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7 Comments

Are you experiencing a December downturn?

Through Embarque, I manage some of my clients’ blogs, and I’ve noticed the same patterns that basically have happened to all b2b publications I’ve managed across the years:

  1. Organic search traffic and related conversions slow down in the first week of December.
  2. We get a surge of conversions in the second week. It must be from teams trying to finish their Q4 budgets, lol.
  3. Traffic and conversions progressively hit below average in the last two weeks of December, and creep back up after the new year.
  4. Christmas-themed topics get an uptick in SEO traffic (e.g. article on “Christmas-themed marketing emails” or “2021 SaaS trends”). Holiday traffic is something that Google Trends is better at figuring out than Ahrefs, because the latter averages out traffic across a year.

Are you experiencing similar trends?

Regarding our own growth, our Indie Hacker’s milestones unexpectedly helped us gather a fair bit of traffic and conversions, so I’m really happy about that.

I also have some clients who have sent Christmas discount emails as part of an upselling campaign.

For the founders or all-around marketers, how do you deal with this lack in conversions and traffic? Do you just ride it out, until the new year? Or do you depend on other forms of sales to sustain conversions (e.g. discounts, email funnels, community outreach, and so on).

Would love to know about your tactics :D.

  1. 3

    What worked great for me last year was an email campaign, “Last chance to write off X for 2019”. Our SaaS users are small business owners so this helps encourage them to go annual and bake in our product to their new year of planning.

  2. 2

    Yes. This is normal if your business skews B2B vs. consumer.

  3. 2

    On the contrary, monthly sales for December so far is the best it has ever been for Zlappo, so I'm grateful for that, since I was bracing for the expected December slump!

    1. 2

      Seems like a very interesting tool and an equally interesting client base! Great job! I don't expect people working for me to make December the most profitable month, but it's always nice when this happens haha.

      1. 1

        I think it really depends on the client base.

        Think on the bright side.

        If your business slows down in December, it simply means it's crazy bustling the rest of the year!

  4. 2

    My business is mostly B2B, and I'm riding it out too. I use December to develop new features and bake new pricing model. Preparing for January. I stopped cold email campaign to save my energy and avoid to burn the prospect list, because IMO it's wasteful for December.

  5. 2

    I'm riding it out. Would love to know what other's are doing

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