Halloween Email Marketing Guide With Examples [2024]

Halloween Email Marketing Guide With Examples [2024]

Published By Marilia Dimitriou
February 13, 2024

Halloween email marketing is the scary love child of the spooky holiday and email marketing. But why do you need to care about this little Frankenstein, and what does it offer you?

Email is still one of the most effective channels to nurture and convert your audience with targeted content. On the other hand, Halloween is one of the most popular holidays worldwide, with consumers going crazy over spooky products.

Today, we’ll see why Halloween and email marketing are a match made in hell (but in a good way) and how to create a strategy focused on it!

Is Halloween Email Marketing Worth It?

Well, Halloween is a family-friendly holiday without the expectations of Thanksgiving or Christmas. This means that while it doesn’t have the same spending patterns, sales do leap!

According to Halloween marketing stats:

  • 2023 is expected to be a great season for the Halloween industry
  • 68% of adults look forward to celebrating Halloween
  • Total consumer expenditure reached $10.6 billion in 2022
  • Last year, the average spending per consumer was about $100.45
  • 29% of consumers will buy Halloween products online
  • In 2022, about a third of consumers in the US were planning to begin Halloween purchases approximately three to four weeks in advance

Now that Halloween marketing has your attention, how do you benefit from this excitement, and how do you show your customers what you can do for them during the holiday season?

These holiday-themed emails will allow you to engage your audience, shower them with special offers and discounts, and incentivize them to act! Ready to build them? Sign up for a Moosend account, pick one of our Halloween templates, and make evil magic happen!

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How To Build An Email Marketing Strategy For Halloween

Since Halloween and email marketing are a great combo, let’s see how to structure your strategy to take advantage of it:

1. Plan your Halloween email campaigns

When you decide to boost your revenue through holiday campaigns, you must first add it to your email marketing calendar.

Targeting only the 31st of October won’t be ideal for engagement and conversions. The best way to get more sales is to create a series of holiday emails, find the best time to send them (e.g., pre-Halloween period) and give the right incentives, such as discount codes and limited-time offers.

Adding your spooky campaigns to your calendar will allow you to create a consistent schedule that will convince your audience to act.

To help you out, here are the best and worst sending times to plan your campaigns:

  • Best day and time: Thursday and Tuesday – 8 am to 9 am
  • Worst day and time: Saturday and Sunday morning – 6 pm to 5 am

With these in mind, you can effectively plan your sending times for your campaigns during this time of the year, leading to an amazing Halloween day! Below is an example of an email calendar with potential Halloween email campaigns you can add:

Halloween email marketing calendar template

Need a calendar to organize your campaigns? Grab our free email marketing calendar template to keep everything nice and tidy!

2. Choose a Halloween email design

After planning them, it’s time to design your email marketing campaigns. To do it the right way, you’ll need an advanced email software tool like Moosend or Mailchimp to offer you the right elements!

Why? Because a plain campaign isn’t going to cut it! For the ultimate spook, you will need animated GIFs, videos, high-quality visuals, graphics (spider webs, jack-o-lanterns, etc.), and countdown timers.

Below, let’s see the ingredients you need to nail those Halloween campaigns:

Email newsletter template

Starting with your design, you can leverage your platform’s Halloween email templates (or import some) to save valuable time and effort.

Opt for simple layouts that are both spooktacular and easy to customize. Since Halloween is more of a visual holiday, choose templates that favor graphic elements and images to wish your audience a Happy Halloween and mesmerize them!

Moreover, go for designs with a balanced color scheme to make your calls-to-action (CTAs) pop out! Here’s an example from Moosend’s holiday newsletter templates with the right Halloween colors and scary visuals:

Halloween ghost email template by Moosend

You can customize this template on the spot! If you want to save your design and send it to your email list, sign up for a Moosend account first! Then it’s time for some serious trick-or-treating using your boo-tiful Halloween newsletter!

Email copywriting and visuals

As mentioned before, Halloween campaigns favor visuals to communicate the spooky message. Nevertheless, adding targeted email copy is crucial to converting your subscribers at first glance!

To make it work, you need to:

Here’s an email copy example by Home Chef to show you how it’s done:

Subject line: 🎃This Halloween Sale is EERIE-sistible

Home Chef Halloween email example

The above email is a great Halloween campaign example that combines short copy, stunning visuals, and the power of GIFs to make a great impression!

Last but not least, don’t forget about your CTA button copy! Add actionable language to motivate users to click and highlight the benefit!

Post-click landing pages

After creating Halloween-related email campaigns, you need to lead your audience to similarly branded landing pages! This will give them a fun experience and make your email content more engaging and targeted!

The recipe for success is to use similar email content and visuals to promote continuity between your Halloween email marketing campaign and your landing page. To inspire you, here’s a landing page design example by Klientboost:

Klient Boost Halloween landing page

The agency gets bonus points for using a Halloween-style image to give their resource a spooky vibe. Also, they use a brightly colored CTA to ensure that their new visitor will notice the desired action offered for free and turn it into a lead!

Need a few templates to get started? Here are 38 landing page templates to create your spooky pages!

3. Create Halloween email subject lines

A good email subject line will determine the overall performance of your campaign. But how do you create Halloween subject lines that will give you the desired open rates?

First of all, Halloween is the only time of year when worse can be better! A cringe-worthy pun about monster savings, a spooktacular result, or a fangtastic offer is right for the spirit of the season.

Also, puns are a good choice as people will welcome them with a smile. Don’t be the brand that is too ghoul to have fun! And while corny subject lines will do the job, highlight your offer and the benefit of getting your product. You want to fit in, not blend in!

Here are some classic Halloween email subject lines to help you out:

  • Last Chance: 35% Off Halloween Prints 🎃🎃 (MeUndies)
  • BOO! Get 20% off everything! 👻 (Topshop)
  • Trick or Treat – All-New Cat Toys! 🎃 (Meowingtons)
  • Ha-ha-Halloween costumes (Pinterest)
  • Don’t let Halloween sneak up on you! (Modcloth)
  • Treats, Tricks, and Tipples: Order now for Halloween (Fortnum & Mason)
  • Get Halloween READY 👻 (EM Cosmetics)

Email marketers should get creative with subject lines to intrigue their audiences with memorable and fun headlines!

Of course, to maximize your efforts and see your email metrics fly high, combine your subject line with a relevant email design to provide a seamless experience like Misty’s Florist:

Subject line: Halloween arrangements to make your night

Misty's Florist Halloween email example

Remember, the rules of good Halloween subject lines are simple:

  • Keep them short enough to be mobile-friendly
  • Leverage Halloween-themed emojis
  • Make your offer straightforward
  • Foreground the value for the consumer

If you find yourself in need of help, you can always grab a subject line Tester like Refine to check the performance of your creations and improve your email marketing metrics!

4. Offer Halloween discounts

Halloween is the perfect opportunity to get your customers to make a purchase regardless of the product. How? With amazing discounts, of course!

If your business is “Halloweenable,” consider themed offers that will magnetize your customers. If not, consider seasonal giveaways. Below, you can see a simple Halloween email marketing example by Hickies:

Subject line: Last Chance to Save! 👻

spooky Halloween email campaign by Hickies

The brand not only offers an irresistible deal but also gives free shipping and “buy X, get X more for free” to incentivize shoppers to make a purchase!

Moreover, sometimes, your audience might want something more than free shipping! In this case, you can give them a free Halloween treat. This way, you can inspire their next purchase and get them excited about their order.

Below, you can see an example by bareMinerals, offering their potential customers three free products when they order:

bareMinerals Halloween email campaign

Of course, to get it, shoppers will need to invest $75, which is not bad considering the nature of the brand. To take advantage of this practice without limiting your customers, you can offer freebies like free candy, stickers, or any other item to put a smile on their faces!

5. Target specific customer segments

Halloween isn’t just the 31st of October! The spooky shopping spree lasts throughout October and sometimes after that.

Also, it is a fact that 41% of Halloween shoppers start searching for deals and products before Halloween even begins. This shows us that you should be an early bird regarding Halloween email marketing!

To leverage the spooky season to the fullest, you need to target the right people at the right time. Segmentation will give you the targeting you need to send the right messages. And, it’s one of the simplest email marketing tips in the book you can follow.

Creating segment-specific campaigns will give you better engagement and conversion rates since Halloween is celebrated differently based on age. For instance, here’s a Halloween email example by Guess targeting parents:

Subject line: Happy Halloween

GUESS Halloween email campaign for specific segment

Targeting your “parents segment” with children’s costumes and candy deals is an excellent way to get them to buy. Similarly, you can deliver a Halloween loyalty campaign to your VIP customers to reward them in a spooky way.

6. Plan a grand Halloween sale

Holding flash sales throughout the month can allow you to build urgency and scarcity into the seasonal awareness your customers already have.

Here’s how Bottle Breacher does it:

Subject line: Happy Halloween 🎃 OPEN For YOUR Treat!!

Bottle flash sale email

Flash sales are particularly effective when integrated into an omnichannel marketing strategy. Most of them aim at getting new customers. Whether they are particularly effective in achieving that is up for debate.

While an A/B tested flash sale campaign from mobile device case manufacturer CaseMate generated impressive-looking figures, like a 236% increase in revenue, it didn’t show long-term profitability. Nevertheless, Halloween email marketing is more interested in increasing brand awareness and tempting one-time shoppers to return.

To boost your efforts, you can integrate different channels like social media channels to alert customers when the sale is actually about to start. To make it happen, you can:

  • Give an exclusive promo code to email subscribers to increase your newsletter signup and generate more sales.
  • Send a two-part code to both email and Twitter; each part gets you 15% off, which is 30% in total.

Clever, right?

7. Reward customer loyalty

Consider a Halloween-themed loyalty program. Why? Because retaining existing customers is more profitable than getting new ones!

On top of that, shoppers who love your products are more likely to recommend you to their friends and spend more on your brand:

customer loyalty stats

Source

Before you start rewarding customers, come up with a dedicated points system. For instance, you can attribute more points to shoppers making frequent purchases, interacting with campaigns, or recommending products to their friends.

Now, to adapt this email marketing best practice for the spooky season, make sure to craft Halloween-focused campaigns that offer true value to your VIPs. Don’t send your loyal shoppers the same deals and discounts you deliver to the rest of your mailing list. Instead, plan a campaign that will make them feel special.

Here’s a loyalty email example by H&M, informing customers about the points they’re going to earn during Halloween:

H&M loyalty campaign email

8. Integrate social and email marketing

Email marketing is highly effective, but it can reach its ultimate form when combined with other channels! For instance, when you take email and integrate it with social media marketing, you can plan a Halloween marketing campaign that will elevate your seasonal marketing strategy by far.

For Twitter:

Use Twitter Cards! They are designed to let your followers sign up without leaving the social platform. Using a Halloween form is a fantastic opportunity to power cross-channel marketing with urgency, scarcity, and relevancy. Asking your Twitter followers to join your email list leverages the trust you’ve built on social media to establish a deeper level of engagement.

For Facebook:

The platform has a ‘subscribe’ button, allowing a one-click email subscription from your profile page. (Use Facebook Custom Audiences to target your subscribers.)

Moreover, consider adding social buttons and sharing links to your emails to encourage your subscribers to share your content across social channels too. Here’s a simple Halloween email marketing example by Meowingtons:

Meowingtons Halloween email campaign example

Alternatively, try embedding video in your emails or social feeds in landing pages and emails.

Lastly, remember that even though social is hard to track attribution and return compared with email ROI, it is getting better and more effective as numbers become more available.

9. Use email marketing automation

Chances are you have at least some customers who would prefer to sit during the Halloween season with a warm cup of a pumpkin-spiced drink and a book by someone other than Edgar Allan Poe.

Also, some people enjoy the autumn vibes and fall deals more than the spooky Halloween spirit. To make it work for them, consider building email workflows that target the autumnal celebrations of the month than the creatures of the night.

Bring people to your eCommerce store and landing pages by creating campaigns based on their online behavior.

Start by serving customers similar emails that focus on the beauty of autumn to satisfy those who aren’t so fond of Halloween but still want the discounts, the way Society6 does:

Subject line: Final Hours of Our 30% Off Autumn Sale

Society6 autumn email campaignTo create Halloween campaigns, you need an email marketing automation software tool with a user-friendly workflow editor.

Moosend’s platform will allow you to create smart, automated workflows based on customer data, using pre-made recipes. You can try out the feature by signing up for a free account!

10. Leverage user-generated content

There’s nothing more effective than user-generated content for driving social proof and engagement.

This is very important for Halloween! Just think that consumers are likely to have a circle of friends with similar tastes and ages. So anything you can do to get them to share their costume ideas, Halloween cookies, cozy purchases, great deals, or kitschy giveaways with their friends is vital.

The key to this is to collect and integrate user content into your emails and social posts. Here’s an example from Tesco’s Youtube channel:

Posted on Facebook, the video showcases Tesco products used to create Halloween effects. Viewers were then directed to how-to pages that teach readers how to achieve similar effects.

Pain points solved, customers entertained, and purchases encouraged. That sounds like a win!

To take advantage of this practice, create engaging YouTube videos with your customers and add them to your emails to please your subscribers.

Also, don’t forget to invite your audience to share their experiences with your products on social using specific hashtags! Here’s LARQ’s Halloween email marketing campaign:

LARQ user-generated content email

Remember that the more you involve your customers in your marketing, the more effective it will be! So go out there and take advantage of user-generated content. It’s a Halloween miracle!

Halloween Email Marketing To Die For

Using email marketing is the perfect tool to generate more revenue, but it works best when it is done as part of a comprehensive strategy!

To nail it, make substantial offers, build social engagement, and social proof as a part of your plan, and Halloween could be the season where you grow your list, your revenue, and your business.

Now that you’ve read some good strategies for increasing your ROI during Halloween, it’s time to apply them! And don’t forget to grab the tools to make it happen! Create your free Moosend account today to craft the best Halloween-themed emails and workflows!

Time to boo-st your sales the easy way!

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