This is the first installment in “Emails We Open” – a blog and content series in which the team at MH Digital shares and analyzes real emails that we receive in our own personal inboxes that stick out to us. We break down not only the design and layout, but the content strategy itself and how it pertains to their audience. Emails We Open is a series demonstrating how brands take email design and strategic theory and turn it into reality.
The email we’re highlighting in this post is titled “The Monthly Stoke”, a monthly newsletter sent to IKON Pass Holders.
Email: “The Monthly Stoke” – Newsletter
Company Background:
The IKON Pass is effectively a full-season ski pass across a conglomerate of resorts around the United States, but centered on those in the Rocky Mountains. The IKON Pass is targeted towards skiers who are likely to ski more than one week a year across various mountains in their region. It’s got two tiers of passes, plus a few ancillary services/add-ons at the resorts/mountains that are included in the pass.
The Audience:
Despite the steep price tag of a minimum $600 (the pass increases price over time as the ski season approaches), The IKON Pass does not have a long sales process in which an email nurture would be of great value. Just about anyone who ends up on the newsletter for The Monthly Stoke is someone who has purchased the pass for that season (or possibly the season before). The IKON Pass website does not drive a traditional lead magnet, so it’s important to note that the vast majority of their subscribers are already customers (we’ll get into this later).
Analyzing the Email
At a high level, the design of The Monthly Stoke newsletter is very simple, on brand, and fits the no frills design that a newsletter should follow, allowing them to plug in different stories and content without a total redesign for each edition.
The first section of The Monthly Stoke focuses on driving people to use the product itself (a SaaS model might refer to this as driving “activation”), and nothing gets a skier excited to head up the mountain like fresh snow and a ‘powder day’. With a topline story about the best powder days including an action shot of a skier in deep snow, plus actual data about the snowfall in the last 7 days at 3 of the resorts on the IKON Pass, the newsletter does a great job of capturing attention right away and providing value to the readers immediately.
Next is the giveaway contest section of The Monthly Stoke newsletter. When we bing on new clients to address their email or marketing automation needs, we typically find is that they have solid content in a few of their marketing channels, but it is often siloed. With this contest, The Monthly Stoke drives its subscribers to follow them on Instagram and effectively cross-pollinates its users across multiple channels, making sure that they’re able to be in front of them throughout the year. This way, if someone doesn’t open email often but is on Instagram, they’ll see content from The IKON Pass.
We often take the same approach of driving cross-pollination with our clients in Welcome Series emails, and encourage internal collaboration on the monthly campaigns we manage for clients to keep everyone in the loop about what’s going on, so that we can share information about content on Facebook, a story posted on Instagram, etc.
Included in their contest details is the tagging of an adventure buddy – an important note as it creates a soft referral opportunity. Given that skiing is a social activity, getting people to purchase the same pass together drives future sales for the pass and gets more eyeballs on their social channel as well.
The Rocky Mountains section is personalized to my location, and it offers another opportunity to upsell with the Friends & Family tickets that come with the Pass (there are a limited number of discounted lift tickets that your friends/family can use if you come along), among a few other discounts on services at the mountains.
The next section is a ‘Know Before You Go’. The base tier of the IKON Pass has blackout dates at particular resorts on the pass during certain busy days of the year. This section does the job of curbing customer support questions about blackout dates, in addition to providing the passholder with that information ahead of planning a weekend or day trip to one of those blacked out day/locations which would result in a poor experience (even if it was their own fault). Done in this way, email becomes a good channel for customer support/experience to communicate with customers proactively, rather than just reactively.
Adjacent to the ‘Know Before You Go’ is an experience upsell to add convenience to purchases at IKON Pass through what they refer to as Resort Charge.
Finally, the last section is their offering to ‘Track Your Stats’ with the IKON Pass App. The app tracks statistics like number of days skied, number of chairlifts and vertical feet climbed, top speed, etc – in addition to a few other things. The app does two key things: it gamifies the number of days you go skiing and thus spend at the mountains the pass represents (and makes it competitive with friends who are also passholders), but it does another key thing and opens the opportunity to send Push notifications – which is another channel to be able to send direct messaging to its passholders not only this year, but for next year as well and for as long as the passholder has the app on their phone.
Takeaways:
Besides its clean branding and easy to digest layout, what we love about The Monthly Stoke newsletter from the IKON Pass is the job it does at sending relevant messaging and content to a subscriber base who has already purchased the core product – the pass itself.
A lot of brands do a poor job of communicating to their existing customer base, particularly if they only offer one or two core products or services. Most of the time, they end up either not properly segmenting their user base and continue to send sales emails to these existing customers around the same product/service they already acquired, or they don’t communicate with them at all.
The Monthly Stoke on the other hand does just about all of the things really well that we’ve highlighted previously in a blog post titled: ‘Considerations for Email Marketing a One-Trick Pony’. It drives activation through the powder day content. It drives cross-pollination of other social channels and referrals through the contest section. It ties upsells of add-ons through good customer experiences like the IKON Pass App and the Resort Charge feature.
Finally, and most importantly, it adds enough value that we aren’t going to unsubscribe. This is critical because when the time comes to advertise next seasons’ IKON Pass, they’ll have a warm and active subscriber base to start nurturing and promoting the Pass to.
We’ve taken a similar approach to our client, Lunchbox, which has been critical in growing their subscriber base and driving growth from their initial Kickstarter through to the launch of their newest categories. If you run email for a product or service based business like The IKON Pass, keep The Monthly Stoke as a great example of how to do an email newsletter right.
Need the help of email marketing experts to develop the strategy and content to execute an email program like The IKON Pass?