“Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.
conversionvoodoo.com
conversionvoodoo.com
The conversion rate is just a depressing example of how people will buy anything you tell them to. Once you get people to read your email, you'll much more likely to convert. (You get Viagra spam because somebody clicks it and buys.)
This is basically why I give everyone a unique email address, and /dev/null the address after I stop needing it. People like the author of this post try to abuse my attention, and that is not OK with me.
It frightens me to know that there are people who spend as much time optimizing the performance of their marketing messages as we do on algorithms. The key difference (at least this is what I tell myself) is that while my work improves the actual product, the marketers work does no such thing.
For many consumer products, the value of the product is the experience created by the product in conjunction with the marketing. I think hackers tend to focus to exclusion on "core" or "objective" value. If the consumer market thought like that, everyone would be buying off-brand cola.
Second, I would imagine there's at least one order of magnitude more effort going into marketing optimization than there is into computer algorithms.
Like everywhere else, 90% of everything is crap and "marketing" is no exception, but how many bingo cards do you suppose Patrick would have sold if he wasn't greatly skilled at some oft-disparaged disciplines like SEO and email marketing?
Marketing done wrong is just as useless as all the programming done wrong you laugh at on Daily WTF. If you think you can run a profitable startup while religiously _not_ doing "marketing", I think you're wrong. I'd love to hear how you pitch that philosophy to investors though....
What does 'abuse my attention' mean to you? Is it unsolicited (spam) email, or just any form of marketing/promotion in general? This is an important point to address for startup founders who often rely on obtaining and nurturing attention relationships with their users.
When I get emails, I expect them to be from either friends or from clients. I like my friends enough to want to see the things they send to me ASAP; I want to hear immediately from clients so that I can respond to them at four in the morning (if I'm up anyway, that is). Know who I don't want interrupting my workflow? You.
If you're looking to get my attention because you've got a new feature or you generally just want me to come back to you, then come up with a way to make me want your reminder. Have me become a fan of you on Facebook, so that you can push to my feed. Have me follow you on Twitter. Publish your story to Hacker News, and make sure it's good enough that I'll notice it and check it out again. Get a blog and push your updates to me through RSS. But when you email me, you're being a jackass.
No, it's not. Maybe it was when we didn't have RSS and other "push" systems like Twitter and Facebook to handle people who didn't know who wanted to see their updates but assumed somebody might. Now, however, there is little reason to push content directly to my inbox rather than letting me specify the sorts of things I want there.
I'll put my email address down on a web site if they haven't launched and I want an email notifying me of launch. I think that's a reasonable time to email me. I think it's also a great idea to offer an easy "sign up to have us email you our blog posts" for people who don't have RSS but would still like to benefit from receiving updates. People who release specifically-made-for-email newsletters are either not taking enough advantage of modern methods of online communication, or they're assholes who care more about my seeing their name than they care about whether or not I want to see their name.
I _try_ to use unique email adresses, but it's a bit of a pain so I only end up doing it when I suspect spamminess, perhaps there's an opportunity here, a simplified way to auto generate single vendor/website specific email addresses directly from mail clients. It'd be reasonably easy to do it inside gmail on chrome, but I'd wNt it to work the same from my phone, iPad, laptop, desktop, and webmail. That makes it a bit harder. Perhaps a mail server based scheme where I can bcc a specific address and have the mail server/proxy deal with everything...
No, no they don't. That was pre-facebook - most of those users have moved there now.
Look, I dislike spam as much as the next guy, but being an entitled whiner like you are in this post is beyond ridiculous. If you don't like advertising and businesses trying to sell you stuff, move to North Korea and send me a postcard next Christmas to let us know how you're doing.
It's perfectly reasonable for someone to _not_ want, what consumerism brings them. People who decide they don't like receiving marketing emails - trying to dupe them into making a purchase - shouldn't be required to opt-out of society.
Dude: you chose to let email interrupt your flow. This is simply not how reasonable people use email: most people turn their computer on once a day or two and see if they have any email. When friends want to get a hold of them, they call them on the phone or maybe send a text message.
The question should not be "would you call me with this announcement", it should be "would you send me a piece of snail mail with this announcement". Seriously: when you insist that email be used in this manner /you/ are the person who is being the jackass.
I will also point out that letting friends interrupt you is also ludicrous. "Hey bill: next Thursday I'm thinking of going bowling; want to come?" should not force you to stop everything you are doug and drop out of flow. The next step is that you start going to your friends and yelling at them for forwarding you something they found funny and legitimately thought you would enjoy (and which most of their other friends also enjoyed).
Where does it end? This kind of email addiction is exactly what all of those "how to be happy and effective with your work" books spend most of their time trying to stamp out of you (as people who make their life around business and computers often fall into this trap).
What's interesting is that newsletters would be better-implemented as RSS/Atom feeds... but nobody ever does that. Why? Because nobody would actually subscribe. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.
(Again, I'm not saying that spam is ineffective, it is effective. But then again, coming up to me and hitting me on the head and taking my wallet would probably get you the money in my wallet faster than creating a business would.)
Wonder about what? 99% of the population have no idea what an RSS feed is, and the other 1% largely don't use them.
1. You probably don't have a personal relationship with your customers. Don't fake it.
2. Trying to sell your customer something off the back of a message like this is opportune and Machiavellian.
3. If you want an opportunity to sell your customers something - be honest and upfront about it.
At the end of the day, this article is just an advertisement for an email conversation company.
And if you're selling things online and aren't creating these lists, you're leaving a bunch of money on the table.
In what way is this abusing their confidence?
P.S. For folks who are curious about possible ways to address diverse customers without compromising one's very non-diverse principles:
http://us1.campaign-archive.com/?u=77a3e522d2bf02ea858d2316c...
It tripped me up while I was reading it.
I don't care if people spam my grandma. Just don't spam me!
Offtopic, but what service do you use for this email redirection setup? Or do you run your own mail server? I do exactly the same thing, currently using MyDomain.com, but looking for a better alternative.
The experiment was, however, about as controlled for general USA populous as we were able to do - big box retailer, drives most customer acquisition via SEM / SEO so these type of results should be duplicatable if your customers find you through search engines.
I'm not religious, it's just the goddamn holiday. I don't say 'happy holidays' to a Jew, because it's flat out rude. They're Jewish, it's their religious holiday and I respect that. I'll say happy Kwanzaa if I knew someone celebrated it. I'll say happy noodle day to a spaghetti monsterist.
I like respect. If I'm spending money, I want some damn respect or I'll go to the little store downtown and buy something that's actually celebrating the holiday I'm buying for: Christmas.
Oh, and what if you're talking to a Pagan? Do you identify them by the sacrificial blood they are so clearly wearing?
Note: This method isn't 100% accurate due to the lack of verified studies into the field of divination, and the fact that a large subset of people would hit you if you pelt them with seemingly random foods.
They're saying "Happy Holidays", not "Happy Holiday". There are all sorts of holidays in December, including New Years.
I've yet to see 'Happy Holidays' when they're selling me Easter Eggs. So I grant your technicality but they're not using it that way given their own usage methods for multiple holidays.
I'd understand this terminology more in British-speaking countries where 'holiday' veritably means any non-regular brake from work. Whilst in North America it is almost literally still used for its original meaning as a Holy-day - with vacation denoting the chiefly British usage of holiday.
So why, in the US when Holiday is virtually still a contraction of Holy day are they not simply using the days name, when they use every other holidays name including other days of religious origin.
I believe the death/martyrdom and ressurection of Christ on Easter weekend is likely to be a more offensive holiday to bring up in the presence of Jews than his birth. But then, you know, that's logic. You can never be logical and politically correct, it must cause cancer or brain aneurysms as by the present date evolution seems to have made them mutually exclusive.
That doesn't stop it from being a holiday. I don't shop for Christmas presents at my grocery store, but they still put up decorations and wish me a Happy Christmas or Happy Holidays. Both are accurate, and neither rely on me buying stuff for said holidays.
> I've yet to see 'Happy Holidays' when they're selling me Easter Eggs.
There aren't multiple popularly celebrated holidays at Easter time, so it'd be inaccurate then.
> You can never be logical and politically correct...
[citation needed]
To me this looks like a thoroughly ridiculous and awfully US-centric “controversy”.
I've known more people who were upset by "Merry Xmas" than anything else.
So for a big portion of the folks who are supposed to appreciate your PC-ness you missed the holiday by almost a month. Hardly surprising the remaining segment liked "Merry Christmas" better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States#M...
But fair point - would be interesting to test a happy holidays message earlier in the season.
So for people who do celebrate Christmas, regardless of religion, of course the more specific "Merry Christmas" would beat the generic "Happy Holidays."
Of the folks who don't celebrate Christmas, but do celebrate a gift-buying holiday, Hannukah is pretty important. My gut tells me that Jewish folks are a big portion of this segment, and running the experiment 3 weeks after Hannukah would pretty much kill any chance of conversion for them.
Still, the takeaway from your experiment is solid: if you're running an email campaign 4 days before a major holiday, go ahead and focus on those who celebrate it.
It's not "politically incorrect" or offensive to say "Merry Christmas" to someone who isn't celebrating Christmas (or, as is far more likely now, is instead preparing to celebrate New Years). It's stupid.
Why leave out new year's?
Headline: THE WAR ON NEW YEARS HAS BEGUN! :)
Also, I can't help but grin about "conversion" and the religiously-tinged "Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" debate. Perhaps the already-converted are more likely to... convert?
I just love to see this kind of experimental results.
It's worth remembering that the conversion rate only applies to the people who clicked at all - remember the surly curmudgeons like us who don't. :)
Just before you think about applying this to your business.
While they converted 16% they probably alienated another 16%
Maybe fewer percentage of the people even opened the e-mail and the click-through percentage of the people that actually opened the e-mail was the same?
There is a conversion funnel to actual paying customer. For this kind of test they are testing conversion from one step to the next. At other steps in funnels that I've seen, I've found that the increase in conversion at that step goes fairly straightforwardly to conversion to paying customer. However for email in particular at a couple of different places I've seen that improvements in clickthrough rates do not convert linearly to improvements in revenue.
While 100% more people may have clicked through, I'd be willing to bet that actual purchases went up by substantially less than 100%. This is not to discount the value of, say, a 20% increase in sales. But you really should measure that instead of clicks. (That said, people like this company like to measure clicks because it is very easy to do so.)
In this case the results were nearly linear, this is addressed in the article: "While we haven’t included the buy rate in the chart above due to client confidentiality, the results were similarly impressive."
http://www.google.com/trends?q=merry+christmas,+happy+holida...
He also incorrectly calculate the CTR. The CTR on an email campaign is clicks divided by opens. He divided clicks over sends, which since fewer people opened the "Happy Holidays" email, fewer would have naturally clicked. "Merry Christmas" still performed better, but not at the rates he's suggesting.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS is what terrorists say. Merry Christmas, Avery and Jack.