Q: How many resort emails are being read/clicked days after they're sent?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

We’ve all seen that spike in the open-rate chart where thousands of people open your email within minutes of it arriving in their inbox. But what happens after that first day? How many opens and clicks can a resort expect and are there enough to impact when you deploy your campaigns? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
The sample we took for this analysis was from 10 different resorts from all different parts of the country. For each resort, we took two, random emails that had at least 50,000 recipients for some of the smaller lists or at least 100,000 for the bigger guys. These 20 emails had a combined 500,000 opens and 50,000 clicks.

Rather than end up with an extremely long tail on our graph, we plotted the first 7 days after sending an email and then lumped everything after that into one group. Here’s what we found.

Unique Opens / Clicks
Looking at unique clicks and opens, we get and idea of the first time recipients take action. Here’s how it breaks down.

The trend is clear, and probably what you expected, so let’s take a closer look at some the these numbers and see what they mean.

The Nitty Gritty
The first, and perhaps most important, thing is that when you send a message, like we said earlier, 90% of the people that are going to open will do so in those first two days. Likewise, 90% of those that are going to click will do so during that same time.

However, remember that for an email sent to 100,000 people with a 20% open rate and 15% click rate, after a week has passed that email could be opened as many as 420 more times and get 63 additional clicks.

Keep these stats in mind as you planning your next email. If you are sending a last minute reminder for a season pass deadline, sending it the morning before the deadline (e.g.: Friday morning for a Saturday night deadline) means more people will see it but may not carry the urgency of a “Last Day” email. With a pre-arrival, sending 4 days in advance will reach 95% of guests by the time they arrive.

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