Five tricks for making your Halloween email campaign a treat

Halloween is here and little children will surely be marching up and down your block dressed as ghouls and vampire movie characters in just a matter of hours.

The holidays always show the unique strategies that companies come up with for their promotions. Scarily enough, no one ever complains that Halloween has become commercialised to the point where its meaning has become obscured. In fact, if there ever was a holiday that is just howling to become more sales-oriented, it’s Halloween.

Halloween is hot as any savvy marketing person will tell you. Halloween is a marketing scream which has grown to become retail’s second-highest income-generating season after Christmas generating billions in sales, with candy only being around one-third of that.

Boosting Halloween sales with email marketing is more of a treat than a trick. The National Retail Federation predicts total Halloween spending to reach US$6.86-billion this year in the USA. Whether it’s on decorations, costumes, candy or other items, with the average person expected to spend US$72.31 to celebrate the eve of hallows.

Do you have any last-minute Halloween promotions planned for your email campaigns? If not, you certainly should. The haunting holiday can provide a boost to sales before the year-end crunch. And for the last few years this dark day has been a candle of hope in a spooky economy.

Halloween can be a marketing monster. So if you’re shrieking for some Halloween promotional inspiration, take your email campaign from frightful to delightful with these spook-tacular tips to get your promotion out before the end of the day:

Daytime Halloween emailing is not to be feared — When developing on-the-day email campaigns for Halloween, you want to target the last-minute shoppers. This means pitching specials and products in an email campaign that will drive in-store purchases instead of online commerce, as these are subject to delivery times and the usual holiday congestion. If you’re marketing on the day, sell for the here and now.

Offer Halloween-appropriate incentives — Your Halloween promotions are likely to include discounts and other special offers. Offer a free gift for every purchase. Find a low-cost product that’s small and easy hand out with every Halloween sale. If your company does not normally offer any Halloween-related products, these freebies will lend more credibility to your holiday-themed marketing. These will also give you additional seasonal imagery to use in your emails.

Theme regular products for Halloween — Running a Halloween-related campaign does not require selling costumes, party supplies or even pumpkins. So, you can make slight changes to emails to give them a Halloween spin. This can be as simple as adding a spooky subject line with some supporting copy and a Halloween-inspired image, or dressing up your newsletters in a Halloween Costume (email template).

Reviving dead email leads — Any company that uses an email list has to deal with unresponsive or just plain “dead” recipients that are haunting open and click-through rates. If once-active recipients have stopped opening your emails or aren’t clicking on email links; in the spirit of Halloween it may be time to determine whether the addresses can be saved or should be slashed.

Select the group that has not opened a message in a few months and send an email with text that asks them to verify their interest. If they don’t respond, you can comfortably call them dead and hack them from your list, or if you have trouble letting them go on to the next life; consider offering them a particular benefit to come back to life — such as 30% off their next purchase.

Dare to be different — With so many Halloween promotions prowling around, you might decide that the best way to stand out is to present customers with an alternative to ghosts and ghouls. For example, you can use images and copy that reinforce the notion of a unique holiday that the whole family can enjoy, instead of beating the same candy and pumpkin drum as all your competitors.