Retreats vs Workshops
What is it?
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet… But would it sell as well?
COMO Shambhala marketed their yoga events as “workshops”, as the term “retreat” was already being used in reference to their spas. This was a legacy creative decision made a long time ago by an older copywriter… and it just stuck.
But the marketing team had serious concerns that the term “workshop” misrepresents the product and negatively impacts marketability – so we brought in facts and numbers to argue the case.
What I did
I led the project to determine the marketability of both terms, working with members of my social team and the CRM team.
The tests
To find out which term performs better, we A/B tested the two terms across different user touch points:
Online search behavior
Hashtag association
Social posts
EDMs
Online search behavior
To test how people search on the Internet, we just used Google to check for the search frequency and associated keywords for Retreats and Workshops.
“Wellness retreat” had a much higher search volume than “wellness workshop” – so score one for Retreats.
When it came to related search terms, Retreats came up on top again with far more relevant terms like yoga, wellness and holidays. Workshops on the other hand, had related searches like craft, DIY, and woodworking.
Hashtag association
We then turned to Instagram to see what comes up when you search for #retreat. It turned out to be relevant content, with related tags like #womensretreat, #restorativeyoga and #qigong.
#workshop didn’t fare as well, with content and related hashtags about crafts and other DIY projects.
Social media posts
We did a few tests on social media. First up was an A/B test of identical Facebook ads with the Retreat/Workshop term switched. Retreat doubled the Click-through rate of Workshop.
Then there was a pair of organic Instagram posts – both variations performed similarly.
And because we can, we tried an Instagram Story poll, asking if fans would rather go on a retreat or workshop. Retreat took 80% of the votes.
EDMs
Finally, we A/B tested an EDM with the subject header being the only difference. Retreat had better open and click-through rates, but only by a teeny tiny bit.
Conclusion
The results strongly favored Retreats as the ideal term to market with. So we went with that instead.
