Q: Is there any correlation between a hotel email’s word count and its performance?

Last week we found that more links in an email mean more clicks total but fewer clicks per link. A natural follow up question is whether word count follows suit. So, do 400 word emails perform any differently than 100 word emails? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
We used the same sample as last week (1,200 campaigns, 60 resorts, 70,000,000 recipients) and grouped these campaigns by their word count. We also looked at the same to metrics – click rate and clicks per clicker – with the same scale to better compare what we found. For reference, this is the 100th word you’ve read so far in this post.

Interestingly, there appeared to be no clear correlation between click rate and word count for our sample. But there was between the number of clicks per clicker. Clicks per clicker started at about 1.3 at 1-100 words and peaked around 1.4 for 400+ words. This increase of 11% was much smaller than the increase of 28% seen between extremes in last week’s link count analysis.

What This Means
The most intriguing stat of all is one we didn’t even include on the charts: opt-out rate. For link count, opt-out rates were almost identical between the groups sitting right at 0.20% no matter how many links an email contained. For word count, however, opt-out rates started at 0.18% for the 1-100 word count group and consistently rose to 0.22% for the 400+ word group.

With no clear, positive correlation to click rate and a smaller impact on clicks per clicker than link count, the last straw for word count may be the increase in opt-outs. When it makes sense, keeping word count as low as possible may be worth the effort.

Also for reference, this is word number 300.

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