Q: What were the most popular resort marketing insights during the 2012/13 season?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Inception”, you may understand what we’re about to do here. Like dreams inside of dreams, we’re about to Stash the Stash. Between October 2012 and June 2013, we covered 35 different marketing topics. So, which ones were the most popular? Take a look.

The Goods
As you likely know, we alert marketers of new Stashes via email each week (you can sign up at the bottom of this post). Some of those emails had high open rates but low click rates. For others, it was the exact opposite. To rank Stash posts, we combined the two metrics: dividing total clicks by the total emails delivered (Clk/Del below).

So, if it was sent to 200 people, 80 opened (40% open rate), and 40 clicked (50% click rate), you’d get a clicks/delivered rate of 20% (40/200). That’s the number you see in the far left column of the table below. The title is a link in case you missed that post, and the date each post was published is after that. Take a look.

Clk/Del	Topic	Date
32.52%	Does season pass purchase date impact renewal rate?	Mar-12
32.45%	Do resort pre-arrival emails actually work?	Jan-29
30.77%	Which words get the most summer email opens for resorts?	Jun-18
28.72%	How frequently are resorts posting on FB vs previous seasons?	Apr-23
26.37%	Where do the longest-staying resort guests come from?	May-15
26.11%	How are guests using social media this year vs. last?	Feb-26
26.09%	How fast does a resort’s FB fan count grow when it snows?	Oct-9
25.46%	How hard is it to get a passholder back after they skip a season?	Jun-5
25.31%	Do winter guests return more often than summer guests?	Feb-12
24.47%	How good are skiers at guessing how many days they’ll ski?	Dec-4
24.44%	Do guests read the emails you send while they’re at your resort?	Apr-9
23.81%	If your NPS is X, can I predict if you’ll return to my resort?	Oct-2
23.68%	Subject line personalization: cheesy add-on or effective tool?	Oct-16
23.67%	Are more older resort guests becoming active on social media?	Mar-19
22.99%	How did ski vacation bookings compare this summer over last?	Nov-20
22.80%	What happens when you email guests that don’t open your emails?	Apr-30
22.78%	For every 100 followers you get, how many do you lose?	Apr-2
22.56%	Should you send pass deadline emails the last day or day before?	May-7
21.95%	How does social media activity decrease a guest’s age increases?	Oct-30
21.94%	Do guests who stay longer always plan further in advance?	Feb-5
21.39%	Does a resort’s “like rate” on Facebook match email “open rate”?	Apr-16
20.66%	Send during holidays but not about them?	Dec-26
20.61%	Spring pass sales were up, did the pace hold ’til New Year’s?	Jan-8
20.51%	What happens to booking lead times when snowfall is scarce?	Dec-18
20.42%	Does the power of specific marketing words change over time?	Jan-23
20.31%	If I booked the last 3, 4, or 5 seasons, will I return next year?	Jan-2
20.24%	Age vs email, who do your emails really reach?	Nov-13
20.11%	Do skiers who buy their season pass in spring ski more?	Mar-26
20.00%	How many skiers at one resort own a season pass to another?	Dec-11
19.38%	How do owner-passholders compare to everyone else?	Jun-25
18.90%	Who books their trips earlier: winter or summer guests?	Feb-19
17.50%	At what age does lodging spend peak for destination guests?	Nov-6
16.42%	Does the length of a tweet impact the retweets it gets?	Jan-15
15.73%	Email performance is on the rise but did summer stats follow suit?	Nov-27
14.90%	In terms of RFM, who are your Twitter followers…really?	May-28

There aren’t any hard and fast trends that stand out. The top 5 posts were published all the way from January to June and cover season passes, summer, social media, and lodging. Same goes for the bottom 5 with topics traversing an equally broad range of themes.

What This Means
More than anything, we wanted to give all the new Stash followers a fun way to review some of the topics they had missed with a truly Stash-like method of prioritization.

We may have our favorites, but hopefully these numbers don’t lie and give you a good reading list that will spark new ideas, help you think outside the box and, ultimately, improve your marketing. Thanks for being along for the ride and see you next week!

Come On In
The Stash isn’t going anywhere. So if you want the next topic we add to this list waiting in your inbox Tuesday morning, stick your email below.