The ski season is almost here and your website traffic is ramping up, but can your online customers find your tickets and passes?  It’s impossible to maximize revenue if customers aren’t successfully funneled into your Cloud Store. Here are a few best practices on how to most efficiently monetize your website traffic through advance lift ticket sales. You can also find more tips here.

The Importance of the Purchase Funnel        

An increase in traffic to your online store has a proportional
impact on revenue.

The “purchase funnel” is the process through which you attract and convert potential customers into lift ticket buyers.  In this case, the funnel is your Cloud Store and the input is the web traffic your marketing team is working hard to drive to your site.

Increasing traffic into the Cloud Store means your revenue will grow. What’s the best way to do that?

Store Traffic Generation Strategies

Here are the best practices determined by our seasoned user experience (UX) web designers, tested and proven to drive the most incremental traffic to Cloud Store users:

1. Prominent call to action (CTA) above the fold, driving to Cloud Store search page
2. A Persistent CTA in the header should appear on every page of your site
3. CTA buttons that stand out in bright, contrasting colors
4. Text in button has desired action, eg “Buy Now & Save” as opposed to passive language like “Learn More”
5. One-click to get to the store, remove interstitial pages, there is no need to explain to your customers how to buy online
6. Store opens within the same tab, avoid opening a new tab or window, that makes it harder for your customers to navigate back to your site
7. In the image carousel, make sure the CTA is clickable
8. Any page referring to lift tickets should have a “Buy Now & Save” CTA button
9. Skip or remove the “window pricing grid,” it isn’t necessary to show this when you are selling tickets online in advance
10. All emails, newsletters, snow alerts and highly trafficked pages on your site should have a link or button to buy lift tickets, that goes directly to your Cloud Store search pages.

What do great CTAs look like?

Below are seven Liftopia partners who’ve nailed it. Check them out; you might see a great idea for your ski area’s website!  

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Mount Snow

A bright & bold CTA promoting extra savings for advance purchase is a GREAT way to drive conversion in your store!

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Red Lodge

Red Lodge has the right strategy to get customers into the purchase path: The CTA stands out with contrasting colors and dedicated real estate in the hero image while highlighting a benefit of buying online.

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Val Cenis

Val Cenis’s call-to-action is heard loud and clear! A highly visible CTA gets your customer’s attention… and to buy tickets for your resort!

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Mt. Spokane

Persistent links in bright colors at the top and bottom of Mt. Spokane’s homepage let you know exactly where to purchase tickets.

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Treetops Resort

Increase the number of CTAs and increase revenue! Three CTAs on the homepage has Treetops poised for a successful winter campaign.

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Mt. Southington

Keep your customers in the purchase path; don’t make the mistake of linking your CTAs to a new tab/window. Mt. Southington’s ticket page is loaded up with bold CTAs linking directly into the store, within the same window.

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As always, we are here to help. If you’d like a custom analysis of your site’s usability and traffic generation as compared to other Cloud Store resorts, give us a call or email us at partners@liftopia.com.