Vail’s Widget Network
Objectives:
Vail Resorts was looking to connect with their customers wherever they live in their digital lives. They contacted OTOlabs to begin building a set of applications for desktop, mobile and social media environments. Since the initial engagement, Vail Resorts has grown the scope of the project, building on an initial platform to deliver a compelling brand experience that drives strong business results.
Vail Resorts was one of the very first travel organizations to explore branded desktop applications, widgets, toolbars and social media as a means to improving and deepening customer engagement and retention. Since 2002 Vail has continuously improved this campaign based on analysis of previous campaign metrics. The Vail Resorts SnowMate has served as an example to the travel industry, which has now embraced desktop applications, widgets and social media as an important customer relationship technique.
Approach:
The Vail Resorts SnowMate started as a Windows branded desktop application (BDA) and ScreenMate, and has since been extended into a second ScreenMate, a Macintosh BDA, a microbar, a Macintosh desktop widget, an IE Toolbar and a Facebook application.
The Vail Resorts SnowMate suite of Web 2.0 relationship management widget applications employs a variety of content channels to keep users emotionally connected with the resorts, and offer channels to trigger purchasing behaviors. Content channels include:
• Snow and weather conditions
• News and events
• Updating photo/video Galleries
• Snowboard and skier ScreenMate
• Animated snow condition alerts
• Mountain-cam images
• Screensavers, wallpapers, and animated ecards
The Facebook Snow Fight application has recently launched as part of the SnowMate suite. This viral application lets Facebook users have snowball fights with each other. When it is snowing on the mountains the user gets more snow to throw at their friends.
Results:
The Vail SnowMate has delivered consistent positive ROI year after year. The approximate direct ROI for the last three years (season 2005-2006 to the present) is approximately 18:1. This number represents SnowMate users clicking through to a Vail Resorts website and booking a visit. It is also likely that many other visitors booked their visits through the telephone or other channels after interacting with the SnowMate widget applications.
Beyond simple ROI measurement conversion metrics analysis reveals other interesting trends.
- 50% comes from simple logo clicks – either snow.com or the resorts
- 21% from the snow reports
- 16% from mountain cams
- 13% from articles and offers
This seems to demonstrate the value of general messaging as a sales generator. While specific offer articles do generate sales, a large percentage of sales-generating click throughs are coming from simple logo clicks, snow reports and webcams. It is interesting to note that the 18% of article and offer messages represent some 75 percent of the article and offers revenue, which probably makes sense given that some articles were far more offer-oriented than others.
Usage of the SnowMate also remains very high, with an average of 38 interactions per week with users who have kept the application for more than one day. 58 percent of users have kept the application for more than 30 days, and 52 percent of users have viewed the application for more than 30 minutes.