Mammoth Resorts:
How a world-famous resort creates "mammoth messaging" using Lyris

Company Background

The tiny town of Mammoth Lakes, California may have started off as a gold mining settlement, but it quickly became known another treasure altogether: the staggering beauty of the Eastern Sierra Mountain Range-in particular the 11,000-foot gem known appropriately as "Mammoth." By the 1930's and 40's, people were congregating at Mammoth to experience the rush of downhill skiing. Some die-hards even brought portable rope tows powered by Ford truck engines to facilitate their newfound habit.

Since those early days, the Mammoth Mountain Resort has grown to be a destination befitting its epic location. With 27 lifts, 150 trails, and an average yearly snowfall of 384 inches, it enjoys a standout reputation among skiers and snowboarders all over the world, as well as a growing crowd of summertime golfers, mountain bikers, and fly fishers.

Goals and Challenges

The lack of a commercial airport means that nearly all Mammoth's visitors arrive by car and that its customer base is made up primarily of coastal Californians in both the northern and southern parts of the state. Aware of how technologically savvy its customers are, Mammoth's marketing team was among the first to use email to provide up-to-the-minute reports on the resort's dazzlingly great conditions, as well as the many events happening on the mountain throughout the year.

And though email was proving to be the perfect medium for such perishable communications, Mammoth's email marketing was initially somewhat segregated from the rest of the business. The resort was using an outsourced hosting solution to conduct its email campaigns, which meant that integration with in-house data was basically non-existent. When Lead Web Developer Marc Fathauer joined the Mammoth team in 2001, he realized that the resort could benefit from bringing things in-house.

"We decided that we could do it on our own," he recalls.

Bringing things in-house meant that Mammoth needed a solution that could integrate seamlessly with its other systems. The resort purchased a Windows SMTP server and began looking for a software package that was flexible enough to work well with its existing infrastructure, yet powerful and fast enough to get its snow reports out quickly and reliably.

Fathauer had used Lyris ListManager in a previous position, and suspected that it would be a good fit for Mammoth's needs. After evaluating a number of other products, the rest of the team agreed and in 2002, they bought a ListManager Platinum Pro license for SQL Server.

Since purchasing ListManager over three years ago, the resort's in-house lists have grown to over 100,000 members and its email marketing program has been successfully integrated into the larger, resort-wide mix of data.

"As a big resort, we end up with a lot of customer data," says Fathauer.

"Retail, rental, email, online profiles, lodge stays...we really wanted to work with it all in a much more integrated way. Also, our emails contain really timely information on weather and conditions, so we needed something that could get things out fast."

"That's where ListManager has been absolutely great for us. It's really good at letting us move data in and out of it and we use that data in our backend SQL systems. We also accumulate and track it with Crystal Reports. ListManager makes this incredibly easy. And it gets things out fast."

"Another important thing is that we've really enjoyed working with everyone there at Lyris," he adds. "The sales team, the tech support team-everyone's been wonderful."

Fathauer says that Mammoth's future plans for its marketing program include creating customized, triggered mailings based on its vast store of backend data.

"If someone books a room with us, the email they receive shouldn't just confirm their upcoming stay, it should also let them schedule a lesson, rent equipment, buy lift ticket," explains Fathauer. "We want to do more than collect information now. We want to start using it more to bring things up to the next level."

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