Elk Springs Resort sees 215x ROI and customer service efficiency boost with Klaviyo

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Elk Springs Resort is a sprawl of 180+ rental cabins in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Dolly Parton’s Dollywood. In this popular tourist destination, competition for guests is fierce, and the resort team uses Klaviyo to build guest relationships, drive direct bookings, and reduce dependency on online travel agencies (OTAs).

Learn why leaving Mailchimp for Klaviyo B2C CRM was like going “from crawling to sprinting” for Elk Springs Resort

Challenge

For years, email marketing was a nice-to-have for Elk Springs Resort. They used Mailchimp for sporadic email campaigns, but it wasn’t a focus.

“We were hitting our booking numbers just based on our organic web presence,” says owner Andy Gladstein. “Our website was very effective compared to everybody else’s.”

That worked until it didn’t. The rental market in Gatlinburg was getting more and more competitive.

Gladstein wanted to keep operations lean and grow direct bookings in a market increasingly dominated by OTAs like Airbnb. That would require a more intentional approach to lifecycle marketing.

Solution

Mailchimp was the only email platform the Elk Springs team had heard of, until a consultant recommended Klaviyo B2C CRM.

“I didn’t know what a flow was,” Gladstein says. “We realized, ‘Oh my gosh, we can create a whole flow in Klaviyo based on an event or interaction on our site. Incredible.’”

Switching over to Klaviyo B2C CRM was quick. The tech-savvy Elk Springs team easily connected their custom site to Klaviyo via API. A week after their welcome call, they were up and running.

We went from crawling to sprinting. There are just massive operational and marketing benefits we get out of Klaviyo. It’s making the pie bigger.

Now, Elk Springs can proactively answer FAQs with informational flows that trigger before check-in.

“Our customer service team is about 30% the size of a comparable company’s,” Gladstein says. “That’s because we use automation tools like Klaviyo.”

Klaviyo also helps drive direct bookings. Currently, Elk Springs relies on OTAs for less than 15% of revenue. The rest comes from direct bookings, and 39% of direct booking revenue came from Klaviyo in the last year.

“We went from crawling to sprinting,” Gladstein says of switching to Klaviyo. “There are just massive operational and marketing benefits we get out of Klaviyo. It’s making the pie bigger.”

Strategy

Today, Elk Springs relies primarily on Klaviyo automations—which drove 83% of their Klaviyo revenue in the last year—to create a personalized customer experience. Impactful use cases include:

• A check-in flow: This flow is tailored to each guest’s cabin’s features and time of booking, with driving instructions to their specific location, water safety messaging for cabins with pools, and more. It reduces the number of customer service calls by pre-empting questions, and “on Fridays, when we have a hundred cabins checking in, it’s astounding how beneficial it is,” says Gladstein.
• A VIP rewards flow: When someone who previously booked a major stay is active on the Elk Springs site, a flow triggers and sends them a special VIP discount. It’s one of the key ways Elk Springs drives repeat direct bookings.
• Reactivation campaigns: Most people like to vary their vacations year to year, so Elk Springs often sends reactivation campaigns to a segment that visited or showed high intent to book multiple years prior.“Those segments have been wildly successful,” says Dan Dearborn, sales and marketing director at Elk Springs Resort.

Overall, Elk Springs’ Klaviyo strategy has helped drive direct booking revenue efficiently.

“We wouldn’t be able to maintain our level of service without Klaviyo,” says Gladstein. “It’s allowed us to automate a lot of our messaging, so we’re not sitting around trying to remember repetitive things. We can focus our brainpower on solving novel problems.”

We wouldn’t be able to maintain our level of service without Klaviyo. It’s allowed us to automate a lot of our messaging, so we’re not sitting around trying to remember repetitive things. We can focus our brainpower on solving novel problems.