Q: When is the best time to send email snow reports each morning?

Some resorts send at 4:30am, others closer to 9:00, but overall, when is that golden window where email snow reports get the most opens? Or does the time matter at all? That was the question we had this week, so, as you probably guessed, we dug into the data to find an answer.

The Setup
For this sample we analyzed snow report emails sent from 21 different resorts to more than 18,000,000 recipients. When we talk about “time” in this analysis, we are referring to the local time each message was sent. First, let’s check when emails have been sent up to this point by looking at total sends by hour.

As you might have expected, snow report volume is almost identical during the 5:00, 6:00, and 7:00 hours. Starting in the 8:00, as the start of the ski day quickly approaches, this number drops off significantly.

So, how did open rates fare? The 7:00 hour came in first with an average open rate of 19.9%. Close behind were the 5:00 hour at 19.3% and the 8:00 hour at 18.7%.

Perhaps more important to note is the seemingly dead area from 6:00-7:00 where the open rate averages just 15.6%. Why opens drop so sharply we don’t know. Looking closer at the numbers we see that right at 6:00 the average is still high and at 6:50 it’s almost back up, but between 6:10 and 6:40 opens are significantly lower.

What to Do, What to Do
The first thing is to check the send times of your snow reports from last season. If they were sent around 6:30 each morning, you may want to try sending them after 7:00 or before 6:00.

If you aren’t sending during that dead-zone, consider other factors like when neighboring mountains sent their reports as you work to optimize these emails. For the most part, snow reports have a large sweet spot but running a month-long split test to begin the season might help you further nail down the best sending time for your resort.

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