Q: Do mountain resort email open and click rates differ between men and women?

We’ve compared email marketing open and click rates on a number of different foundations, but we’ve never looked closer at a very simple difference between resort guests: gender. Though adding gender to an email database isn’t a common request from clients, we dug through the small set of data we did have to see what we’d find. Take a look.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at two different types of messaging – newsletters and targeted/segmented messages – sent during the last 6 months. In total these messages were delivered to just under 250,000 recipients. Of that group about 175,000 were male and 75,000 were female. Here’s how the open and click rates looked:

Newsletters received by men were opened 33.9% of the time versus 31.8% by women. Newsletter click rates were 9.1% for men and 8.9% for women. For the more segmented campaigns we saw a reversal for open rates – 51.8% for men and 52.8% for women – but again showed men as the more likely group to click with a click rate of 7.6% compared to 5.7% for women.

What This Means
The really interesting thing to us was the fact that the open rates flipped with segmentation, indicating that specific topics or themes can impact the behavior of one group over the other. As a simple example, the biggest click-rate gap between the genders on newsletters also happened to be a campaign about mountain biking.

As we think about this more some interesting ideas come to the surface. Should emails be segmented by gender? Should copy be written in a tone and with offers that are catered to each group? If these gaps exist at your destination, it’s definitely something to consider.

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