Ok, so Halloween is just a few days away and you’ve completely forgotten to send out any form of email marketing campaign that latches onto this time-honoured tradition of spookery and trick-or-treating.
Don’t panic. The great thing about email as a marketing method is that you can jump on it at the very last minute in order to get a piece of promotional activity out of the door and in front of your target audience. It’s what makes email a brilliant tool for busy marketers.
To help you out, we’re going to consider five halloween-inspired marketing tactics you could employ today that will make the most of this time of the year.
It’s not too late!
1. Promote Halloween-related products
This one requires a bit of creative thought (unless you’re a pumpkin supplier). Examine your list of products or services and look for something that you can tie to Halloween. It can be the most innocuous of links or vaguest of connections, but if you find something that fits, it’ll be the perfect centrepiece for your campaign.
In the example below, the retailer is lucky enough to have pumpkin seeds within its arsenal, but don’t be put off if your products aren’t obviously ghoulish – a subtle play on words (“treat your car to a spooky, deep black shine this Halloween”) will do.
2. Latch onto trending news
If you’re struggling to find inspiration within your product base for Halloween, you can do a lot worse than latch onto trending news stories in order to create an email worth opening.
As a prime example, the recent spate of clown sightings in America could be put to fantastic use at Halloween. They’ve been shared vigorously on social media sites because they’re unnerving and spooky – perfect fodder for this time of year.
Take a look at this snippet from an email campaign:
Nope, there’s nothing spooky about the above at all. But the subject line for the email was ‘Don’t clown about with your in-store technology’, and that’s a perfect example of using a news story to your advantage at Halloween. It’s brilliantly subtle and sure to get people clicking.
3. Have fun with imagery
This tip requires a bit of design flair either in-house or on behalf of your external marketing agency, but if you can call upon such skill, now’s the time to do it.
You could do something as simple as pumpkin-ify your logo or simply include a header with Halloween-themed imagery. Whatever you do, make it eye-catching and prominent.
4. Experiment with words
If time’s tight, a regular email campaign with some added Halloween-Inspired phrasing could be enough to raise a smile among your subscriber base and get them clicking.
Focus your spooky wordplay where it matters – either within the subject line, the opening paragraph or on call-to-actions, like so:
5. Use social media to your advantage
There’s no greater win in digital marketing than getting a hashtag of your own to trend. At Halloween, you may just be able to tempt people to join in and create some real engagement on Twitter.
To stand a chance of making this happen, you need to combine a product offering with a hashtag that is Halloween-related and theme your entire email around that message. Make it the only thing in the body, if you like, but ensure you encourage recipients to get involved by sharing their take on your challenge.
Wrapping up
Halloween is a great time to spook your subscribers into submission. In the UK, we’ve rapidly followed our friends across the Atlantic when it comes to making this time of the year akin to a public holiday; it’s big business, and even if you’re a little late to the party, there’s still plenty you can do to grab the attention of your subscribers with the above tried-and-tested techniques.
