Trends Q: Should you send season pass deadline emails the last day or day before?

If you’re selling season passes, you’re probably going to have deadlines. And if you have deadlines, you’ve probably got one coming up soon if you haven’t had one already. So, as that “final day” approaches, when should you send your last email? That was our question, here is our answer.

The Goods
To tackle this query we took email campaigns sent to nearly 3,000,000 resort customers that referred to a deadline either being “today” or “tomorrow” in their subject line. Here’s how it shook out:

In terms of both opens and clicks, sending an email the day before a deadline outperformed those sent the day of. How much of that difference is related to the distribution of clicks/opens over time might be an issue if people are seeing a same-day email the day after the deadline and not opening/clicking before it is no longer perceived as relevant.

What This Means
Deadlines are powerful stuff. Over 24x as many sales happen the last day of a season pass sale than the first day. The last week sees 10x more than the first week. Getting the timing right can help maximize the hours leading up to a deadline.

While the day before is the overall winner, there isn’t a huge difference in terms of opens and there may be a combination – 3 days before + last day, week before + day before, etc. – that would work better at your resort. Use this as a jumping off point for your own split tests to learn from an upcoming deadline and be ready for the next.