Boo(st) Your Business with Spooktacular Halloween Email Marketing Tactics

Halloween email marketing hands holding a pumpkin

Halloween is almost upon us! Along with the festive spirit, it brings an incredible opportunity for email marketers to onboard new customers, connect with their old customers, and boost their sales numbers. You may be running all types of email campaigns throughout the year, but this festive season is the one you should be paying close attention to.

While many email professionals focus on commerce-specific events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday to push offers, freebies, and discounts, you should be aware that Halloween spending figures are just as incredible. Did you know that Americans spent $10.2 billion on Halloween last year? But that’s not the number you should care about — it’s the $12.2 billion that is expected to be spent in 2023!

If you’re interested in getting a slice of that cake, we’re going to be talking about the role that Halloween plays in email marketing, great strategies you can use, and tips and tricks to get the most out of your Halloween email marketing campaign!


Table of Contents


What Does Halloween Have to Do With Email Marketing?

Halloween email marketing is important for several reasons, especially for businesses and marketers looking to capitalize on this festive holiday. Here are several key reasons why your Halloween marketing emails are significant:

  • Seasonal engagement: Halloween is a widely celebrated holiday in many countries, and it presents a great opportunity for you to engage with your audience in a fun and creative way, translating to better open rates. Sending Halloween-themed emails can capture the attention of your subscribers and help maintain or increase their interest in your brand.
  • Increased sales: Halloween-themed promotions, discounts, and special offers can drive sales during this holiday season. Email marketing allows you to reach out to your subscribers with exclusive deals and product recommendations tailored to the Halloween theme, which can lead to improved conversions! 
  • Brand awareness: Running email campaigns during this period can help boost brand awareness and reinforce your brand’s personality. Creative and well-designed emails with Halloween elements can make your brand more memorable and relatable to your audience.
  • Customer loyalty: By offering special discounts or promotions to your existing customers through email marketing, you can strengthen customer loyalty and encourage repeat purchases. This can also lead to more word-of-mouth referrals for your business.
  • Build your email lists: Halloween advertising campaigns provide an opportunity to collect valuable data about your subscribers’ preferences and interests. You can segment your email list based on the engagement and responses to these campaigns, which helps you tailor future marketing efforts more effectively.
  • Testing opportunities: Halloween serves as a kickoff for the holiday shopping season, and effective Halloween email marketing can help set the stage for future holiday campaigns. It allows you to start engaging your audience early and build momentum for upcoming promotions for Christmas, for example.

In summary, Halloween email marketing is important because it offers a timely opportunity to engage with your audience, boost sales and signups, strengthen your brand’s presence, and build customer loyalty. It allows you to tap into the Halloween spirit and create memorable interactions with your subscribers while setting the stage for the upcoming holiday season at the same time.

Dunkin Donuts Halloween email campaign
Dunkin Donuts Halloween email campaign

Halloween: A Great Opportunity to Boost Sales and Signups

By now, you probably understand the incredible opportunity Halloween provides for you to reach out to your customers. Here are a couple of ways to get the most out of this festive season: 

  • More signups: Halloween is a great marketing opportunity as you can use attention-grabbing headlines to reel in new customers. You can use a festive page to create awareness of your products and services and entice people to sign up for your emails. 
  • By using different tactics like Halloween-themed lead magnets, parallel campaigns on social media, referral rewards for customers, and the like, your readers will be keen to tap that Signup button. It’s also a great idea to have a spooky pop-up to entice customers to sign up for your emails! Everyone loves a good scare. 
  • Sales opportunities: Halloween is definitely a massive opportunity for you to generate sales, and we’re going to look at a few ways you can do that.
Sales techniqueDescription
Halloween bundlesThe holiday is a great opportunity to bundle up your most popular products/services and offer them to your customers at a combo discount. Your email recipients will definitely see the value in add-ons that would normally cost them more. Bear in mind that more holidays are coming, so do something special for Halloween alone.
Flash salesSending out emails to alert your customers of flash sales is a great way to generate great sales figures. These create a sense of urgency and FOMO is pretty persuasive.
Unique discount or offer codeNo one can resist an amazing discount or offer, and sending out codes via email will entice readers to visit your site and make a purchase.
Virtual eventInform your customers of a virtual Halloween-themed event where you can create a fun experience for visitors and use it to generate sales. 
Gift guidesAll of us struggle to think of gift ideas, so you should make the job easier for your customers by emailing them an excellent Halloween gift guide using your curated products or services.
VIP early accessPeople love exclusive access, and Halloween is an opportunity to give your customers exactly that. Send out an email to your top customers, inviting them for a customized shopping experience where they can access your products or services before the main Halloween sale goes live.
Exclusive dealsA deal that only appears once a year is a deal that no one wants to miss out on. Take advantage of this by offering your customers a rare opportunity to sign up or buy your products.
Post-Halloween SaleThis one’s for your customers who may not have pulled the trigger for Halloween. Offering them a sweet deal right after the holiday is over will attract customers who missed out on good deals during Halloween.
Halloween email sales techniques

Besides sales and signups, Halloween is also a great time to boost website traffic or enhance brand engagement.

Blue Apron Halloween email campaign
Blue Apron Halloween email campaign

Building Your Email Marketing Strategy for Halloween

If we’ve convinced you to take advantage of this Halloween opportunity, you’ll need a strategy. We have a few suggestions that you can customize and adapt according to your requirements.

1. Create the email marketing calendar

This is the first step to ensure you don’t execute a rushed campaign. Putting together a calendar lets you plan the volume and schedule for your emails, and it’s a good time to define your goals clearly.

2. Segment your email lists

Based on subscriber preferences, past purchase behavior, and engagement levels, you should create fresh lists to suit your marketing strategy. This gives you the edge when it comes to personalized and targeted messaging.

3. Organize offers and discounts

This is where you plan what to offer your customers. You can use the ideas from the table above and space them out strategically to ensure the best results from your campaign.

4. Create content for your Halloween campaign

This is the most fun part of this process. This is where you write eye-catching copy and catchy subject lines with lots of funny Halloween-themed puns to keep your readers engaged. The holiday-themed email templates are equally important — incorporate Halloween colors, fonts, and visuals. 

At Campaign Refinery, we are proud of our campaign template library, where you can find a variety of options that suit the tone and style of your campaign. Using our templates also ensures that your Halloween-themed emails are mobile-responsive, so they won’t look wonky when your customers access them on their smartphones.

Remember to keep a different tone for your pre-Halloween emails, as you want to create suspense and excitement before your main emails hit your customers’ inboxes. It’s a good idea to send one last Halloween email with your sweetest deal. This is to win over the customers putting up the most resistance!

5. Use social media campaigns

Run social media ads to drive signups to your email newsletters this festive season. You can use quirky posts and offers to build awareness of your brand and use compelling CTAs to win them over.

6. Continually analyze email performance

It’s vital that you constantly monitor your campaign metrics to see which ones are performing best. Use the learning to fine-tune the emails going out after.

OUTPUT Halloween email campaign
OUTPUT Halloween email campaign

Creative Email Campaign Ideas for Halloween

Using game-like elements in your Halloween email marketing campaigns makes your content more appealing, interactive, and enjoyable for your recipients.  This also increases engagement and encourages them to click on links or make purchases. Here are several ideas you can adopt this Halloween to give your subscribers a little treat!

  1. Trick or Treat: This one’s obvious, and it can create incredible engagement for you. Send your customers a game that they can play where they have a chance to win big. You can also use this click-or-treat game to entice new visitors to sign up for future deals and offers.
  2. Countdown to a big sale: Having an email series that informs your customers of an upcoming sale or discount period is a good way to create awareness and excitement. 
  3. Content giveaway: Create an e-book or guide for Halloween and give it away to anyone who signs up. Market it as a Halloween gift, and you can use this book to build your email lists organically, too. 
  4. Share user-generated content: You can use Halloween as an opportunity to share customer-generated content. It’s an opportunity to post customer testimonials, share Halloween stories, or just random anecdotes from your readers. People love a sense of community, and emails wishing them a Happy Halloween are great for engagement.
  5. Gamify your email content: Introducing a playful vibe to your emails and sharing quizzes, games, or interactive pages for them to enjoy the spirit of Halloween can be excellent for brand recall and engagement. Remember, your customers will always remember how you made them feel! Build relationships first; sell after.

Halloween Email Marketing: It’s All About Clever Copy

Great copy can really BOOst the engagement levels of your Halloween emails. We’ve compiled a few Halloween puns that work really well as sales copy. Included is an imaginary product called XYZ — feel free to replace that with your own product!

  1. “Don’t Ghost Us This Halloween! Get Spooktacular Deals On XYZ!”
  2. “XYZ: Our Product Is So Good, It’s Almost Scary!”
  3. “No Tricks, Just Treats! XYZ Is Your Halloween Must-Have.”
  4. “Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun, And XYZ Is Here To Help!”
  5. “XYZ: The Pumpkin Spice Of Your Halloween Shopping.”
  6. “Get Into The Festive Spirit With XYZ: Fang-Tastic Halloween Deals!”
  7. “Trick Or Treat Yourself To XYZ’s Halloween Specials!”
  8. “Haunted By FOMO? XYZ’s Halloween Sale Has You Covered!”
  9. “Boo-Tiful Savings Await! Shop XYZ For Halloween Fun!”

Example: Real estate Halloween marketing emails

If you work in real estate, Halloween is the perfect occasion to engage your potential customers with email marketing, as families that looking to purchase a home would appreciate your festive spirit. Here are several subject lines or CTAs you can use with your emails!

  1. “Scarily Low Mortgage Rates For You!”
  2. “Don’t Be Haunted By High Rent: Treat Yourself To Homeownership”
  3. “Creep It Real: Exclusive Halloween Listings Just For You”
  4. “No Tricks, Only Treats! Spooktacular Deals On Homes”
  5. “Find Your Haunted Mansion Today With Our Ghostly Good Deals!”
  6. “Halloween House Hunting? We’ve Got The Perfect Spells for You!”
  7. “Haunted By Leaky Roofs And Bad Wiring? Check Out Our Premium Homes!”
  8. “Unboo-liveable Savings On Homes! Reach Out To XYZ!”
Grubhub Halloween email campaign
Grubhub Halloween email campaign

5 Design Dos and Don’ts for Halloween Email Marketing

It’s important to keep your brand image in mind while designing your email templates, but here are 5 good rules to follow as you craft your email campaign. 

  1. Use scary images, but by that, we mean scary cute. If you do too good of a job, you’re gonna scare off your customers!
  2. If you sell products, do a Halloween-themed photoshoot for your items. Halloween is a gloriously visual holiday, and your campaign must be image-focused. Your products in a festive setting can make all the difference.
  3. Use your company’s colors in email template designs — staying on brand can be a challenge, especially if your colors clash with the orange. However, it’s essential to keep your recognizable features.
  4. Use gifs. They may look tacky in regular business emails, but at Halloween, anything goes! Note that during this season, there will be plenty of themed gifs and images available on image sites, so get the most out of it.
  5. Use spooky fonts for your copy, but don’t make them unreadable. After all, you don’t want your customers struggling to make sense of your holiday email.

Great design is just as important as solid copy, and with the above design guidelines in mind, you can create an immersive experience for your readers and delight them with your Halloween campaign. 


Automate your Halloween Email Marketing Strategy

Automating your Halloween emails can save time, ensure consistency, and allow for more personalized communication with your subscribers. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to automate your Halloween email marketing strategy.

  1. Pick the right platform: A trustworthy and dependable platform will offer you maximum peace of mind with your automated emails. At Campaign Refinery, we offer various tools to help you design the ideal Halloween-themed email automation flow. With a clean user interface and simplified controls, you can set up all the right triggers to help you hit the sweet spot this Halloween. Depending on the online behavior of your email recipients, you can also create customized sequences with Campaign Refinery’s Sequence Editor.
  1. Set clear goals for your Halloween campaign: Plan your automated emails in the correct order of steps and follow-ups to ensure maximum conversions. For example, you can create a welcome series for new signups and also have a re-engagement series for inactive subscribers.
  1. Segregate your audience: Divide your email lists into different groups, such as loyal customers, new subscribers, and past Halloween shoppers.
  1. Timing is everything: Bombarding your recipients with Halloween-centric special deals, coupons, and discounts is not the way to go about it. Refine your strategy to make each email unique, and ensure your triggers are cleverly designed to connect with the right type of customer.
  1. Analytics are your friend: Email automation doesn’t mean you study the analytics only after the campaign is over. It’s best to analyze the metrics for each batch of emails so that you can understand how your customers are thinking. At Campaign Refinery, we offer in-depth insight to help you track every aspect of how your emails are performing. Our software helps track all useful metrics like open rates, engagement rates, spam complaints, unsubscribes, and bounce rates. We’re also going to add Google Postmaster Tools to our dashboard soon, so you get even more insight into your email marketing efforts.

Running Your Halloween Campaigns with Campaign Refinery

Teaming up with Campaign Refinery as your email partner ensures that designing your Halloween campaign is a breeze, and you also get an outstanding amount of insight that will impress you. 

We have a rich selection of adaptable templates, a UI that even a 10-year-old could understand, an email sequence tool that will let you customize almost any aspect of your email flow, and to top all of this off, you also get the best insight into your email performance. With our powerful analytical tools, you can refine your email marketing strategies and make data-driven improvements.

And if you’re struggling with generating leads despite your email marketing efforts, we have something exciting for you! 

Our founder, Travis Ketchum, has been in the email industry for decades and has remarkable stories to share. He created this program specifically for email marketers looking for phenomenal growth and compiled all of his knowledge and strategies into the Lead Magnet Multiplier course, and we’re giving it to you FREE — the only catch being that you must complete the course to retain access. 

Does a 7.56x growth in your subscriber acquisition sound good to you? Then, this is the link you need to follow: Lead Magnet Multiplier course access.

We know you’ll love our course, so drop us a line to let us know how much!

Happy emailing!

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