Q: What effect do specific words have on ski resort email open rates?

Now almost two months in, the Stash is really starting to take us in some interesting directions. We’re going to step away from the email stats starting next week, but before we do, there’s an extremely insightful one to share.

Originally, the idea was to analyze email length to find a correlation between copy length and click rates. While we may revisit that topic in the future, we found some stark differences based on subject lines alone and this question was born.

The Common Threads
Now, before jumping into the list, remember two things.

1) You Can Only Use Some Words in Certain Situations
Some words imply recency or an action that the recipient would have taken to trigger it. You can’t just use “thank you” without some relationship to time (end of season, recent stay at your resort) or “upcoming” without knowing that recipient will soon be taking an action (visiting your resort, using a lift ticket).

Now, our system lets our clients setup these transactional messages. Instead of being sent to a list of 25,000 all at once, these messages are triggered to specific groups based on what they’ve done and who they are. But remember one thing…

2) The Recipient Doesn’t See the Tech
When someone gets your emails, they don’t see the technology behind it. They don’t see the segment they were placed into. All they see is a subject line. That, and that alone, is their sole reference point to determine if they will open that message and that is what we are looking at today.

The List
This list was compiled by doing a search for specific keyword(s) in our clients’ email subject lines over the last few years. Next to each word is the total number of people that received an email with that word in the subject line. Finally, the open rate is listed for those emails and the entire list is ranked by those open rates.

So, without further adieu, here’s the list:

The One Big Lesson
For the most part, relevancy is the name of the game. The recipient knows you can only use certain words in a subject line if there was some sort of interaction between them and your resort. The top 5 – thank you, upcoming, arrival, renew, welcome – all need some reference to an action, time, or both.

In short, the highest open rates come when the message is highly relevant to that recipients situation: what they did or are about to do.

It’s also interesting to note how some other words did. “Feet” was used to describe storms that were beyond “inches”. This increased opportunity for untracked snow resulted in 19.24% and 16.95% open rates respectively.

Ironically, emails with the word closed had a higher open rate than those with the word “open” in the subject line. “Ski & stay” (also included “ski and stay”) saw 14.59% opens while “stay & ski” (or “stay and ski”) were much lower at 10.14%.

The weather words averaged 18.1% open rates while the promotional words only 14.4%. Does this mean when sending a promotional email you should avoid sales words and focus on the snow in your subject line? Perhaps. This is the jumping off point where you can take these pieces, using them in your own campaigns, and check the results.

Combinations? Other Words?
Obviously, more than 50 different words are used in resort subject lines and this is an analysis that we will certainly revisit in the future. What words would you like included? What combinations of the words above would be interesting to see analyzed? Let us know.

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