Seasonal letters
Christmas card wording for clients
A client Christmas card competes with every other card on the same shelf, and almost all of them say the same four words. The ones that get kept say something about the year that actually happened. One specific sentence is the entire difference, and it is also the thing most businesses leave out because it does not merge.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
With something specific about the year
[FIRST NAME], thank you for a year that had [EVENT] in the middle of it and came out well anyway. We are closed [DATES] and back on [RETURN DATE]. Have a proper break.
Straightforward and warm
[FIRST NAME], thank you for your business this year and for being good to deal with, which is not a given. Merry Christmas to you and everyone at [BUSINESS NAME]. Back on [RETURN DATE].
Professional, for a formal relationship
[FIRST NAME], with thanks for your continued business through [YEAR]. Our office closes [DATES] and reopens [RETURN DATE]. We look forward to working with [BUSINESS NAME] again in the new year.
Premium, where less is the point
[FIRST NAME] - thank you for [YEAR]. [SIGNATORY]
To a client who had a hard year
Worth writing separately rather than merging. These are the cards that are remembered.
[FIRST NAME], a difficult year by any measure. Thank you for keeping us in the loop through it. Hoping the break is a real one and that next year is kinder.
Getting it right
- What to mention. Thanks for the year, one line that is true about this client specifically, and your actual office closure dates if you have them. The closure dates are the single most useful thing on a business Christmas card.
- What to leave out. "Seasons greetings from all the team at", which is what a card says when nobody wrote it. A sales message. A year in review about your own company.
- How long. 25 to 60 words. Christmas cards are short by convention and a long one feels like a newsletter.
- How personal. Warm, and consistent with how the relationship actually runs. A formal supplier should not become jolly in December.
- When not to send one. Where you know the client does not observe Christmas. A new year card in January is a better letter anyway and arrives when nobody else is writing.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [BUSINESS NAME], [DATES], [RETURN DATE], [YEAR].
Australian Christmas cards have to be posted far earlier than people plan for, and a card arriving in January is worse than no card. Work backwards from the last recommended Australia Post date rather than from the date you want it to land.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
Christmas is the one run with an immovable deadline and the one everybody starts too late. A list of six hundred clients is a fortnight of evenings in the fortnight nobody has.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint, personalises every piece from your list, written into the sentence rather than dropped into a gap, hand-addresses the envelopes, inserts, collates and seals and lodges the run with Australia Post, or sends it back to you to release in waves.
Christmas list longer than the time left? Check the cut-off dates with us
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Writing more of these than you have evenings
Tell us roughly how many and what they say. We will come back with an exact price and a production window.