The best example of email marketing I’ve seen this month comes from my favorite local ski area Mount Hood Meadows.  What made it so special?Have a look and I’ll explain more below about what I thought separated it from 90% of the email marketing campaigns I see.

If you clicked on the image and were able to read it, what should have struck you right away was the personalization.  They were thanking me for visiting the area.  Big deal?  Here’s the big deal there were only two ways for them to know that I visited the area that day.  I bought my pass and they scanned my pass, that’s it.  They knew I skied because they scanned my pass.  I am sure everyone who skied that day who had also opted in to receiving  emails from Meadows got a similar email.  This in itself is pretty cool stuff there checking their database of who skied against those who have opted into email and auto generating the campaign based on that.  This is a level of email sophistication you don’t often see.

Subject line:

“Tell us about your day at Meadows.”  What do you think their open rate was with a subject line like that and timing it so that recipients got it just two days after their visit?  I am betting it was huge.  They were doing what it is often challenging to accomplish with mass email campaigns, they were speaking directly to me.  Suddenly I wasn’t just part of some mass campaign they knew I was there and they wanted my feedback.

Greeting line:

Again they nailed it personalizing the email with the name of the recipient.

Body:

This is where they made their first Oops in my opinion, but they also got somethings right.

They asked for my feedback directing me to a short survey and using some fun communication by comparing the time it takes to fill out the survey with a ride up one of their express chair lifts.  They go on to invite me to upload pictures and videos of my day to their site. Oops. This is where they also blew it.  The oops comes in the form of the link at the end of the sentence telling me “If you took some pictures or video of your day at Meadows, you can share them with others viewing our website.   Why are they directing me to their “Conditions” page.  They lead me to believe I would be landing on a page where I could upload pictures and video and then took me to a completely unrelated page.    The next oops isn’t quite as big, but it could still use some improvement and it comes in the form of the second link where they ask me to share my story behind the images on their Guest Stories Blog.  Unfortunately, the landing the page they chose http://www.skihood.com/Community-and-News/Meadows-Blog/Posts/2009/08/Guest-Stories  is a post from August 29th inviting people to share their stories. Unfortunately, at first glance it looks like no stories have been uploaded even though there’s a link to do so and you’re left wondering where your story will appear.  It’s true there is a link under categories in the right hand menu, but as their web designer should know right hand menus often get overlooked and you certainly don’t want people to have to search for information.  What they should have done is made this a static page not a blog post and at the bottom of the page their should be an rss for image thumbnails showing latest 5 images which would be clickable links to the post with the image or at least to the blog category archive page.

Sig line:

Finally they deserve kudos for their sig line which offered three ways to connect.  One thing though that you can’t see from the screen shot that I posted was that for email clients that by default don’t show images, at least without being enabled, and that’s most email clients the email seemed to end with “When away from the mountain you cn stay connected by following us on:”  What they should have done is made it so that if image viewing isn’t turned on in an email client there would be links there saying Twitter |  Facebook.

In spite of the three Oops, I am still really impressed with this campaign.  I think a lot more businesses that track when customers or clients have visited their establishment could use something like this.   Kudos Meadows.