Q: Which summer subject line words get the most email opens for resorts?

One of the first Stash posts last year was a simple one that sought to answer the question of which keywords in resort subject lines get the most opens. Today, we’re revisiting that topic but just focusing our data lens on summer months and, specifically, summer activities. Which have snagged the most opens in the past? Take a look.

The Goods
We looked at over 1,500 summer email campaigns for this analysis that were sent between May and August each year. In winter, the main focus is obviously snow and skiing. In summer, the variety of activities is massive. So we took a long list of activities (e.g., camping, biking, golf) as well as reasons you may visit a resort (e.g., views, escape, experience) and times/holidays (e.g., mother’s day, weekend, 4th of july) and used open rates as a gauge of interest around specific things that may motivate a visit and get warm-weather messages in front of more eyes.

One thing to not before the list is that we only analyzed email campaigns sent to over 1,000 recipients to avoid including too many highly segmented, niche offers that might skew things one way or another. Take a look.

What’s interesting to note is the common threads of things that show up near the top. For example, four food related words – dinner, brew, food, wine – are all in the top half. Concerts and music are nearly identical (though almost never used together in the emails we looked at) right in the middle. The time/holiday words all appear in the top half as well.

What This Means
This list combines a few factors including how broadly appealing an activity my be (open rate) as well as how often it’s been promoted (recipients total). Use this as a jumping off point as you plan your summer emails and choose subject line wording for those campaigns.

Take a look at your own numbers as well. Dig in and see what words perform best with your audience, compare then to the list above, run a few split tests and dominate your summer email marketing.

T-7 Days and Counting
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