With all the “noise”, are more and more people opting out of hotel marketing?

In email marketing, an unsubscribe represents someone saying “that’s enough.” But email doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s just one channel in a growing landscape of online messages. In 2006 there was no such thing as a brand Facebook page or advanced ad targeting, so is all this marketing noise in 2016 driving more and more people to opt out of these messages? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at a simple email metric that we’ve put under the microscope before but never on a year-over-year scale: unsubscribe rate. We took email performance data from 20,000 hotel and resort newsletter campaigns sent to over 1,000,000,000 people since 2007. We then found the average opt out rate for each year including year-to-date results for 2016.

From a high of 0.23% in 2007 and 2012 to lows of 0.17% in 2009 and 0.18 in 2013, there really hasn’t been a consistent trend up or down from an average of about 0.21% for our client sample since 2007.

What This Means
This honestly surprised us. We knew that opt-out rates hadn’t necessarily spiked, but we assumed with all the factors at play in today’s marketing environment something would have to give. For whatever reason, it hasn’t. At all.

Whether that’s a testament to email in general or the efficiency of the email efforts within this sample is tough to say, but there’s probably also more to this story. For example, is a millennial more likely to unsubscribe than a boomer? As you might have guessed, we’ll be covering that in an upcoming post.

Another Tuesday, Another Insight
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