Q: Does the performance of specific marketing words change over time?

If you’ve ever coached sports, you’ve probably learned you can only run a play a few times before its effectiveness begins to wane. But what about marketing? To put some quantity behind this idea, we looked at the most commonly used resort marketing words to see how their performance has ebbed and flowed over the last few years. Take a look.

The Goods
For this analysis we looked at the open rates of emails that used the most common resort marketing words. We tried not to cram too many onto this chart, but if you look carefully, you should able to trace each graph. The thick black line is the average open rate for all emails sent during that year:

Overall rates aside, a handful (special, offer, deal, save, free) seemed to have increased right along side the average since 2009. Others (savings, discount) have plateaued over the last couple years while a the remaining few (limited, lowest) have actually dropped.

What This Means
For the most part, these words seem to ebb and flow along with overall email averages. A few, however, may be showing signs of overuse as they have either plateaued or begun to decline. For example, “lowest” didn’t appear in any resort email during 2009. In 2010, when it showed up, it had the highest performance of any marketing word before dropping significantly in 2011 and again in 2012.

While this analysis is hardly conclusive, you may want to consider thinking outside the box with your promotional words. Either trying new ideas or rotating through previously used words from time to time may help keep your marketing messages fresh and unique.

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