Q: What were the top 10 resort marketing insights of 2014?

When a new Stash post is published, a quick email alert is pushed to a growing list of marketers. Which means that with 51 posts in the books this year, we have 51 open and click rates to compare. That’s right, in true Stash form, we’re going to wrap up 2014 by once again Stashing the Stash.

The Goods
To find our “Top Stashes of 2014” list, we sorted all Stash posts by the click rate of each based on total sends rather than opens. So…drum roll please…here are the top 10:

1. If you update Facebook many times a day, do later posts get less engagement?
2. Should you sell the dollars saved or percentage discount?
3. Should You Capitalize the First Letter of Every Word in Subject Lines?
4. Do subject line exclamation marks increase open rates?
5. Does message length impact resort engagement on Facebook?
6. Does ability to email a guest impact the chance they’ll return?
7. Does a video’s length impact the views and ratings it receives?
8. Does email segmentation lead to higher performance?
9. Does capitalizing one IMPORTANT word increase open rates?
10. How many resorts have taken the Ice Bucket Challenge?

It was a pretty close race with less than half a percentage point separating the top 4. Overall, just 5 percentage points separated #1 from #10.

What This Means
I think it’s a simple reminder of why we write the Stash every week: insights help us do our jobs better. Whether that’s showing ways to optimize our messages or simply giving starting points for new ideas, numbers don’t replace instinct and innovation, they enhance it.

We’ve got 150+ of these posts in the books (foreshadowing), and we’ll have another 52 coming in 2015. See you then.

Next Week…
We’ll start 2015 off with more resort marketing insights. If you don’t want to miss a post, stick your email below for alerts when new posts drop.