Q: Likes vs opens: does social engagement follow the same curve as email performance?

One of the first Stash posts we tackled was daily open and click rates for resort email campaigns throughout the year. With another year of email performance along side social media metrics in the database, we decided to revisit this topic with an extra twist: does the “like rate” of resort Facebook posts match the “open rate” of resort email campaigns? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we analyzed over 300,000,000 resort emails and 325,000 resort Facebook posts published during the last 3.5 years. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, open rate is defined at “unique opens / total sends” and like rate is defined as “post likes / page fans”.

Performance was grouped by day of the year and then adjusted (like rate is usually less than 0.5% while open rate is typically around 17-18%) to fit on the same axes.

First, you may notice that the peaks and valleys seem smaller on this chart compared to the last daily open analysis we did. While the new data did smooth those extremes a small amount, it’s how widely Facebook engagement fluctuates that makes those peaks seem shorter and the valleys seem shallower.

What This Means
The bottom line is Facebook performance is more influenced by changing seasons than email, at least with this sample. On the email side, the peak open rate is about 40% higher than the lowest open rate. With Facebook, that difference is 300%.

Email will perform more steadily throughout the year, while Facebook can greatly magnify any efforts when the timing, and message, is right.

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