I wish I had access to data beyond just Inntopia, but I don’t. So please forgive me for this accurate, but one-sided, perspective on email.

A while back I decided to pull some stats for some Inntopia Marketing Cloud clients. Now, resorts use Marketing Cloud for a lot of stuff, but I really wanted to understand email. And, specifically, the ROI if email was the only thing they did on the platform.

So I rounded up the fees folks were paying (for everything, not just email), grabbed annual revenue numbers attributed to all their email campaigns, and started doing the math.

Any guesses about the number I found?

ROI

While you crunch the numbers in your head to make your prediction, let’s do a little recap.

First, ROI is calculated by comparing the revenue something generates by what you spend to generate that revenue. For example, if you spend $100 on a campaign and it generates $1,000.

You’ll see marketers express the ROI of that scenario in a few ways:

• As a ratio – 10:1
• As a percentage – 900%
• As revenue per dollar spent – $10

I’ll toggle back and forth between the ratio and the rev/dollar, but let’s use the latter for the sake of simplicity. So in this case we spent $100 dollars, made $1,000, so our ROI is $10 per $1 spent.

Now, for context, the average ROI of the email marketing world as a whole is usually around $40 per $1 spent. I’ve seen $38, I’ve seen $42 or $43, but $40 seems to be the average.

Resort Email ROI

I looked at 10 random resorts. And the lowest ROI I could find was $47 generated for every $1 spent. The next lowest was $65.

The highest? An absurd $584 generated for every $1 spent.

This is a small sample and, yes, it’s a group that’s more sophisticated because they have the bandwidth to use more advanced tools, but remember that they’re paying a premium for that sophistication and even with that larger denominator in their equation they’re STILL generating that kind of ROI.

Omni Channel…Sorta

Listen, social is cool. Yes, print has it’s place. Display can work. And search will help.

But email?

Email literally cannot be beat.

A big chunk of the resort marketing world gets this. They invest in email accordingly (in both time and budget) and sees mind-blowing numbers. The rest? Well, they may not have seen the light yet. So this week? I’m gonna talk about email and why it has been, is now, and will be the king of resort marketing channels for years to come.

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.