Email Marketing Strategies for Halloween 

Did you know that Halloween is the third most popular holiday in the United States? So why not Market towards it? October is a consistent build-up to the last day of the month, Halloween; blasting out different deals, sales, limited-time offers, etc., is a great way to draw people to your brand. In addition, you are creating engaging posts and promotions to increase engagement, lead generation, and customer outreach, converting many people to the funnel.

Halloween may be overrated as you become an adult, but 62% of adults enjoy celebrating Halloween. In 2021 the average adult spent 92 dollars on something Halloween related, whether that be decorations or costumes. Using Halloween as a marketing strategy is genius; it is the segmenting holiday that then trickles into Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a great time to pull customers into the spending money spirit. Approximately 29% of consumers buy their Halloween products online as it has become much more accessible, and people are getting more creative with their costumes.  

When it comes to promotional emails via the holidays, there are specific times to look out for when to send emails. This is commonly known as the spooky calendar. The best days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. The worst days are Saturday and Sunday from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m. This is also to keep in mind time changes as most emails need to be sitting out at the specific times first state or country, so people are not receiving emails at 1 a.m.

Trick or Treat your Customers with a discount!

It is a great holiday to capitalize on email marketing, as there are many puns. Getting creative with the marketing strategy used to circulate the holiday is a fun way to bring customers in. There are many different approaches to using a discount during the Halloween season. Such as creating an exclusive link for a certain amount of days or being able to use promotional codes that are Halloween-related. It is also a great time to show your customers your brand has personality. Making it fun and creative allows your brand to express to the consumers what is more profound than the surface. It's an opportunity to create a relationship with a customer and stand out to them based on creativity. 

Using discount codes is also a great way to offer special deals to our customers based on segmentation. So, for example, if they have a solid purchase history, they may fall into an Elite member and receive a discount code Treat25. But if they are new joiners and need to collect more points, they could be considered a primary member and receive a code of Treat15. So it is a great way to work on customer retention and show the members that they are valued and seen to end because of their interaction with the brand we are now; we're awarding and giving them a treat.

Another form of a discount that is not necessarily A price reduction would be to include free shipping. Essentially saying, "If you buy X, then you get Y for free," incentivizes customers to add more to their cart. Another great way to do this is to add a treat to their shipment. But, again, you are emphasizing that during the Halloween season, they will receive something spooky and their purchase. 

Subject lines that Spook the Audience!

Frequently there is a suggested unspoken approach to writing the subject line in an email. But when it comes to Halloween, some etiquette goes out the window. This is the opportunity to be spooky and catch your customer's attention by using creative subject lines that are considered punny. Here are five tips and tricks for writing a mysterious subject line.

1. Draw attention with Emoji - The most important thing is to get the customer to open the email and read more. Using emojis, it's attention-grabbing and could increase open rates.
2. Short and to the point - You always have a couple of seconds to grab your reader's attention, so whatever you choose your subject line to be, it must be able to grab the attention of a customer and retain it.
3. Catchy - Halloween is full of puns and is centered around the idea of being creative and putting on a mask to be anything you want. You have a catchy subject line to spark interest in those who need to get in the spirit. 
4. Sense of Urgency - Use this opportunity to create FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), creating spooky emails and building up suspense. 
5. Keep the Subject line mobile-friendly - 4 out of 10 email users open and interact with their emails via mobile devices. And ensuring that the subject line is not only catchy in relatable but is mobile-friendly is a great practice. Even if somebody is using a mobile device, they should still get the whole experience of what the subject line offers.

A couple of spooky subject line examples are as follows:

• "Something wicked this way comes," 
• No tricks, only treat this Halloween! 
• Trick or Treating on an Empty Stomach? Now THAT'S scary!
• Are You Ready To Get Spooky? 
• October is Here! 👻 See these Spooky Savings for Halloween

Use Visuals!

Using visuals is a great way to not only build suspense but also incorporate a 'scary' marketing angle. Incorporating Halloween into email marketing is essential because a picture says a thousand words. That said, ensuring the images are on point for your brand is always necessary. Halloween is a great time to get creative, but you want to keep the message of what you're trying to portray to your audience. 

When it comes to the visual aspect of emails, typically, there is a suggestion of colors that your brand needs explicitly to stay in. because Halloween has colors attached to it, meaning that when you think of how we think of orange, purple, black, gray, etc. When marketing, you can use those colors because a human brain blue associates the two together. You are also welcome to use fun Graphics such as spider webs, pumpkins, candy, and Frankenstein. All these things related to Halloween will allow customers to connect easily with your brand and see what is happening.

Internal Linking 

When writing an email using Halloween content, it is essential to carry it to your website. Connecting the Halloween theme throughout your email on your website will give your users a fun experience and makes your email more engaging because they can associate the two together. You are using similar content and visuals to promote your email marketing campaign on your landing page. With Halloween, you can use a pop of color and make it unique, meaning that your call-to-action buttons should be bright and eye-catching. 

When it comes time to create a Halloween email campaign, it is essential to ensure that you have a platform that allows you to be creative and time efficient. Mailsoftly offers the ability to personalize email templates and provide layouts that are not only attention-grabbing but offer the chance to personalize it to your brand.

Let's Check out some Examples!

Examples are a great place to start when getting ideas, using ideas to spark personal creativity. Learning from other brands can teach you some ideas that stand out and ideas that maybe don’t fit your brand or the message you are trying to portray. Perfecting a skill or knowledge of a craft is one way to advance your email campaigns. Applying something that you have seen is a great way to practice, you can then do a trail runs to see how the emails look and make sure they are mobile friendly as well. 

Postcards Do a couple of great things in this email campaign. First, we can walk through it collectively and check how many Incorporated Halloween has. For starters, you can see the headlines as no tricks, treats using something catchy and short to interest the audience in reading more. Then, moving on to the visuals, the spooky color theme and the pumpkin, bat, and skeleton are all associated with Halloween and stay on point with the email's message. Finally, they offer a deal, suggesting that if they shop up until Halloween, they will receive 3x the points for their purchase. They used three methods we discussed earlier, and as you can see, the email is templated well and simplistically gets the point across that they have a Halloween deal. And lastly, their call to action button matches the theme of their email template. 

Lands’ End does some pretty spooky things with its email campaign. Working from the top of the page, we can see that they are setting a timeframe on their discount, which can fall under FOMO (fear of missing out). Not only is there a discount at the top of their page with a discount code, but it is 31% off, which is also the day of Halloween. They have creative visuals where they are using their products to create a spooky black cat, which everybody knows during Halloween they are associated with bad luck! Underneath that, they have incorporated a play on words stating, “broomsticks and cobwebs and old witch’s brew. We’ve spellbinding savings (‘til midnight) for you”. Taking full advantage of the Halloween season lands’ End greatly touches upon the points discussed. Their call to action button is also right underneath their pun. The tactic here is to read the creativity and have that spark the user into exploring what deal they have to offer. 

The loft catches the customer's attention because of the orange color, as mentioned in the above. This is the opportunity to stay away from those classic brand colors and hop on the Halloween color trends. With this being said, starting with the large caption of "The Scary - Good Sale" is a fun way to entice customers into seeing the sale; using the term scary good is always going to spark a customer's interest. It's also a fun approach when they include "We Know, Freaky" because some people may think the sale is too good to be true, so it is freaky. Again, they are capitalizing on the play of words to bring customers to the website. Typing that call to action button and immediately following and standing out in bold to match the imagery used was an excellent aesthetic for LOFT to include.

ModCloth Including this as an example of more of a fun approach, ModCloth is a clothing brand, and the fact that they open up their Halloween email campaign with an Ouija board question is comical yet an excellent marketing technique. Opening up with a question, “Is there a cute outfit in your future?”It is a cute and interactive way to draw in the audience. The Ouija board is often associated with an older generation because they are hardly used now and are spooky! The concept of the Ouija board is that you ask it questions and give answers. The Ouija board answering yes is a well-known marketing technique, but it is fun for customers and catches their attention.

When marketing for Halloween, it is essential to remember that you want to have an email that catches the attention, of course, but also plays a role in Halloween, which means that you want to incorporate colors, freaky fonts,  fun imagery, play on words, and discount deals and coupons. Halloween is celebrated across multiple countries; it is also the time for people to dress up and portray themselves as whoever they want to be, incorporating that into your brand. This is the one time you can make an email spooky or get creative behind the font you use, so make sure you're taking advantage of the opportunity. These things are very enticing for a customer to see, and you really want to emphasize those in your email templates. Mailsoftly offers the chance to personalize templates based on the campaign,  and it's a great platform to start your Halloween email journey.