Trends Q: Did ski resort emails perform better or worse in 2014/15 than previous years?

With the 2014/15 ski season in the books, it’s time for our annual email marketing performance update. The season, as expected, saw myriad changes to the social, email, and general communication landscape. So how did clicks and opens compare to previous years? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we used the same methodology as previous years to add these new data points. Specifically, we only included campaigns sent by ski resorts to at least 10,000 recipients during the 2014/15 winter season. The chart below shows all previous years as well.

Versus 2013/14, 2014/15 saw a slight increase in open rates and a slight decrease in click rate – continuing the trend we’ve seen for the last half-decade. More specifically, open rate increased from 19.8% to 19.9% while click rate decreased from 8.0% to 7.9%.

What This Means
The natural question is why. From our perspective, the increase in opens is likely a result of both improved marketing from resorts and the proliferation of mobile devices. As we saw a few weeks ago, open rates tend to spike when mobile usage is highest.

On the clicks side of the equation, it’s likely also a result of mobile behavior and the lack of mobile-friendly email templates. Either way, keep in mind that both are averages, not absolutes, and many resorts bucked both trends by significantly increasing both their opens and clicks last season.

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