Trends Q: Are mobile opens shifting the hours when resort open rates are highest?

Mobile opens have grown quickly over the last half-decade, but what effect has this increase had on the resort email send times that get the highest open rates? That was this week’s question. Here is this week’s answer.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at resort emails delivered by 90 resorts to over 600,000,000 recipients over since 2012. Emails were analyzed by the local time each was sent at and grouped in three-hour blocks throughout the day (12am – 2am below representing campaigns sent between 12:00am – 2:59am).

Overall, open rates are clearly up. But looking at hours it appears that the once linear, hourly rise in open rates is being replaced with a morning peak and an evening peak. Even 2015 YTD campaign confirm this trend showing even more pronounced rises in open rate performance during the pre-workday (6:00am – 8:59am) and post-workday (6:00pm – 8:59pm) hours.

What This Means
If you’ve watched mobile usage statistics in the past, the shape of this curve will come as no surprise. What might, however, is that it only started showing up for the emails in our sample last year when data in 2012 show this for mobile web usage in general.

In other words, the trends in mobile usage that have been developing for the last number of years finally appears to be making a significant, increasing impact on the performance of email campaigns.

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