The Ultimate Guide to Halloween Email Marketing

Trick or treat? Tips or tools? If you need some inspiration for your Halloween email marketing campaigns, you’ve come to the right place. Our Ultimate Guide to Halloween Email Marketing will help you add some fiendishly festive touches and tactics to help you nail your Halloween campaigns. Dare to read on to get our extensive expert email tips and scarily good brands examples…

Contents:

1. Email subject lines tips for Halloween 2. Halloween-inspired email design creative examples 3. CRO tips for Halloween email campaigns 4. Tools and tactics to boost your Halloween campaigns 5. Expert insights from our CEO, Philip Storey

1. Spooktacular subject lines

Consumers these days have a lot of emails landing in their inbox, day in day out – even more so during seasonal events like Halloween. Use this opportunity to be creative with your email subject lines, in order to stand out from the competition (and the inbox) and improve customer engagement. Halloween lends itself to creativity, so don’t be afraid to do something out of the ordinary. Use relevant emojis, clever wordplay and enticing incentives to increase open rates.

Emoji use in email subject lines

Most brands now are embracing emojis in their marketing activities, including email subject lines, to help grab their subscribers’ attention and trigger an instantly emotive response. Using seasonal-themed emojis is an effective tactic for increasing open rates, especially during peak sales periods.

Media Post reports that the use of emojis in everyday email and mobile marketing campaigns has increased 775% year-over-year and emoji use in marketing messages has shown a steady 20% increase month-to-month last year alone.

However, try not to copy what everyone else is doing, just using the same emojis everyone is using may result in your impact being diluted. Take a look at Mailschimp's chart below for the 15 most commonly used emojis in email subject lines.

Check out these examples of emoji use in Halloween email marketing campaigns:

The first is from Queen of Hoxton:

The next email subject line is an example from WeGotTickets:

This subject line from TimeOut goes emoji crazy:

Seasonal subject line tips

Utilise the trigger of the Halloween season to help you entice subscribers to open your emails and engage with your content and offers. Consider the following tactics when looking to optimise your email subject lines:

• Be playful and daring with your subject line copy
• Add mystery and intrigue to entice recipients
• Offer compelling reasons to open your emails
• Promise the incentive of real value 
• A/B test your subject lines and use customer insights to refine and optimise 

Get in-depth Halloween subject line tactics and examples in our spooktactular blog:

5 Spooktacular Subject Line Tips to BOOst Your Halloween Email Campaigns

2. Creative Halloween email design examples

Halloween is all about being creative, so let the juices flow and incorporate seasonal themes, clever wordplay and relevance, to catch your customers’ attention. Little design additions, such as spiders and cobwebs in the corners of your email templates, are effective subtle tweaks. but try to strike the right balance between staying on-brand and adding creative Halloween email design touches.

Consider creating vibrant Halloween emails, incorporating festive colours, seasonal marketing copy and hooks, and engaging Halloween visuals, photos and even GIFs.

Here are a couple of great examples of innovative Halloween email design creative from top retail brands:

Hotel Chocolat

This email from Hotel Chocolat is on-brand, whilst adding visually-appealing images and Halloween-related icons, whilst the CTA buttons are clear and the copywriting has just the right amount of seasonal slant to perk the attention of the reader.

Jack Threads

This following email example from Jack Threads packs a real punch, with powerful visuals, custom typography to add a blood-soaked theme to the 70% off discount offer and the brand logo, whilst the "PRICES ARE SLASHED " tagline perfectly fits with the imagery. It's a really compelling email campaign! 

If you need some more creative inspiration for Halloween email campaign design, check out these great resources:

• 5 Horrifyingly Good Halloween Email Creative Examples
• 5 Creepily Creative Email Marketing Campaigns for Halloween

3. CRO tactics to increase Halloween campaign conversions

Discounts and offers obviously help to gain customer engagement during seasonal marketing opportunities, but adding playful email marketing copy and relevance helps your Halloween campaigns to be more enticing. Consider leveraging FOMO (fear of missing out) and using dynamic content to help encourage conversions. Offering limited-time-only deals, that end at midnight on the 31st, say, heightens urgency and encourages customers to convert.

Create compelling calls to action that are just dying to be opened, which are clear, relevant and super-enticing – why not add an element of mystery, as it’s Halloween after all! Place your calls to action alongside a valuable discount code and make it clear how your customers can take advantage of the offer before it expires. They won’t want to miss out!

Check out this BOO-tiful example, from Lands' End:

Lands' End

Not only is the visual super-effective and engaging in this email campaign example, check out the FOMO and urgency used in the copy, "IT'S NO APPARITION...BUT IT WILL DISAPPEAR", which is cleverly linked to Halloween, but also to the notion of it being a limited-time offer. This is followed up by confirmation that the offer is for "1-day only", which can be redeemed with the seasonal discount code: "BOO".

Do you want some more great examples of top tactics and effective Halloween campaign examples from top brands, check out our 4 Fiendish Email Marketing Tactics to Boost Halloween Campaign Conversions.

Here are some other great resources for you to find out more about CRO tactics in email marketing:

• How to Apply CRO to Email Marketing

4. Email tools and tactics to BOOst Halloween campaigns

If you want to take your Halloween email campaigns to the next level, fear not, we’ve got a bag full of treats and tools for you to discover! There are plenty of innovative email marketing tools available to help brands give their campaigns that extra boost.

Here are just a few of Enchant Agency's favourite email tools:

Phrasee

Phrasee uses Al and language algorithms to predict subject lines that are most likely to result in encouraging your subscribers’ engagement, due to enhanced relevancy. It’s a great way of ensuring results on your specified campaigns.

Fresh Relevance

This a great tool for retailers and email marketers looking to ramp up their personalisation and add dynamic content, such as countdown clocks, to boost urgency and increase conversions. Check out our blog on the effectiveness of Fresh Relevance!

Realtime Email by Live Clicker

Want to make sure your customers are getting the latest and most relevant content during seasonal campaigns, like Halloween? Live Clicker brings your campaigns to life by using data intelligence to add live content into your emails, so your email recipients get real-time offers and up-to-date info. Fire up the FOMO with Realtime Email by Live Clicker 

To learn about more great email tools which can improve your performance, check out the following resources:

• 10 Awesome Tools to Revolutionise Your Email Marketing [ebook guide]

5. Expert insights from our CEO, Philip Storey

Enchant Agency Founder and CEO, Philip Storey has offered some spine-tingling tips to help you create your own awesome Halloween email campaigns.

Differentiate your brand from the competition

“One of the key things to consider at Halloween is to try and differentiate yourself from your competition. The best way to do this is, is to actually stop looking at what your competitors are doing. You can keep an eye on what they did last year, but the best thing to do is look at completely different sectors and markets. For example, if you’re in retail perhaps look at what a travel company have done in the past. Also, go back into your inbox and look back at what others did strategically for the marketing campaigns in previous years.”

Halloween subject lines

“In terms of subject lines, be careful not to be tempted to use too many clichés, like 'No tricks, just treats'. It’s just too obvious and everybody does it. You have to think of how you can apply Halloween to your brand and find a nice way to weave it in with what you offer. Make it fun and intriguing and try to take it one step further and be as creative as you can.”

Email design tips for Halloween

“From an email design perspective, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to send an entirely orange and black email! Something like a banner or light touch is enough. Even little creative treatments like a witch or cobweb on the logo are enough to set the scene.”

Check out this example below from Stella McCartney. Sometimes just some minimalistic design touches can go a long way!

Ask yourself, do you really want to participate?

“From a strategic point of view, the first thing you should ask yourself is, ‘Do I need to?’ Think about whether or not it’s appropriate for your brand or business to be diving into Halloween. If it feels like you’re having to think to try and come up with something in time, it may not be the right thing for your brand”.

Integrate social media with email marketing

“Look at how you can utilise social media to enhance your email marketing. Perhaps using Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, depending on which channels your brand is most active on. Think about how you can put your subscribers through a competition at Halloween. Try something you may not usually do through email marketing, maybe offering them the chance to subscribe to your emails and get something for nothing through a competition." Remember: Make sure you don't have a shocker and let all your good work down with some fatal errors!

Summary

Don’t be afraid to try out these seasonal marketing methods in your own email marketing campaigns. We hope you found our Ultimate Guide to Halloween Email Marketing to be of help and hopefully, it has given you plenty of inspiration.

Halloween is just one of the many different touchpoints within the customer lifecycle to engage with your email subscribers and send them seasonal offers, relevant content and loyalty-based incentives, to nurture them and retain them as active customers. Download our free guide, How to Revolutionise Your Customer Lifecycle with Email Marketing, and go make waves with email.