A look at what six years of B2B orders show about how firms in five industries send client holiday cards
Client holiday cards from B2B firms tend to blend together at a glance. Winter scenes, snowmen, "Happy Holidays" inside. But six years of order data show that professional service firms handle their card programs very differently by industry.
If you're running a client card program or thinking about starting one, this is a look at what separates the two groups. Which industries do what. When they order. What the firms that treat this seriously do differently from everyone else.
Part 1: What each industry sends
Most professional service firms commit to one occasion each year. They send either a Thanksgiving card or a Christmas or winter holiday card. A smaller cohort sends both. The mix by industry is where the interesting variation lives.
For the analysis below:
- Holiday cards: Christmas cards, winter scenes, "Happy Holidays" cards, "Season's Greetings" cards, New Year cards. Everything in the December end-of-year family, religious or secular.
- Thanksgiving cards: turkeys, autumn harvest imagery, "Happy Thanksgiving" language. November-focused, gratitude-themed.
Here's how firms in each industry choose:
| Industry | Sends only holiday cards | Sends only Thanksgiving cards | Sends both |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finance | 70% | 23% | 8% |
| Legal | 89% | 9% | 2% |
| Real Estate | 79% | 19% | 2% |
| Healthcare | 88% | 8% | 5% |
| Industrial-Mfg | 90% | 2% | 8% |
Look at the Thanksgiving-only column. That's where the biggest gap between industries lives.
Thanksgiving is much more popular in Finance. Nearly a quarter of financial advisors send Thanksgiving cards INSTEAD OF Christmas or holiday cards. Not in addition to. Instead of. Add in the 8% who send both, and roughly 3 in 10 financial advisors touch their clients with a Thanksgiving card each year. That's more than any other industry.
This makes sense given the nature of the business. Financial advisors run relationship-driven practices where retention drives lifetime value, and where a specific "thank you for your business" moment lands differently than a generic seasonal greeting. Thanksgiving lets a firm say the thing they actually mean - thanks - without the noise of the holiday shopping season crowding it out.
Real Estate is close behind. 19% of real estate agents send only Thanksgiving. Given the referral-driven nature of that business, it makes sense: real estate is another category where explicit gratitude works especially well. Real estate agents rarely send both (2%), so like Finance, they're making a real replacement decision.
Legal, Healthcare, and Manufacturing lean holiday. Nearly 9 in 10 attorneys, healthcare providers, and manufacturers send only holiday or Christmas cards. Thanksgiving as a standalone client touchpoint is uncommon in these industries.
Manufacturing's pattern is distinctive. Almost no manufacturing firms send only Thanksgiving. But 8% send both, one of the higher "both" rates. When a manufacturing firm brings Thanksgiving into their program, they add it to the Christmas card rather than replacing it.
Within all of this, design choices vary too. Foil, religious content, patriotic imagery, and industry-themed or humorous elements are separate design decisions that cut across occasion:
| Industry | Foil | Religious | Patriotic | Industry-themed or humorous |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finance | 14% | 1% | 5% | 9% |
| Legal | 6% | 0.1% | 1% | 34% |
| Real Estate | 9% | 2% | 4% | 13% |
| Healthcare | 5% | 1% | 1% | 7% |
| Industrial-Mfg | 11% | 1% | 1% | 1% |
This table tells a specific story about industry personality.
Legal is the industry-humor vertical. A third of Legal orders are industry-themed, humorous, or both. Most of these cards are legal industry humor specifically - courtroom scenes with a comedic angle, gavels with a punchline, law office cartoons. Popular Legal designs carry names like "Law Office Snowman," "Naughty Kids Legal," and "Break In The Jury." This is a striking finding when you consider that Legal is the most uniform industry on occasion (89% send only holiday cards). Attorneys agree on when to send a card. They have different preferences on how to decorate it - and a big share of the industry leans into the inside joke.
Manufacturing is the most traditional industry. About 1% industry-themed or humorous. Manufacturing firms send classic, unadorned holiday cards. When they buy a personality element, it's foil (11%), not a joke or a factory illustration.
Finance invests in premium design. 14% of Finance orders use foil cards, more than double most other industries. Foil costs more but reads as premium - polished, high-end, worth-taking-seriously. Finance is the industry most willing to spend on that signal. It fits the broader Finance pattern: firms in this industry treat client-facing materials as an extension of the brand and are willing to pay for the association.
Genuinely religious cards are rare across every industry. Under 2% everywhere. Nativity scenes, explicitly Christian language, references to Christ. When people talk about "religious" client cards, what they usually mean is Christmas-themed. Actually religious content is a small share of even the Christmas cards firms send.
Patriotic imagery is mostly a Finance thing. 5% of Finance orders feature patriotic elements on the cover, usually paired with Thanksgiving imagery. Other industries send patriotic cards on 1% to 4% of orders.
Here's a sample of what B2B firms actually write inside their cards:
Holiday / Christmas
"May your holidays be merry and bright."
"Happy Holidays. We wish you and your family a healthy new year."
Thanksgiving / Gratitude
"In warm appreciation of our partnership during the past year, we extend our very best wishes for a happy holiday season."
"There is no better time than the holidays to express our appreciation for your business and friendship."
Religious (rare)
"For Unto Us A Child Is Born, Unto Us A Son Is Given: His Name Shall Be Called Wonderful Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace."
"May the peace, love and gentleness of The Christ Child."
Patriotic (words are usually generic; the patriotism is in the picture)
"May the spirit of the holidays remind you of the strength of our nation."
One thing worth noticing: many cards with Christmas imagery on the cover print generic holiday messages inside. The picture says one thing. The words say another. Deliberate or not, the pattern is common enough to be worth naming.
Part 2: When each industry orders
Holiday card orders start coming in during September, pick up through October, peak somewhere in mid-to-late November, and taper through December. That's the overall shape.
The interesting part is how each industry differs, and how order size changes across the season.
| Industry | Peak week | Average list size |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | Late October | 260 cards |
| Legal | Early December | 269 cards |
| Real Estate | Mid-November | 175 cards |
| Healthcare | Mid-November | 197 cards |
| Industrial-Mfg | Mid-November | 287 cards |
Finance orders earliest. The busiest week for Finance orders is the last week of October. Financial advisors treat client cards as something to plan in the third quarter and finish in the fourth. By the time most industries are just starting to think about it, Finance is already done. The average Finance order is 260 cards.
Manufacturing orders the biggest. The average manufacturing order is 287 cards, the largest of any industry. Manufacturing firms, especially long tenured firms, tend run big programs.
Legal orders latest. Attorneys peak in the first week of December. December ordering works fine. Cards sent on December 10th arrive and get read. But the pattern is real: Legal treats client cards as a December task more than a Q3 project.
Now here's a pattern that goes deeper than peak week. In every industry we studied except Finance, the firms that order earlier order bigger - and the drop across the season is dramatic.
| Industry | October orders | December orders |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | 281 cards | 313 cards |
| Legal | 374 cards | 144 cards |
| Real Estate | 169 cards | 118 cards |
| Healthcare | 202 cards | 179 cards |
| Industrial-Mfg | 308 cards | 190 cards |
Look at Legal. The average Legal firm ordering in October sends 374 cards. In December, 144 cards. That's a 61% drop across a two-month span. Manufacturing shows a similar pattern: 308 in October, 190 in December, a 38% drop. Real Estate and Healthcare show smaller but real drops.
Finance is the exception. A small number of very large late-season orders make December Finance orders slightly larger than October Finance orders on average. When the outliers are set aside, the typical Finance firm still orders larger in October, just less dramatically than firms in Legal or Manufacturing.
The broader pattern is worth sitting with. The firms placing October orders aren't just planning ahead. They're running bigger programs. They decided months earlier that this was worth doing at scale, and they took the time to prepare a real list. They see client cards as a genuine relationship tool, not a December task to check off. The firms placing December orders are, on average, running smaller programs and putting the whole thing together at the last minute.
When a firm places its holiday card order tells you something about how the firm handles the rest of the year. October senders tend to have client retention operationalized. December senders tend be reactive and scramble.
Part 3: What separates the firms that come back
Most B2B holiday card orders come from firms that ordered before. What separates those firms from one time orderers?
Two patterns.
They send cards on more than one occasion. Firms in the year-over-year group are roughly 4.5 times more likely to run a multi-touchpoint program than firms that ordered once and disappeared. In the data from this research specifically, that means sending both a Thanksgiving card and a holiday card in the same year: 9% of year-over-year firms do this, versus 2% of firms that ordered once and never came back. The broader pattern applies to any additional touchpoint - birthday cards for anchor clients, welcome cards for new ones, occasional handwritten notes. What separates the sophisticated sender isn't the specific occasion. It's the choice to run multiple client touchpoints as a matter of course. Any firm can adopt this. Adding a Thanksgiving card to a holiday program, or adding a birthday card for key clients, is a small operational decision with an outsized effect on retention.
They're relationship-driven businesses. The firms that come back are disproportionately in industries where client tenure is measured in years or decades. Financial advisors are the biggest example: Finance firms make up 44% of the year-over-year cohort but only 32% of firms that ordered once. But the pattern isn't really about industry. It's about business model. Wealth managers, estate attorneys, wills and trusts practices, healthcare providers with long-term patient relationships, industrial-manufacturing firms with anchor customers, logistics operators with named accounts - these are the businesses where a small annual touchpoint like a holiday card is a real investment in a very long relationship. The industries where cards work least as retention tools are the transactional ones: personal injury, one-off consumer services, project-based work. When the client relationship ends after one engagement, a holiday card doesn't move the needle.
The pattern across both findings: firms that come back understand client retention as a discipline. Not a nice-to-have. Not an obligation. A tool they've decided is worth using every year, and often more than once a year. They plan ahead. They reinvest across multiple touchpoints. Everything else follows.
When most firms sit down to plan their holiday card year, there's an urge to try something new. A different design. A different message. A twist. The data suggests that urge isn't what characterizes the firms that turn client cards into a real retention program. What characterizes them is doing the same thing well, at scale, across multiple touchpoints, next year, and the year after that.
What all of this adds up to
Two findings, one thread.
Each B2B industry has a distinct card personality. Financial advisors are much more likely than anyone else to send Thanksgiving cards, and they invest more in premium design. Real estate agents lean into Thanksgiving too. Legal is the industry-humor vertical, using industry-specific imagery and humor at rates every other industry avoids. Manufacturing is the most traditional. Healthcare uses cards for more occasions than any other industry.
In every industry except Finance, the average firm ordering in October sends significantly more cards than the average firm ordering in December. Legal shows the most dramatic pattern: October orders average 374 cards, December orders 144. October senders take client retention seriously. December senders check a box.
The firms that come back year after year share a discipline rooted in the relationship driven nature of their businesses. They send cards on more than one occasion, running multi-touchpoint programs at 4.5 times the rate of firms that ordered once. And they're disproportionately relationship-driven businesses, where client tenure is measured in years and where retention drives lifetime value.
Notes on the data
How we got these numbers.
Where the numbers come from. All figures come from six years of B2B holiday card orders placed with Cards for Causes between 2019 and 2025. Firms without a B2B industry classification are left out. When multiple people at the same firm placed orders, we grouped them into a single record.
Industry classification. Each firm is tagged with an industry based on firm-level data. B2B firms are well-tagged, and 99% of orders match to a customer record by email.
Card theme classification. We classified card themes (holiday, Thanksgiving) by looking at what's printed inside the card and the imagery on the cover. Cards with Thanksgiving language or imagery went into "Thanksgiving." Everything else in the winter and end-of-year family (Christmas, generic holiday, New Year, seasonal) went into "holiday." Cards that weren't holiday-season cards at all (sympathy, birthday, get-well) were excluded from this analysis.
Firm behavior classification. We classified each firm as holiday-only, Thanksgiving-only, or "sends both" based on the full observed history of their orders. A firm is classified as "both" if they sent both a Thanksgiving card and a holiday card at some point across their observed years. When restricted to same-year sending, the "both" rate is smaller (roughly 2 to 3 percent), but the year-over-year concentration holds under both methods. Reported figures are rounded to reflect cell-level sample size uncertainty; the manufacturing cohort in particular has a smaller sample (51 firms) than other industries.
Design attributes like foil, religious content, patriotic imagery, and industry-themed or humorous elements are separate flags that overlap with occasion, not peer categories. A Christmas card can have religious content or not; a holiday card can use foil, industry imagery, or humor. The "industry-themed or humorous" column reports the union of the two - cards that are industry-themed, humorous, or both. In Legal specifically, most industry-themed cards are also humorous. An LLM helped classify the top designs; the rest were classified by rule.
List size. All list-size figures are averages (means) rather than medians. Means run higher than medians because order sizes are right-skewed: a small number of very large orders pull averages up, especially in Legal where the mean is roughly twice the median. Where averages tell a different story than the middle of the distribution - most notably in the Finance October-vs-December comparison - the piece flags it directly.
Timing. We looked at weekly buckets from September 1 through December 31 of each year, pooled across all six years. October and December order-size comparisons use monthly buckets with at least 30 orders in each cell.
Year-over-year firms. These are B2B firms whose first order fell between 2019 and 2023 (giving each firm at least two more seasons to reveal whether they'd come back) and that ordered in at least two different calendar years across the six-year span.
Sample sizes. All reported figures come from cells with at least 30 firms, except where noted.
For questions about the data or requests for other cuts, contact Cards for Causes.
