Trends Q: Should resorts send email campaigns right on Thanksgiving Day?

Around Christmas last year we did a fun analysis of what happens when you push out email campaigns on Christmas. With another major holiday just days away, we wanted to ask the same question of Thanksgiving to find out if resorts should avoid, or embrace, sending messages around this fourth Thursday in November. Take a peek.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at all the emails campaigns sent by our clients in the week leading up to and after Thanksgiving Day for 2008-2012. We average both clicks and opens by their relation to the holiday and plotted them on the chart below. Because the day after Thanksgiving is also an important business date, we’ve highlighted Black Friday as well.

As you might have guessed, it’s tough to draw hard and fast conclusions from a sample size that’s as limited as this, but the results are nonetheless interesting. First, the weekends before and after Thanksgiving show a significantly higher open rate than any other days during this stretch.

For the most part, click rates seem to follow open rates. If people open, they’re likely going to click which holds true with trends from other times of the year.

What This Means
The short answer is that this data doesn’t mean all that much. Thanksgiving is just around the corner and you likely have a dozen other things to be worrying about than what the Stash said or didn’t say.

If you won’t leave without a takaway then let us recommend that, if you have a campaign that absolutely needs to go out that week, you consider sending it the weekend before Thanksgiving. We can’t guarantee a difference in performance, but this small set of emails suggest it might be worth of a shot.

If We Make it Through December…
The next Stash drops the first week of December. Don’t want to miss one of the last resort marketing insights of 2013? Stick your email below and we’ll alert you when it goes live.