Trends What happens in the first hour after a big hotel or resort email campaign is deployed?

A few weeks ago we looked at email’s long tail and compared it to social media. Amazingly, nearly 4% of all email opens happen more than 30 days after a campaign is sent. But what about the opposite? How much activity does a message see immediately after it hits recipients’ inboxes? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 25 email campaigns sent to over 4,000,000 by 10 different resorts and hotels. Messages were only included if they were sent to at least 100,000 people (the average was 175,000).

The first thing we broke down was what percentage of total opens happened during each of first six hours after an email was sent.

About 27% of all opens occurred during the first hour after a campaign was sent and over 61% came within the first six hours.

The trend was very similar for clicks, as you’d expect, but to identify any variations we also looked at how click rate (clicks/opens) changed over that same period.

Interesting, the average click rate for this sample rose slowly but steadily during each of the first six hours after a message was deployed from a low of 6.3% to a high of 7.2%.

What This Means
If you look just at those first three hours you’ll get a total that is just a shade under 50%. In other words, although opens will come for months after a message is sent, half of all the people that open any given message will do so in the first three hours.

More intriguing, however, is the behavior that shows up among recipients who take longer to open. There is clearly a substantial group of people who live close to their inboxes and open emails more quickly. But, for whatever reason, this group may be less likely to act on marketing emails.