After nearly doubling every year, social posting volume started to decline on nearly all major sites starting in 2013. Was it a bubble bursting or a new channel trying to find the sweet spot between content and value? Here’s what we saw in 2016.

The Goods
To find our answer we again looked at over 1,100 hotel and resort Facebook accounts to find the average monthly posting frequency each year since 2008.

After monthly posting dropped 3.3% in 2014 and 12.0% in 2015, posting volume stayed nearly flat; climbing slightly from 22.0 posts per month in 2015 to 22.5 posts per month in 2016.

What This Means
What’s important to note is that, once again, Facebook isn’t alone in this trend. After Twitter posting volume dropped 19.8% in 2015, it declined just 1.2% in 2016. YouTube saw a drop of 14.1% in 2015, but only 5.0% in 2016.

Going back to our original question, the decline we saw between 2013 and 2015 wasn’t the beginning of the end. Rather, it was simple a matter of marketers finding a more realistic, balanced pace for the content posting schedules.

Next Week, More
We’ve been publishing resort- and hotel-specific marketing insights like this one every week for more than four years. Don’t want to miss the next round? Stick your email below to get an alert when it drops.

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So which of our nearly 50 posts were most popular in 2016? Take a look.

1) Social media posting drops 12-20% in 2015 across all major sites.
One of the metrics we’ve updated semi-regularly over the years is YOY social posting frequency. At the intersection of adoption…
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2) How dead is Google+? Hotel and resort profile data tell the story.
Google+ has become the punch line of many marketing jokes. References to life support and ghost towns are not uncommon as the…
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3) Do women open resort marketing emails more frequently than men?
We’ve looked at gender a few times in regard to mountain resort marketing, but we’ve never looked at gender in the context…
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4) Most punctuation marks have no influence on open rates, except one…sorta.
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5) How many skiers book a return trip to the same resort in the summer?
Seasonal crossover is a big question in the ski industry, and rightly so. With a loyal, engaged group that tends to create traditions…
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6) Only 1/3 of resort websites were responsive in 2014, but what about now?
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7) The one content type that’s slowly dominating hospitality marketing on Facebook.
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8) Millennials and Email: Hospitality-specific data yields intriguing results.
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9) A small subject line tweak that worked in 2012 no longer makes a difference.
Back in 2012 we did an extremely simple, but intriguing, analysis. Simply put, does putting the name of…
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10) How many hotels have jumped on the Pokemon GO bandwagon?
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The Goods
To find our answer we used the same sample as last week of 20,000 recent transactions that occurred within four days of an email being sent. We then found what the average size for lodging and non-lodging transactions for guests who booked the same day they opened an email, the day after, etc.

The average lodging transaction size for this sample was $732 when booked the same day an email was opened, $869 the next day, $854 two days later, $884 three days later, and $827 four days later. Those numbers for non-lodging were, in the same order, $396, $443, $357, $331, and $318.

What This Means
As you might expect, the people who take a couple days to make a decision on a lodging reservation do in fact spend more on those bookings. In other words, even with limited occupancy or limited-time offers, smaller, simpler reservations will be booked faster than larger, more complex ones.

The same doesn’t necessarily hold true with other transactions where spend does spike on the second day but then drops off after that suggesting that non-lodging doesn’t carry the same issues of complexity and other facts may be at work.

Next Week, Another Insight
We’ve been publishing new hospitality-specific insights every week since 2012. Don’t want to miss next week’s? Stick your email below.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 20,000 recent transactions that occurred within four days of the transactor first opening or first clicking a marketing email. We then worked backwards and found how many people booked the same day they opened that email, the day after, and so on. Here’s how it looks.

OPEN-TO-TRANSACTION

For our sample, 36% of transactions happened the same day an email was first opened, 21% the day after, 16% two days after, 14% three days after and 13% four days after.

But what do these gaps look like for the first click?

CLICK-TO-TRANSACTION

For our sample, 52% of transactions happened the same day an email was first clicked, 18% the day after, 12% two days after, 9% three days after and 8% four days after.

What This Means
There are two lessons to take away from this sample. The first is that, somewhat surprisingly, people who booked lodging were slightly more likely to book the same day they opened or clicked an email compared to those who purhased something else (spa, tickets, golf, etc.).

The second insight is that someone who clicks is significantly closer to transaction than someone who opens. And not by a little. About 1/3 of email openers who eventually transact will do so that same day while that number is north of 1/2 for clickers.

The next question you might have is transaction size? Do people contemplate larger transactions for longer and act more impulsively (same day) on smaller bookings? That’s what we’ll tackle next week.

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The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 700,000,000 emails sent by 100 resorts and hotels over the last three years. Our analysis is based on the assumption that if more of those 100 resorts were active on a given day, other brands (not in our sample) would be too. So we:

1. Found the average send volume of every day since Jan 1, 2014.
2. Compared that day’s volume to the average of the 10 days before and after.
3. Grouped the results by how far above/below average the send volume was.
4. Found how far above/below average performance was for each group.

For example, the first bar on the left in the chart below means that on days where marketing volume was less than 50% of normal, the open rate on that day was 3.4% above average.

As noted above, on days that saw significantly lower volume (less than half of average) the open rate was 3.5% higher than normal. On days that saw 150% of typical send volume the open rate was 3.2% lower than normal.

What This Means
As we suspected, on days where send volume was highest open rate dropped and visa-versa, but the difference was small. Remember, a difference of +3.4% on a 20% open rate is just +0.7 percentage points or a difference of 1034 opens instead of 1000.

So, yes, there’s a difference, but not a massive one. We also need to remember that if many brands are sending on the same day, there may be more important reasons for that which take priority over a small bump in open rate.

Next Week, More
We’ve been publishing new hospitality-specific insights with hospitality-specific data every Tuesday since 2012. We call it Tuesday Trends. Stick your email below if you’d like an alert when the next one drops.

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The Goods
To find our answer we looked at email marketing performance for 100 resorts and hotels since 2008. We found the average daily open and click rates of the week before and after Thanksgiving and plotted them on the chart below.

For this sample the open rate peaked on the Sundays before and after the holiday, click rate peaked even earlier than that, with Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday all coming in just below the sample’s overall average in both opens and clicks.

What This Means
With both charts we see the highest performance 4+ days before Thanksgiving. In other words, if you have something to say and were planning to send early next week, you may want to hustle and get it out the door either during or just prior to this weekend.

But what may catch your eye in this chart is the dip in opens on Cyber Monday when email volume (not shown above) peaked for this sample. So, is there any correlation between widespread email volume and average performance? That’s what we’re going to look at next week.

Don’t Miss It
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Rather than just add categories of all posts – good and bad – we’re handpicking collections of the top posts around specific themes. Today’s topic is social media marketing. What works? Where are we going? How did we get here? Enjoy.

Do older resort guests tend to have a higher NPS than younger guests?
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Are older social media users as influential online as their younger counterparts?
We’ve put numbers to a few instinctual responses in the age versus social media debate. Today we want to add another insight to this list…
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Are resort guests with Gmail addresses younger than those using AOL emails?
Last week we looked at how many people in resort databases are using various email providers like Yahoo!, Gmail, or AOL. A long list…
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How much does social media activity decrease as the age of guests increases?
We all know, or at least assume, that older guests are less likely to use social media than younger guests. In true mythbusters…
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Are older guests at your resort more likely to book a return trip?
Over the last few months we’ve been exploring factors that impact the likelihood someone will return to a resort. We’ve explored everything…
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Who does email really reach? The young tech-savvy crew or the older crowd?
Now you’re seeing what happens when marketers get excited about something: they just keep rolling with it. Such is the…
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Age vs. length-of-stay: the older the guest, the longer they stay?
A lot of things can change with age – jobs, vacation days, income, marital status, and children are just a few. To start…
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We’ve been publishing these insights every Tuesday since 2012. Don’t want to miss next week’s dig into the data? Stick your email address below.

The Goods
To find an answer we looked at 7 of our clients that have been using both automated lifecycle messaging (pre, during, post-stay, etc.) and review widget survey integration (review form appears on last page of feedback survey) during the last 18 months.

Before turning on their campaigns these brands averaged 195 reviews each. Here’s how the 1/2 step, rounded review scores (3.0, 3.5, 4.0, etc. – theses are used to visual display a company’s average rating) and actual, non-rounded scores changed over that period for each brand.

All of the brands in this sample raised their non-rounded score by an average of 0.29 points which helped 4 of the 7 brands reach the next 1/2-point step for their score. On average, these brands climbed half of the available slots in their respective rankings (e.g., if ranking out of 10, a jump of at least 5 spots).

What This Means
There are a few important lessons from this data set. The first is that these efforts absolutely work. It helps guests have better experiences and more people end up posting reviews. But even more important to remember is that if you start with a significant number of reviews (like all of these brands) or a high score (like brands 1, 4, and 7) increasing your score takes time.

We could cherry pick a data point like Brand #2 that started with more than 50 reviews and still managed to raise their rounded rating from 3.0 to 4.0, but that’s the exception. Same goes for the brands that started with just a few reviews we didn’t include in our analysis. So, yes, it’s absolutely possible to increase your score with great communications and better integrations, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

Next Week, Another Insight
We’ve been publishing new resort and hotel marketing insights like this one every Tuesday since 2012. Don’t want to miss next week’s? Stick your email below and we’ll send you an email alert when it drops.