Q: How did resort email performance during the 2013/14 season compare to previous years?

While many of you look back over the ski season and run year-end reports, we like to do the same on an industry-wide scale. One of the most interesting to us each spring is email performance. With mobile usage on the rise, how did ski resort open and click rates fare in 2013/14? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
For this analysis we looked at resort emails that had been sent over the last five years. To focus on larger campaigns rather than transactional messaging (which we’ll cover later), we limited the sample to messages intended for at least 10,000 recipients. This resulted in over 250,000,000 sends, approximately 50,000,000 opens, and about 5,000,000 clicks. Here’s how things compare year-over-year.

Right off the bat we see two clear trends. The first is that open rate is steady climbing among resorts. The other is that click rates have been dropping slightly along the way. This year our ski resort clients averaged an open rate of nearly 20% with click rates sitting just above 8%.

What This Means
More than anything, these stats are simply a reflection of a greater email trend related to smartphones. Since the dawning of the iPhone age, a growing collection of evidence supports the idea that mobile device adoption has lead to both higher open rates and a lower click rates.

With the resort industry anything but immune to these trends, it’s important to start planning and designing the experience to meet the needs, and accompanying behaviors, of these guests.

More Data, More Insight
Next week we’ll share another hotel marketing insight just like this one. Don’t want to miss it? Stick your email below and we’ll send you a quick message when it’s live.