Q: Does including a dollar amount in the subject line of your emails increase the open rate?

For many mountain resorts around the country, March heralds the beginning of season pass sales. With this product on the brain, we decided to try to find the answer to a nagging question we’ve had for a while: does including a dollar amount in the subject line of these emails increase or decrease the open rate? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at emails from the last five years sent by over forty mountain resort in the United States. While it’s tempting to do a blanket “includes” vs “doesn’t include” query, we had a funny feeling the answer to our original question would depend on the context. So, we created a list of specific words and compared the open rates between subject lines that also included a dollar amount or didn’t include a dollar amount. Here’s how it turned out.

As we suspected, the impact of showing a dollar amount depended on the context. For most emails, not showing a dollar amount lead to higher open rates. Subject lines that mentioned lift tickets, passes, sales, deals, or offers all saw a higher open rate when not paired with a dollar amount. The inverse was true for subject lines with references to lodging or savings.

What This Means
Let’s break these up into two groups. The first is where the dollar value is tied to the actual price of a product. In this case knowing the price would tell almost the whole story. If someone knows a lift ticket costs $50 from the subject line, in many instances they can decide to act on this offer without ever opening the email.

On the other hand, the second group is where the dollar value is tied to a discount. Without knowing the original price, we can’t make a decision and must open the email to get more information. Perhaps that is why “save”, the only word exclusively tied to discounts, is also one of the only words to see higher open rates when a dollar amount is shown in the subject line.

More & Merrier
Another resort marketing insight like this one drops every week. We call it The Stash. Stick your email below and we’ll shoot you an email when the next one is released.