The hospitality email marketing metric that refuses to budge.

Marketing pundits have been predicting the demise of email marketing for more than a decade. As such, we’ve been monitoring some of the vital signs of this channel over the years and wanted revisit one of the most important today: opt outs. Are more people getting tired of hospitality email marketing in 2017 than years past? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we used the same criteria as previous analyses but added the rest of 2016 data and the first couple months of 2017. This combined sample includes a total of 25,000 campaigns sent by hundreds of hotels and resorts across North America. We grouped these campaigns by the year they were sent and found the average opt out rate for each group.

Based on this sample, the opt out rate for 2016 ended at 0.20% while 2017 has started at 0.22%. These two data points sit on either side of the overall average of 0.21%.

What This Means
What’s interesting about the above-average start to 2017 is that we saw the same thing when we looked at these numbers in March 2016 before rates dropped . So while it is slightly up, three are still two other years with higher opt out rates from this range and past trends suggest this number will drop by December.

In other words, no, there is no spike in opt outs. People have been unsubscribing from hospitality marketing emails at roughly the same rate for nearly a decade even as open and click rates continue to rise. So, no, email isn’t going anywhere. If anything, it’s only getting stronger.

Next Week
We’ll be back next week with another insight like this one. Don’t want to miss it? Stick your email below.