Why we don't send holiday wishes to our customers

Here's what we do that's something more than just sending a holiday wish email to our customers.

Simply put, we don’t live in 1998 for us to wish people for holidays over work email. Time has passed, and everyone is trying to keep their inbox clean. The last thing they would want to see is some random happy holidays email from a client or a vendor, for which they already know the content inside the email.

Treating holiday wishes emails as your lead-warm-up-strategy is a terrible idea;

No one wraps in a critical project status update after a ridiculous 3mb image file wishing happy holidays in an email with subject line, “Happy holidays, Steve” (If you do, think twice about your job role).

A few years ago, I sat down with my marketing team to listen to their ideas about keeping in touch with our customers before the big holidays season. Among all the brilliant ideas, one of the plans was to send out an email to everyone wishing them a holiday. Having founded the company with technology in the center (we’ve changed a lot since then), it was essential for us to evaluate logically about the open rates of these emails, and the emotion we would instill in a customer when they read our happy holidays email;

After about 15 minutes of the marketing team pitching their ideas, we sat down to do something called “The logical teardown”; The logical teardown is something that helps you weigh what to focus on first, based on the tasks that can have a huge impact on the team’s KPI; for the marketing team, the KPI during the last quarter was to make sure our customers know we are there for them, and we sincerely wish them a perfect time during their holidays;

Here is a screenshot of the results we arrived at from this logical teardown exercise (edited some confidential information for publishing purposes):


So the final 5 points you see in this note, worked out beautifully for us, and we continue to do that for all our customers as we scale;

Instead of writing something that many hundred companies would do, send them a personal note; it is time-consuming, but that is the only way you are going to make someone feel special; that is the only way you are going to make someone think that you care about them;

Again, treating holiday wishes emails as your lead-warm-up-strategy is a terrible idea;

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