The best and worst resort marketing jargon for the holidays.

The holidays mean a lot of things. Family, gifts, snow, traditions – but they also mean marketing cliches. With many of you busy this week, we’re keeping it light and simple by finding which of the more common holiday marketing phrases do (and do not) work for marketers. Here’s a quick list.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 1,200 hotel and resort emails sent by nearly 100 properties to 28,000,000 recipients during the week leading up to Christmas over the last few years. We teased out some of the more common phrases used in email subject lines, kept the ones used enough to give a decent average, and ranked them below by their open rates.

As you might expect, simply including the obvious and relevant “merry Christmas” or “happy holidays” in a subject line correlated to the highest open rates in our sample. Variations on the invitation to “celebrate with us” came in next with “give the gift of” coming in well below average and the perhaps a bit too early “ring in the new year” came in dead last.

What This Means
You can probably think of more cliches than this, but of the 25 we analyzed these were the only ones used often enough each year to have results worth sharing. So, as you noticed, we also included some other more generic marketing-speak in our list.

The takeaway is simple: it’s the Christmas and holiday season, so make your messages about that. But, at the same time, don’t be afraid to throw an offer out as well. It may only be a few days until Christmas, but people are still more than willing to spend.

Next Week
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