The Holiday Closure Email

Three facts and a calendar

Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year, which splits the holiday weeks awkwardly. Many small businesses will close at noon on Tuesday the 24th and reopen on Thursday, January 2.

New Year's Day is a Wednesday too, so others will stay closed until Monday the 6th. Customers cannot guess which kind of business you are.

What they need is three facts: the day you close, the day you reopen, and who to call if something cannot wait.

Those fit in four lines. Most closure emails bury them under a paragraph of season's greetings, a photograph of the team in festive hats, and a sale.

Mid-December is the time to send it: late enough to be remembered, early enough for customers to plan around.

What goes in it

• The last working day, with the time you close.
• The reopening day, with its weekday as well as its date.
• An urgent contact, and what counts as urgent.
• Cut-off dates for orders, bookings and deliveries before the break.
• What happens to messages sent while you are closed.
• One line of thanks, at the end rather than the start.

The third is the one customers go looking for when something goes wrong on the 27th. An email that says only that you are closed leaves them with a problem and nobody to call.

The subject line carries the message

Many customers will never open the email, so put the facts where they will see them anyway: holiday hours, closed December 24 to January 1, back January 2.

In Gmail it will probably land in the Promotions tab with everything else from your mailing system. That is fine, provided the subject line does the work on its own.

Avoid anything clever. A subject line that has to be opened to be understood mostly goes unread.

Short, plain and free of offers

Keep the body to the facts in that list, in that order, signed by a person. A plain layout reads better on a phone than a designed one, and it loads at once.

Leave any promotion for another email. A sale turns the message from information into advertising, pushes the dates down the screen, and invites people to skim past it.

Send it to the customer list you normally email, with your usual unsubscribe link. Once is enough, with at most a short reminder the week before closing.

Decide the urgent contact first

The email cannot give an urgent contact until somebody has agreed to be one.

Decide who answers, how, and on which days: a mobile number carried in turn, a colleague checking the shared inbox each morning, or an on-call rota for a trade with real emergencies.

Then define urgent in the email, in your customers' terms. Leave it undefined and you will hear from everybody; publish someone's personal number without asking them and the arrangement will not last the week.

A worked example

A refrigeration service company with three technicians, looking after walk-in coolers and display cases for restaurants and grocers, closes its office from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day.

A technician is always on call, because a cooler that fails over the holidays can cost a restaurant its stock in a night.

Last year the only notice was a Facebook post. Emails to the service address got no reply, the voicemail asked callers to leave a message, and nothing anywhere mentioned the technician on call.

Customers with failing equipment left messages that waited until January, or called another company and stayed with it.

This year's email went out this week. Its subject line has the dates, and the first line of the body says that any cooler or freezer not holding temperature is urgent, with the on-call number beside it.

The auto-reply, the voicemail greeting, the website banner and the Google listing all say the same, in the same words.

Auto-replies that switch themselves off

Every address customers write to needs the same reply: the shared inbox, the service address, and the main addresses of anyone customers email directly.

Office 365 and G Suite both let an automatic reply start and stop on dates you choose. Schedule them now to stop when you reopen, so nobody has to remember on the 2nd.

The contact form often sends its own confirmation email too. Add the closure dates to it, or it will promise a reply within a day that nobody can keep.

Orders and bookings during the break

A business that sells or books online keeps taking orders while it is closed, which is fine if customers know what to expect.

Put a line on product pages and in the cart saying that orders placed after your last dispatch day ship on January 2. Block the closed days in the booking system, so nobody books an appointment that cannot happen.

And say in the order confirmation email what the website already said, since that is the message customers keep.

The banner and the listing

A slim notice at the top of every page, rather than a pop-up, carries the same dates and the urgent contact. Give it an end date, or set a reminder to take it down on the 2nd.

On Google My Business, set special hours for each closed day, so search and the map show you as closed rather than open as usual.

Then re-record the voicemail greeting in the same words. Customers who find different dates in different places do not know which to trust.

The counter-case

A shop open through the holidays with shorter hours needs a different email: the hours for each day, since those are what customers check.

A business closing only on the statutory holidays may not need an email at all. Special hours on the listing, the banner and the voicemail are enough.

And a business without a customer list relies on those three alone. For everyone closing for a week or more: one short email with three facts, and every other channel saying the same.

This week

1. Settle the closing and reopening days.
2. Name who handles urgent calls.
3. Send the email with the dates in the subject.
4. Schedule the auto-replies to start and stop.
5. Add the banner with an end date.
6. Set special hours on Google My Business.
7. Re-record the voicemail in the same words.

Step two comes before the email for a reason. The urgent contact is the line customers actually need, and it cannot be written until someone has agreed to answer.

Where that email is likely to land, and why the subject line matters there, is covered in holiday emails that land in promotions.

Frequently asked questions

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