December spending: Keep it or kill it?

by Laura Hudson | December 8, 2016

istock_000010862514illustra_santa_suitcase_airport_airplane_map_sit_hiresRumor and folklore say that calls are terrible in December and we should all just save our money. Everyone is travelling and holiday planning, throwing off all our routines. Data warriors that we are, we did some comparing to discover just how true or false the tall tale is.

Our Data Manager pulled data from The Camel Client (a grouping of clients with long-term, reliable data) that stay on air, whether it be at reduced or full budgets, and compared it to those who don’t. We looked at data from 3 different Decembers and compared the % change between the December calls and sign-ups, and the whole year average.

Drum roll, please.

For the clients that did stay on air, on average, they kept their calls steady. Some years were a slight increase, some a slight decrease – but no drastic swing in either direction. For those who pulled off completely? Up to a 29% decrease in their calls from being off air for a month. But let’s look at sign-ups for a minute. The decrease was even greater to the overall annual average of signups. By not airing in December, firms decreased their sign-ups up to 32%. Firms who stayed the course and kept airing, actually saw a 7% average increase when comparing December to the annual average.

To put it simply: Running budgets in December is more beneficial than not. Turns out December is a pretty standard month when it comes to call volume. Reducing budgets on non-holiday weeks and going dark for the entire month can lower call volume and sign ups by a significant percentage.

Our motto still stands: Slow and steady—the turtle wins the race.