Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Destination Website

A Mountain Adventure Awaits You

About This Entry:

A destination’s website is its most powerful tool. It is nimble, it is chocked full of information and inspiration, it is the landing location of advertising campaigns, it is home to small business information, local’s secrets, and hidden gems. This powerful tool takes strategy, tedious tweaking, constant updating, and endless energy to be the best resource that it is designed to be.

The current version of aspenchamber.org was launched on February 7, 2020, shortly before the start of the pandemic shutdown. The website was designed with an editorial feel, intentional whitespace, inspirational content, intuitive navigation, category & seasonal filters, and responsive mobile-friendly design. The balance of a visitor facing destination website blended with a chamber of commerce member services platform makes for a challenging blend, ending with a product that benefits both local businesses and visitors.

Owned media is one of the strongest marketing strategies, allowing a company full control in speaking to an already interested audience. Opt-in email subscribers are a great opportunity to retarget customers similar to this audience in paid media strategies. With the iOS changes, there is a threat to targeting, making email collections more essential than ever. With so much opportunity, we wanted to focus on growing our email database list for our monthly destination newsletter. We added a chatbot to our website to achieve this goal, as well as give us segmentation opportunities with these email addresses.

Campaign Strategy:

Aspenchamber.org was built on a Drupal CMS. Custom “sections” or “paragraphs” were created by our website developers to allow us nimble webpage design throughout the site. A mega menu is utilized for the best user experience, to allow visitors to find the information they’re looking for in the most intuitive way. The website is connected to our CRM, iDSS to pull chamber member business information to the site. Complete listings of business categories are in the Business Directory, but relevant business categories are populated on visitor facing pages as well, such as hiking guides on the hiking recreation page https://aspenchamber.org/explore/recreation/hiking. The customization abilities on this website are key to delivering the right information to the right audience.

We worked with WhereToBot to design, create, and optimize a chatbot for our website. The chatbot utilizes Instabot as the platform, Mailchimp for itinerary delivery, and Zapier to connect everything. The chatbot asks simple questions with limited answer options, leading users further down the trip planning funnel, ultimately to exchange their email address for personalized destination itineraries based on their interests such as season and activity. For those visitors unsure of their interests within the destination, the chatbot guides them to our Field Guide where they can fill out a form to receive our printed inspiration guide by mail to learn more about Aspen.

User generated content (UGC) was another important feature to include. Content from real people generates a genuine view of the visitor experience. We utilize Spotlyte to curate images into categories that are populated onto their corresponding pages on our website. Our weddings page, aspenchamber.org/groups/weddings, pulls Spotlyte images of user generated content showing real Aspen weddings for inspiration. Our Maroon Bells webpage has UGC images populating real photos from real people visiting Maroon Bells.

Results:

The total project cost of the website redesign was $100,000. From 6/1/20–5/31/21, aspenchamber.org had 946,826 unique visitors, average session duration of 2:06, and bounce rate of 57.32%. Unique pageviews on intent to travel pages include accommodations, featuring paid lodging–17,919, “Camping, Huts & RVs”–8,404, “Plan Trip” – 18,005, event calendar – 46,870, restaurants & nightlife – 13,096, and Itineraries – 17,058 pageviews. Aspenchamber.org referred 19,014 sessions resulting in 203 reservations with $21,217.54 in lodging bookings to Stay Aspen Snowmass. We also send referrals directly to chamber members.

Beginning summer 2020, the Maroon Bells scenic area required paid reservations to visit via shuttle or car, hosted on Aspenchamber.org. The Maroon Bells Reservations webpage had 332,153 unique pageviews. In 2020 over 55,000 shuttle visitors and over 5,000 car permits were purchased, through aspenchamber.org and minimal in-person transactions. 2021 reservations were released on 4/12/21. Aspenchamber.org experienced its largest website traffic day in history with 11,219 users, 8:49 average session duration, and 6.11 pages/session.

Comparing engagement metrics of our current site with the previous website, 6/1/2020-5/31/2021 vs 6/1/2018-5/31/2019, we saw positive movement in all the top metrics. Users increased 41.9%, sessions increased 58.88%, pageviews increased 84.59%, pages per session increased 16.18%, average session duration increased 28.04%, and bounce rate decreased 3.83%.

The initial setup of the chatbot with WhereToBot cost $1200. There is an annual cost of $2,580, which includes fees from Instabot, Zapier, and Mailchimp. The chatbot far exceeded our expectations. We went from collecting an average of 4 emails per day with our previous newsletter signup in a sticky footer and a webform landing page. We increased our email collections to an average of 26 emails per day through the chatbot, and we continue to collect emails through the existing webform landing page as well. The itinerary emails delivered to users in exchange for their email addresses have an average open rate of 60% and an average click rate of 39.6%, surpassing industry standards. Currently, 4,071 of these contacts are still subscribed to our monthly destination newsletter. With interests selected through the chatbot, we have new segmentation abilities for this user group.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

This is a very smart and thought out website that integrates new softwares and technologies to give a very practical and curated experience for each user, almost every page was both informative and functional. The team was very clear about the objective they had to achieve, to create a simple but complete, easy and interesting web page that invites you to explore it. The user experience was the basis of the development of everything and it shows in the result, I even wanted to go to Aspen.