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CASE STUDY

Landing More Bookings: 

How Mission Built Guidesly's AI-Powered Marketing Engine

Executive Summary

Guidesly, an online booking platform connecting customers to guides for outdoor recreation activities, partnered with Mission Cloud to build an AI-driven marketing engine in their CRM, Guidesly Pro. Using AWS services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Nova, and SES, Mission helped Guidesly generate personalized email campaigns that stayed true to each outdoor guide's unique voice. The result: newsletters opening at 25-30%, real-time analytics, and huge improvements in rebooking numbers. With the newly automated processes, Guidesly's own success team now spends less time manually building campaigns and more time helping guides build flourishing businesses.

About Guidesly

Guidesly gives guides in fishing, hunting, and scuba diving the tools to run their whole business: booking, payments, calendar, websites, and now CRM. Launched seven years ago as a marketplace, Guidesly now serves over 6,000 outdoor recreation guides and companies across the US, all free to join.

Mission did a really phenomenal job of understanding our needs. Their team took the time to ask the right questions and walk us through the different AI workflows until we agreed on exactly what everything would look like.
TAYLOR LORD
Co-Founder & Head of Product, Guidesly
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Background

Guidesly built its business on AWS as it scaled its SaaS offering. Through the AWS startup program, Guidesly connected with Mission Cloud to expand its Guidesly Pro CRM platform into new territory: AI-generated marketing built directly from its guides' own data.

Challenge

Guidesly wanted to turn its internal CRM into a true marketing tool, generating personalized email campaigns for the platform’s providers without adding headcount or cost. That ambition ran into two real obstacles. First was tone. Guidesly's guides, whether they fish, hunt, or scuba dive, carry a distinct brand voice that makes each of them unique. Generic marketing copy would have made it extremely difficult for guides to differentiate themselves and ultimately undercut the trust that had been built with their existing customers. Second was data. The information needed to personalize each campaign, such as weather data, catch data, rate cards, customer data, fish size analysis, and image & video files, lived scattered across different databases with no shared structure. Guides need to spend their time outdoors, not at the computer learning new AI tools, so the solution needed to act like a silent partner: helping them market more effectively, create stronger content, reengage past customers, and build visibility without ever having to manage the AI behind it.

Why Mission

Guidesly first heard of Mission through the AWS startup program, where champions connected the two companies. Having seen some past consulting engagements lose momentum, the CEO and leadership team were looking for a partner who could earn their confidence early. Mission's presented approach was structured, transparent, and willing to adjust scope in real time, which gave Guidesly confidence in Mission as a true partner. Finally, a four-week discovery phase gave both teams clarity on what would be delivered, what the investment would look like, and what the timeline would be before a single line of code got written.

Why AWS

Guidesly saw AWS as a cloud partner that matched its growth ambitions. AWS's startup program offered proper support, along with the infrastructure needed to host, brand, and manage thousands of individual guide websites and domains.

Mission was a glowing example of how working with a partner can be a rockstar experience. If you get the opportunity to work with someone like that, you do it.
TAYLOR LORD
Co-Founder & Head of Product, Guidesly

Solution

Mission worked alongside Guidesly to extend Guidesly Pro, the company's guide management software, into a full AI marketing system built on top of its existing CRM. The project started with newsletters: automated, highly tailored AI-generated emails that guides could opt into with a single click, built to send on a set schedule, unless edits are requested.

Generating that content meant pulling from Jack AI, Guidesly's internal AI tool that already tracked each guide's bookings, seasonal trends, rate cards, and trip photos. Mission helped connect those scattered data sources into a single pipeline capable of feeding AI-generated content, then layered on Amazon Bedrock and OpenSearch to handle image vectors, along with Claude and Amazon Nova to generate the actual campaign copy. SES, paired with Amazon EventBridge, managed the email events and triggers behind each send, with Amazon Pinpoint supporting parts of the trigger logic.

The most unique challenge wasn't technical; it was tonal. The guides on the platform each have their own distinct voice, whether their focus is fishing, hunting, or diving. So, Mission built the system to reflect that: direct, grounded, and specific to each provider’s own brand rather than a generic template. The output is fed directly from Guidesly's CRM, which pulls new prospects into targeted nurture campaigns for both past customers and warm leads who haven't yet booked.

Results

Before this project, Guidesly's success team built marketing campaigns manually. That approach couldn't scale to the company's full base of over 6,000 guides, especially as many rely solely on Guidesly for their whole marketing agenda. Mission's system changed that math entirely.

Guidesly's first AI-generated newsletter campaign posted open rates of 25-30% and click-to-open rates in the high teens, numbers that have held steady across subsequent sends. For one company, Guidesly tracked a rebooking rate of roughly 3% within the first two weeks of campaign launch, revenue that would not have been captured through their previously limited marketing efforts.

Beyond the numbers, Guidesly now offers providers something they never had before: real-time analytics on their own marketing, opens, clicks, and engagement, available on demand rather than compiled by hand. That visibility, paired with the automation itself, freed Guidesly's success team to spend its time where it matters most, on calls with guides, training on new product releases, and supporting the relationships that keep the platform one-of-a-kind.

Guidesly considers the newsletter system a completed first phase, with a second phase already mapped out: an AI system that adjusts content automatically based on how customers respond to each campaign.

AWS Services

    • Amazon Bedrock
    • Amazon OpenSearch
    • Claude (via Amazon Bedrock)
    • Amazon Nova
    • Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
    • Amazon EventBridge
    • Amazon Pinpoint
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