No doubt about it, computers can help small ski areas in conducting business and probably no other segment of the daily operation benefits as much as marketing. At Swain Ski Center in New York, we have found four main marketing uses for computers: in-house direct mail, list maintenance, program tracking and desktop publishing.
In-house Direct Mail
A typical small ski area probably generates most skier visits from a remarkably small number of households in a very well defined geographic region. At Swain, computers help us identify these customers and communicate with them in a cost-effective way. In the past three years, we have cut our advertising budget by one third and doubled our marketing effectiveness by switching from radio and television and focusing on targeted direct mail.
Our mailing list had been maintained by a service bureau, but it took too much time to get new names on the list. It’s also in the best interest of the bureau to maintain the largest list possible, not necessarily the most accurate or up-to-date list.
Two years ago we scraped the service bureau list of 65,000 names and started collecting new names from multiple sources at the area. We used fulfillment software, like a mail order catalog company would use, to sell season passes and books of prepaid tickets, most of which are sold over the phone in August. The software captures the names and addresses of all purchasers along with age, sex and household size of pass holders. A database program called “Paradox” reads the appropriate files from the fulfillment software into a master database, adding a source code and the date of entry. This list of our best customers became the core of a new mailing list.
Now, on a daily basis, we add the name, address, age and gender of all rental customers directly into the data base with a source code that identifies school group renters, walk-ins, snowboarders and also flags participants in our Learn-to-Ski Specials for immediate action. This coming season, Paradox will read these data files directly from new rental shop software supplied by Sports Select.
Within three days, first-time skiers from the Learn-to-Ski-Special are sent a personalized letter thanking them for skiing with us and offering the opportunity to try it again at the same low introductory price. To do this, Ami Pro word-processing software reads the Paradox master file of new skiers sorted by date of trial and inserts all the appropriate names and addresses needed to individualize the letter and spits them out to a laser printer. The response rate has been tremendous. Kids especially like to get mail addressed to them.
We ask the advisors of school-group programs to supply us with the names and addresses of students participating in the program and these are added to the list. Several ski shops with whom we have good relationships supply us with their work-tags and customer lists. We input this information into the database, again with age, gender and source code so we can give the shops back their names on disk or printouts and, if they wish, exclude their names from our mailings that might promote a competing shop.
We also input to the list from requests, and from contests and drawings, although this source has been proved to be the least effective. Cash walk-in customers are the hardest to get on the list, but we are trying to capture these names with a frequent-skier card for cash customers. We are also asking people who call the area for ski reports or general information if they receive our mailings and if not, we added them to the list. Names of SkiWee and ski school guests are also captured.
List Maintenance
With all these sources, dupes are very common. We use dedicated mailing list software called “Arclist” to purge dupes and merge lists prior to doing a mailing. Arclist has a very sophisticated sorting system that discards dupes to a special file based on names and addresses that look alike. For example, Sally Johnson, #12 Swain Hill Rd. and Bill Johnson, No. 12 Swain Hill Rd. are not dupes to a traditional database like Paradox, but they can be dupes to Arclist if you ask it to avoid sending duplicates to the same household. Arclist can also merge lists, updating the master file with the new record, in the case of a duplicate, and deleting the older one.
When a record becomes five years old, the computer can query the list by date of entry and send that skier a notice asking if he or she want, to stay on our mailing list; if they don’t reply we can drop them.
Dupes cost money. In the summer we purge duplicates from the list by computer, print the list in alphabetical order and by address, and check the 30,000+ names by hand. Arclist is very good, but sometimes humans can spot a dupe that the computer just can’t.
All of this mailing list and marketing information is kept on one 486/33 computer with a 200 meg hard drive. The speed of the 486 machine really helps in sorts and purges of the bigger lists. The information is very valuable, so we backup daily to a Bernoulli Box, a storage device that we can reconnect to any of our other machines if the main machine crashes.
Most of the data that cannot be loaded direct from another program or computer is entered into the 486/33 machine by a skier service rep who has lots of other responsibilities. When we have big lists to add during the season, ticket sellers can input from ski shop forms or other data to a copy of Paradox on their machines during slow times. Then we batch in the smaller list at the end of the day.
For the mailings, we export just the names and addresses for the portion of the list we want to an ASCII text file and give it to a mailing house to print labels and carrier-route the list for the best rate.
We normally mail big mailings third class, but once a year we mail something light, like a postcard, to the full mailing list, first class. This way we get the opportunity to delete names of people who have moved from the market and update those who have changed addresses, but should still be our customers.
By having our mailing lists in-house and maintaining expanded information on our customers, we are able to react quickly and target a promotion or mail to a special group, like new skiers or Ski-Wee customers. In the service bureau days we mailed everything to everybody. Now we make more selective mailings.
In the case of recent participants in our Learn-to-Ski-Special, we wanted to reach every participant, because every member of the household needs to get the offer. In the case of an expensive color brochure, we only want one per household and the computer excludes our school-group participants because we can distribute brochures directly to the schools cheaper.
This summer, Arclist kicked out a list of skiers who bought a season pass last year, but had not yet bought a pass this season. We send these holdouts a first-class personalized letter using Ami Pro and sold an additional $15,000 in passes and ticket packs that we had missed with the third class mailing.
We have seen tremendous results in the last two years and are spending a fraction of what we used to spend. We save both on service-bureau fees and also cut our reliance on newspaper and electric media, which, by definition, talk to the whole market, not our specific market.
Program Tracking
Computers also help us track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Our ticketing computers can track the usage on any individual promotion — Pepsi day, New-Skier-Specials, third-party coupon offers, etc. We can instantly tell what has worked and what has been a waste of effort and money.
The ticketing computers can also enter the zip codes as we redeem coupons from promotions and Paradox can create a graph that shows where the program was most successful. This helps focus our media buying.
Desktop Publishing
The marketing department has also used computers by running Pagemaker desktop publishing software. We now do much of our brochure and newsletter production in house. We still use a graphic artist for the color work, but copy and basic layout goes from our computer to her computer via disk or modem, even from vacations in Hawaii.
Points-of-purchase flyers, menus, wine lists, school group program advisor kits and quickie ads for newspapers are all done in house. The cost is next to nothing, but more importantly we meet all our deadlines.
At a time when small ski resorts have to maximize dollars and energies spent on marketing computer can be a marvelous tool. The small- resort market profile lends itself well to a grass root, homegrown marketing approach. The personal computer allows us to appear more personable as well as more often to our guests.
