About a week ago, I renewed my ski pass online for Keystone Colorado, a Vail Associates resort. The process was simple and reliable. OK so that was the expected bit. The thing that impressed me was what happened today. I received a short and enticing email, welcoming me and linking me to a Resort Explorer. This nicely designed flash site shows off all the cool aspects of the Vail Associates resorts. Basically, it’s designed to get me excited about the vacation I have just invested in.
It does a good job. It’s easy to navigate and the content is pretty good. A few minutes on the site I am even more excited about this vacation. The only call to action is to send a postcard to other people who will be going with me or to download a “Snowmate” desktop app that lets me know about snow conditions and events at my resort. Usually I don’t use these but this one is truly useful to me and as it gets closer to my vacation I will be looking at it daily to figure how deep the base is at Keystone and what’s happening that week.
What impressed me most about this is what they didn’t do. Normally when I get these post-booking emails, it is to offer me money off on something I don’t want yet. It might be something I will be interested the week before I go but right now it would just be an annoyance. Typically when I get these, the sender goes into my sub-conscious spam filter so that whenever I seen an email from them I automatically delete or ignore to delete later. They have blown it with me from the outset.
In this case, the experience was so good that I will be looking out for offers or events in Keystone as it gets closer to my vacation.
My lesson from this is that by being patient early on in a customer relationship and investing in giving something valuable without expecting anything back from, they have bought my trust - even a bit of love. They will never be in my subconscious spam filter and I will most likely spend more with them as a result.
This seems so bloody obvious but how few companies actually do this.
I compare this with a cruise vacation I was investigating. The company will remain nameless but I had to give them my email before I could get anything useful out of their site. I was then bombarded by emails from one of their representatives offering me big discounts on vacations I had never shown any interest in. It turned me off the whole category of vacations.
Adam Turinas
Strategists & Planners