Trends Q: Does day of the month impact ski resort email open & click rates?

Avoiding Bill Paying Times…
The idea behind this question is simple and, intuitively, makes sense to ask: wouldn’t the large amount of bills, mortgage payments, and spending that come at the beginning and end of each month mean marketing is LESS effective and make sending emails mid-month MORE effective?

The Theory
So, if this is true, for the clicks per send rate we would expect to see some sort of a curve that looks like this. Lower toward the beginning and end of the month, higher at the middle of the month.

The hard part about trying to prove or disprove this theory individually is the fact that it would require 31 separate tests. The smaller you break up your split testing groups, the smaller the sample size and less representative the results.

To take a look at this more closely, we pulled 75,000,000 ski resort emails and broke them down day by day. Here’s what we found.

Open & Rate
With open rates, nothing really stands out. Same goes for click rate. There is a spike on the 20th that, after looking at the emails that were sent that day, came from a series of surveys at season pass launches that happened to fall on the same day. Other than that, no major trends. If anything, there is a slight decline to the graph as the month goes along.

The Results
A simple way to look at the overall effectiveness of the messaging is to combine clicks and opens by looking at how many clicks you get per email sent. Again, however, no clear trends stand out. With so many spikes, we smoothed the curve a bit by taking averages of the first five days of the month, middle five days and last five days. And, for an ever broader look, averages of the first 10 days, middle ten days, and last 10 days.

The most surprising thing is that, while hardly substantial differences, the curve is exactly opposite of what we expected. The highest email performance actually came in the beginning of the month.

Key Lessons
Sometimes data tells us what to worry about, but in this case it simply highlights something we should NOT worry about: which day of the month our emails go out. Focus on your campaign goals and other factors like day of the week, but it looks like day of the month has no major impact. If anything, the first part of the month looks like your best bet, but the differences aren’t substantial enough to merit any major worry or change in email scheduling.

Until next week, what are your theories for the results? What questions do you have after seeing this data?

Next Week: Day of the Week
You may have seen data for day of the week before, but next week we’ll share the first analysis specifically for ski resorts and their unique flow from weekend to weekend. Pretty intriguing results so stay tuned.