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“Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

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Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#21

Post by walkon »

tptacek wrote: post #13
civilian wrote: post #11

"Happy holidays" smacks of politically-correct pandering and pussyfooting. (I'm a Christmas-celebrating atheist.) Merry Christmas, HN!

I'm a Christmas-celebrating Catholic and I say "Happy Holidays". This notion that the words "Happy Holidays" are a political statement is bullshit. People said them long before Bill O'Reilly declared that there was a war on Christmas. 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 Y…

Saying "Happy Holidays" to someone who isn't celebrating any holidays this time of year (e.g. a Chinese Buddhist) is also stupid.

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#22

Post by space-monkey »

jordan0day wrote: post #10
jrockway wrote: post #5

I think people think the "Merry Christmas $name" email is not spam (it looks like a message from a friend), so they open and read. "Happy Holidays" is something that only people trying to sell you something say, so you mentally filter that email. 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…

While I very much agree with your sentiment (email marketing is usually a bad thing ), this article seems like a small example of "psychological hacking" and I hate to admit how interesting this sort of thing really is. 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 mys…

Two thoughts:

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.

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#23

Post by ido »

civilian wrote: post #11

"Happy holidays" smacks of politically-correct pandering and pussyfooting. (I'm a Christmas-celebrating atheist.) Merry Christmas, HN!

I'm a (non-practicing) Jew and I appreciate it when people acknowledge I might be celebrating a different holiday than Christmas.

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#24

Post by bitskits »

civilian wrote: post #11

"Happy holidays" smacks of politically-correct pandering and pussyfooting. (I'm a Christmas-celebrating atheist.) Merry Christmas, HN!

I'm an atheist who feels the opposite. I'd much rather have someone wish me "Happy Holidays". Assuming people celebrate a certain (your) religious holiday is presumptuous, IMO. Aside from that, with "Happy Holidays", New Year's is included along with Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus, Kwanzaa and all others.

Why leave out new year's?

Headline: THE WAR ON NEW YEARS HAS BEGUN! :)

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#25

Post by nitrogen »

jordan0day wrote: post #10
jrockway wrote: post #5

I think people think the "Merry Christmas $name" email is not spam (it looks like a message from a friend), so they open and read. "Happy Holidays" is something that only people trying to sell you something say, so you mentally filter that email. 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…

While I very much agree with your sentiment (email marketing is usually a bad thing ), this article seems like a small example of "psychological hacking" and I hate to admit how interesting this sort of thing really is. 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 mys…

Even after reading HN for 662 days now, I still have to force myself to concede that not everyone is motivated by product quality or code cleverness. It still feels immoral to me for a company to sell an inferior product with superior marketing, but I have to ask myself: "Who am I to argue with what people want?" Or, more technically, "Who am I to argue with the neurochemistry of the majority of the population?"

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#26

Post by rorymarinich »

nitrogen wrote: post #17
rorymarinich wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you email me, that means that you update one of the only two applications on my Dock that's programmed to show a number — and the other one is a To Do application. Is your email as important as my to-do list telling me what I've got due today? If not, don't send it. When you email me, that means you update one of the only three applications on my Phone that are enabled to show me a number — and the other two are…

If you use unique e-mail addresses like the GP (jrockway), you could funnel all potentially-obnoxious mail into a separate folder that doesn't trigger notifications. At least, that works with gmail on my Android phone. It's unreasonable for everyone who wants to e-mail you to predict that you have an aggressive notification system.

> It's unreasonable for everyone who wants to e-mail you to predict that you have an aggressive notification system.

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.

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#27

Post by tptacek »

walkon wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Christmas-celebrating Catholic and I say "Happy Holidays". This notion that the words "Happy Holidays" are a political statement is bullshit. People said them long before Bill O'Reilly declared that there was a war on Christmas. 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 Y…

Saying "Happy Holidays" to someone who isn't celebrating any holidays this time of year (e.g. a Chinese Buddhist) is also stupid.

If I was in China, I wouldn't say it. In North America, I'm safe in assuming they're at least celebrating New Years, because they're probably getting the day off.

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#28

Post by tejaswiy »

I'm possibly wrong, but for me, Merry Christmas has a direct association with buying, sales, or e-mails about a sale etc., while happy holidays doesn't conjure up the same meaning, and hence a higher probability of me opening an e-mail?

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?

Re: “Merry Christmas" vs. "Happy Holidays" - nearly double the conversion rate.

#30

Post by reinhardt »

aresant wrote: post #15
btilly wrote: post #14

An important note about email conversion rates. 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 tha…

Valid point. 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."

"similarly impressive" is deliberately vague; I certainly wouldn't take it to imply nearly linear.
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