“Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”? Choose wisely!

Around the holidays we like to remind our readers of a little advice that could double your conversion rate this holiday season. Is it better to wish your guests a “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”?

The results are in:

  • 64% prefer “Merry Christmas”
  • 31% prefer “Happy Holidays”
  • 5% are unsure

Let’s keep in mind that this is simply results from an obscure American poll. Sure, a solid majority of Americans prefer you to say “Merry Christmas”. But does it really matter on your marketing? Should you put “Merry Christmas” on every page? Maybe on banner ads? What about emails? Or should you say it at all?

Well, since we are into testing everything, we convinced one of our clients to let us test Merry Christmas v. Happy Holiday a few Christmases ago. The client allowed us to test this with specific email campaigns, and below are results: (from a prior post.)

We wanted to know if using “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” in an email campaign to a small segment of customers  would impact conversion rates?

We were able to randomly select a group of 100,000 customers for a client and tested these subject lines:


A few notes on the test:

  • The client is a large retailer, their customers mirror a general sample of the USA.
  • The email mirrored the subject line’s message; all other elements were the same.
  • We sent the email on the 21st of December.

The results showed a SIGNIFICANT difference . . .

As you can clearly see, “Merry Christmas” killed it, nearly doubling the click through rate of the other subject lines. 5.47% vs 2.90% is a clear winner with statistical confidence.

Although we’re not allowed to share the “buy” data, it was just as impressive. Nearly doubling the number of transactions by changing an email subject line shows just how important it is to test and try new things. If you’re not constantly testing, you’re throwing money away!

Who out there has also tested Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays? Did you see a difference? Let us know!

Merry Christmas! 😉

Contact us today to increase your Conversion Rate . . .

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By Jon Correll

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