Q: Are skiers opening emails sooner now than when smartphones were less common?

Last week we looked at how late you could send an email and still get it seen by a good portion of your subscribers. As we pulled that data, another question arose as we were periodically interrupted by calls and emails on our smartphones: now that these devices are more common, are people opening emails faster than they used to? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
For this analysis we used emails sent by a dozen different resorts to just under 4,000,000 skiers during the 2008/09 season. Again, we grouped the campaigns by local send time and only looked at what percentage of total opens occurred during the first day.

However, we did decide to be a little less granular with the way we grouped sending times so we wouldn’t miss the overall lesson from the data. So, has the percentage of emails opened the same day an email was sent changed from 2008/09 to 2012/13? Take a look.

If we had guessed, we would have said that more emails are being opened the day they are sent this year than in 2008/09. Yet, the data show little or no change at all to this metric since the year after the original iPhone came out. If anything, emails, overall, were being opened slightly quicker in 2008 than today.

What This Means
There are small differences that indicate emails being sent in the morning are being opened faster now than in 2008 (and the opposite for later delivery times), but the differences are small enough that we’re not expecting any significant trend to develop.

What it means to us is that the trend we reported last week likely isn’t going anywhere despite the continued, rapid growth of smartphone users who have 24/7 access to their email accounts.

Final Countdown
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