Q: How late is “too late” when you need a resort email read the same day?

As a deadline approaches, resorts typically find themselves in one of two camps: they either send a reminder the day before a deadline, or the day of. Deadlines aren’t the only reason to send last-minute emails, so we wondered how late in the day you could deploy a campaign and still get it seen by a large number of subscribers. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer, we took campaigns sent within the last year from a dozen different resorts to over 6,000,000 recipients. Then, we grouped them by the hour (local time) each was sent.

Then, we found the percentage of unique opens that happened by the end of the day they were sent. So, if a campaign went out at 3pm ET on December 17, had 10,000 total unique opens and 5,000 unique opens by the end of the day on the 17th, that campaign would have a 50% “first day” open rate.

Here’s how it looked:

Surprisingly, the difference in opens was fairly small between a message sent at 8am and a message sent at 2pm. After that, however, the percentage of subscribers a campaign will reach drops significantly. From 76% at 2pm, only 53% of people will open an email the day it is sent if it goes out at 6pm.

What This Means
Among other things, it seems this chart might be hinting at different types of email use. Some check email all day long and no matter when you send, they’ll see it. Others may only check during work and likely show up in the decline starting in the afternoon. And still others only check every day or two which probably show up in the 15-20% that won’t open no matter how early it goes out.

What’s helpful is realizing that just because you aren’t sure how big tomorrow’s powder day will be at 8am doesn’t mean you can’t wait for mid-day forecasts and still get the word out in time. Same goes for any last-minute piece of news. Send if you’re confident, but take advantage of this cushion when you need more time.

Sweet Hookups
Next week we’ll post another resort marketing insight just like this one. Sick your email below and we’ll send it right to your inbox when it goes live.