Not All Businesses Thrive at Christmas

While retail sales may flourish, many other sectors of the economy effectively stall during the holiday season. Nearly all companies have "business cycles" - but the nature of the annual pattern can differ substantially between industries.

Many software and service companies including SpamButcher hit a serious dead zone starting about December 15th and leading up until the first few weeks of the new year.

The problem is several-fold. First, everyone starts going on vacation around mid-December. This delays potential purchases until after they return.

Sometimes trial-users will go on vacation, have their trial expire half-way-through, and then get several days worth of junk emails piled up in their inbox upon returning. They incorrectly assume that SpamButcher simply isn't performing well and then opt not to purchase.

The issue extends into the next year. SpamButcher's sale cycle for an individual copy starts with a user downloading the trial version, and usually ends with the trial expiring 21-days later; hopefully leading to a purchase. During the holiday season itself people just aren't spending as much time in front of their computers either coping with spam, or searching for a solution.

So, the downloads that don't happen during the last few weeks of December, also don't turn into sales during the first few weeks of Januaury.

The issue is somewhat mitigated by the fact that SpamButcher is a popular email content filter for home and other individual users. Millions of people were certainly subjected to junk in their inbox even on Christmas morning. So even though most workplaces are shutdown, we still do pull in a few sales late in the year.

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