Q: Do resorts send more emails at the beginning of an hour than the end?

We’ve looked at sends or performance by hour, day of the month, day of the year and more, but one idea recently intrigued us: Do resorts send more emails at the beginning of an hour than the end? A simple query but one with a directly applicable result. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at emails sent by resorts since January of 2012. We grouped them by their send time in five-minute intervals (X:00-X:04, X:05-X:09, etc.) and found the total sends (not just campaigns, but recipients) for each group.

The results were clear showing nearly 3.5x as many emails in the busiest minutes versus slower groups. The volume clearly peaks during the first five minutes of each hour (:00-:04), remains above average for the next five minutes (:05-:09) and shows another slight jump at the half hour (:30-:34).

What This Means
While there are various reasons this may be happening, I think the answer lies in a very simple step in the process. Most of our clients use Blue Hornet to send their emails. And, using this platform, this is what they see each time they schedule a campaign.

Researchers have found that it’s a very common to leave inputs as is rather than change them. For example, organ donorship is less than 30% in countries with opt-in boxes but usually greater than 99% if the box is changed to opt-out. We think the same thing is happening here with the “00” default in the minutes box.

The question then becomes whether the large volume that exists at the beginning of the hour hurts performance and creates an opportunity for resort marketers. Which is what we’ll tackle next week.

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