yet and given it more priority in your marketing strategy – or at least discussions about strategy – now might be the right time to take that step.

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.