A Triple Win: How Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island Made Its Campaign Better for Passholders, Partners, and Sponsors

Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island is known for its savvy, creative marketing and fun passes. They’ve worked with Bandwango to launch a variety of successful campaigns, including paid beverage tasting passes such as the Barrels Bottles & Brews Pass and their W.E. Bird: Windsor Essex Pelee Island Birding Trail, which serves as a guide to the area’s best birding spots. They’ve even used Bandwango’s event ticketing software to create tickets for the annual March Mac’ness event. (Wine paired with gourmet macaroni and cheese? Yes, please!) 

Another important initiative for their destination is the W.E. Heart Local campaign that promotes local businesses such as farm stands, vineyards, producers (such as meat and eggs), markets, and orchards. Although it’s been around for years, this year has shown tremendous growth, and the team shared how they achieved it.

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Defining Success

Jason Toner, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island, shared his overarching goal for every campaign: “Anything I want to push out from our marketing end is hopefully putting someone in a hotel bed to bring back revenue to the region.” 

That goal has guided the creation of a portfolio of engaging passes that showcase the best the area has to offer. However, Toner notes that not all passes serve the same purpose, and therefore, success looks different for each. “I use the terms passive and active,” he said. “With our paid passes, people want to engage and they're going to use them. But our others, we want to see active engagement, and deliver value to our partners. Some of our passive passes are a little more refined in nature.”

For niche passes such as Eyes on Art: A Visual Journey and CROSSROADS Historical Guide, he doesn’t look at hard metrics. He explained, “I like to view them as great digital guides versus having them on our website. We have great content on our website, but it's a lot harder to sort through and find the locations in an easy-to-view list.” He views those more as tools for visitors, and doesn’t measure success in the same way as he does others. 

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The Goal for W.E. Heart Local

The W.E. Heart Local pass was created in partnership with the Essex County Federation of Agriculture with the goal to educate users about all of the farm fresh options in the region. It replaced a traditional print map that had previously existed, so the move to digital a few years ago was already a positive step forward. 

However, the team made a strategic goal of increasing engagement and usage of the pass this year. Seeing an increase in coupon redemptions was especially important, as that showed that passholders were indeed making purchases. Toner said, “My bigger goal out of that was to make sure there's a reason to check in in November, December, January, February, and March when produce isn't in season.” 

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How the Pass Was Optimized

The Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island team took a close look at the pass and put themselves in their users’ shoes. They identified areas for improvement and made strategic tweaks.

They had already been producing an annual event in conjunction with the W.E. Heart Local pass that they call Open Farms. This is a fun-filled day that allows passholders to visit the participating farms. In addition to increasing the cool experiences for that event, here are a few of the things they did to grow the W.E. Heart Local engagement. 

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A change in prize incentives

In previous years, passholders had to check-in and earn enough points for a prize, but that’s now changed to a monthly sweepstakes giveaway. As long as a passholder checks in at one participating business each month, they’ll be entered into a monthly drawing for a $100-value gift basket. 

That helps achieve their goal of giving people a reason to use the pass all year – and not just seasonally. Toner said, “Reinvigorating how we can build traffic throughout the shoulder season gives our partners more value for their dollar, which is what I was trying to establish with this updated marketing.” 

However, they do use one of their paid tasting passes as an additional incentive. If someone checks in at 35 places, they can earn a free Barrels Bottles and Brews tasting pass. 

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Addition of pop-up markets

With one of their sponsors being Libro Credit Union, the team found a creative way to drive engagement and support local businesses. Toner explained the strategy with the pop-up markets, saying, “We did two pop-up markets with Libro. We took four or five W.E. Heart Local partners, and they popped up at a farmer's market at the Libro branch.” 

He shared that it helped reinforce the brand, gave the local producers a chance to sell, and promoted the passport. In the weeks that they did the pop-up markets, they saw substantially higher sign-ups for the pass. 

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Creation of a highly-targeted monthly email 

Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island is using zero-party data to create specifically targeted emails that are sent monthly to W.E. Heart Local passholders. Each message highlights specific offers from participating businesses and includes a recipe featuring ingredients from local partners. 

Partnership Specialist Jessica Riley explained, “For instance, if there's carrots in it, we tell them where they can get carrots locally. So we're actually bringing the pass back into the recipe as well.”

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Results 

The pass is still active, but Toner was excited to share that they’ve already achieved their goal of growing engagement with the W.E. Heart Local campaign this year. 

“We had over a 50% growth in registrations this year, and quadrupled the number of check-ins compared to last year. People are engaging more than what they did in the past.”

Tips for Success from Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island 

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Try new things

“I'm so glad we weren't afraid to make changes to the pass,” Riley said. “I think that it's really made a difference this year. You can really see the growth in that program.” She added, “We're able to do more of that now that we have more freedom within Bandwango. We can build more passes and they take less time to build, so we're able to kind of experiment a little bit more – and that's been nice.”

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Communicate with your partners

Keep your partners informed with regular marketing updates. Riley said, “We want the pass to grow and continue. In order to make sure that they come back, we need to make sure that they know what we're doing for them.” She also shared another reason to stay in communication with them. "They need to know what's going on when people come and check in there, and if people have questions, they need to be able to answer them.”

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Create a toolkit for your participating businesses 

If you want your participating businesses to help promote the pass, make it easy for them. Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island creates social media toolkits so businesses can share that they’re a part of the pass. 

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Choose appropriate sponsors

Since Bandwango passes have the ability to include ad space for sponsors, it’s easier than ever to put a sponsor's message in front of your passholders. They shared that it’s important to get the right sponsor that aligns with the pass though. 

Toner explained why Libro Credit Union made perfect sense for the W.E. Heart Local pass, saying, “They have a lot of rural customers, so it was a natural tie-in from who their client base is.” He added, “They have a community fund to fund things like this, and we go through an application every year. It’s not a guaranteed sponsorship, but they’ve been very happy, and they've been on since the first year we pitched that sponsorship.”

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Don’t rule out your locals

While DMOs are tasked with bringing visitors into their destinations, there is value in promoting your passes to your locals. Toner said, “One of our top visiting aspects to our region is visiting family and friends, so educating locals about what's in their own backyard is another part of our marketing tactic.”

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Conclusion

Tourism Windsor Essex Pelee Island has been creating great passes for years, and has done a great job of continuing to optimize their campaigns to be great for their visitors, local businesses, and sponsors. They’re eagerly planning new initiatives that include scavenger hunts for conference attendees, and they’ve also just launched a new Christmas-themed pass called Elf on the Bar Shelf. We can’t wait to see the adventures of Hops the Elf starting in early November!

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Are you interested in creating unique experiences that add to your visitor experience and help drive revenue to your local businesses? Do you have questions about the sponsorship space available within the passes? Reach out to our team and set up a demo to learn more.