5 Halloween Email Examples and Best Practices to Inspire Your Campaign

Most marketers fall into the mistaken belief that Halloween is a business opportunity only for brands selling costumes, food, or decorative items. That’s hardly the case, though. Letting Halloween pass you by actually means leaving money on the table. Let’s see why.

For millions, Halloween is an exciting holiday when they wear scary costumes, narrate frightening stories, and visit supposedly haunted places. For marketers and business owners, it’s the perfect time to create and dispatch wickedly good marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is the most effective channel to boost sales during Halloween, reducing costs and workload for you and your marketing team. And since we all know how common it is to run out of festive ideas, we have created a guide on setting up email campaigns that will give your recipients goosebumps.

Best Practices For Creating Effective Halloween Emails

Halloween isn’t tricky just for kids or adults dressing up for it. It gets more challenging for marketers who have to create as unique emails as the οccasion calls for.

Before diving into the creative part, follow the best Halloween email marketing practices to design the most spooktacular email campaign ever.

Make an early start

There’s one golden rule for every holiday: it’s never too early to start preparing. People always look forward to special occasions.

Take advantage of the September blues to get subscribers excited about the beautiful days ahead, in this case, Halloween.

Capitalize on their anticipation by sending exclusive content, unique discounts, or intriguing sneak peeks, inviting them to share your festive mood earlier than your competitors. Don’t forget to include support options like live chat on your website in case they have questions that need answering.

Craft scary good email subject lines

You already know compelling subject lines are crucial for recipients to open an email. Your objective is to stand out in full inboxes and entice subscribers with scary good Halloween email subject lines. Halloween is all about creativity, humor, and mystery.

Incorporate these elements into your subject line to intrigue subscribers or get a smile on their faces.

Make it short, witty, and consistent with the email content so that readers know what to expect. You can even run A/B tests to check the best-performing ones.

Provide value and fun

Halloween emails should get subscribers in the holiday spirit and inspire them to prepare for the actual day. This isn’t the time to share promotional content about selling.

People expect to see valuable and fun content that will enhance their holiday experience.

So, find a way to combine your offer with tips on how to decorate their houses, make freaky snacks or unusual costumes, or stay safe during trick or treating.

Leverage thrilling visuals

You can’t go through the spooky season without visuals like thrilling images, fun GIFs, or Halloween-related emojis.

Dynamic content components add a spooky touch to your Halloween email marketing efforts, igniting the Halloween spirit in your audience. Besides the ordinary pumpkins, ghosts, bats, or skulls, think about creating a cute animation of your product or service to call attention to your selling proposition.

Create a sense of urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is usually vital for most email campaigns and subject lines. This is even more important in holiday email marketing since, by definition, holiday promotions don’t last forever.

Using urgent words or phrases such as “Last chance” or “Time is running out” increases recipients’ Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO), motivating them to open your email and act on your message. To intensify that effect, leverage email design elements like countdown timers and actionable CTAs.

5 Creative Halloween Email Examples to Inspire you

While the elements shared are fundamental for a successful Halloween email, they alone won’t do the trick.

As Halloween creativity goes, the options are countless as long as the email components fit your brand image and business objectives.

To help you sort things out, we compiled a list of the most creative Halloween email examples to get you started making some Halloween email magic.

1. Incorporate Halloween-themed images and GIFs

Experienced marketers know that images and GIFs effectively grab the audience’s attention and drive engagement.

Fair game is anything related to the holiday that could resonate with your target audience. You can search for Halloween-themed visuals on dedicated websites or even create your own to have it match the other email elements.

Remember that the more relevant these visual elements are to your products and overall branding, the more familiar your email feels to recipients.

That way, your business enters the holiday fun while staying on-brand and loyal to your business vision.

Subject line: Humongous Halloweekend Sale

This Halloween email from Postable might fall behind in witty copy, but it’s an excellent example of incorporating an animated GIF: the widely-known Dancing Pumpkin Man.

Apart from giving email recipients a good laugh, it features an exclusive, limited-time offer for them to take advantage of.

It creates urgency by highlighting the deadline while leveraging an orange background and a black-colored CTA, a color combination that everyone has tied up to Halloween.

2. Share helpful Halloween-related content

Halloween is an excellent opportunity to provide value mixed with humor, puns, and spookiness. There are various types of helpful content, from enticing video presentations to informative blog posts.

Your subscribers will appreciate the extra effort you put into helping them make this year’s spookfest memorable. And since there is nothing more convincing than social proof, you could feature some testimonial videos to showcase how your offer made other customers’ Halloween dreams come true.

Do you need some Halloween inspiration? Everyone loves a good scary story, so include inspired storytelling to excite them and have them click through your email content.

You can even use interactive elements, such as fun quizzes, and encourage them to share the results on their social media accounts to enhance exposure.

Subject line: Spooktacular dinners for the week

Let’s take this delicious email from My Food and Family as an example, providing readers with spooky recipes to impress everyone at Halloween dinners.

Recipe suggestions cover the entire week from Jack-o’-Lantern stuffed peppers to spooky eyeball tacos. But the email doesn’t stop there; it also employs ghost images, clever copy, a Halloween-specific color palette, and a witty and clickable CTA.

Even the anchors that lead recipients to each recipe are linked to the holiday, the ingredients, and the recipe itself.

3. Enhance the experience with Halloween recommendations

Many people think of Halloween as an excellent opportunity to escape reality and have unique experiences, cook with family or enjoy dishes from a ghost kitchen.

Email recipients will reward your brand with increased revenue and customer loyalty if you address that need through your Halloween email content.

You must draw together local Halloween events or unique experiences and share them with your subscribers. Before dispatching Halloween-specific recommendations, you should segment your audience based on their geographic location.

If your brand sells Halloween-themed products, include them in your emails as product recommendations, and don’t forget to showcase how recipients can use them to enhance their holiday experience. But even if it doesn’t, put your creativity into creating inspired product descriptions with clever copy and interactive elements. But more on that later.

Subject line: Trick or treat! Try a spooky stay

Airbnb is known for sending carefully designed and attention-grabbing emails. In its Halloween email, Airbnb asks recipients to treat themselves to a spooky stay after cherry-picking the most chilling accommodations.

From haunted houses to enticing mansions, the brand’s suggestions are top-notch. They are also displayed as fun and exciting, from the email subject line to the hauntingly beautiful images and the scary, good, all-about Halloween copy.

All these components make it hard for subscribers not to tap on the powerful CTAs.

4. Halloweenify your proposition

Your brand can celebrate Halloween regardless of the industry you are in or the type of product or service you sell. No business doesn’t have room for creativity and some good old Halloween scare.

Figuring out ways to strike fear and get all the Halloween fun going is an effective marketing strategy to drive sales and keep customers engaged this season.

Tapping into the spirit of Halloween is as easy as combining your selling proposition with some Halloween-themed language or visuals. You don’t need to go overboard; just a few elements here and there to show the fun side of your brand and make it relatable to the occasion.

So, don’t miss out on the opportunity that Halloween offers just because you think you can’t link your value proposition to it.

Subject line: Make Halloween sustainably spooky

Nothing frightening about lawns and fertilizers, right? However, Instead managed to get into the spirit and tweak its email copy to match the Halloween requirements.

Spiders, pumpkins, the contrast between orange and black, ghosts made of sheets, and Halloween-themed language are enough to connect the brand to the holiday.

But the email content is still centered around the company’s value proposition, highlighting how its products help you create the perfect scenery for Halloween decorations.

Plus, it keeps the brand tone and vision while combining it with Halloween elements, leading to phrasing like ‘sustainably spooky.’

5. Give them a scare and an offer.

Apart from giving email recipients a scare with Halloween visuals, copy, or color schemes, presenting special offers or exclusive discounts is a surefire tactic to benefit from this special occasion.

People get more impulsive during Halloween, so it is time to entice them with one-time holiday deals.

Whether your email promotion is about Halloween-themed collections or your standard product or service, you can make them an offer they can’t refuse – and your email content should be centered around it.

But it’s equally important to create a sense of urgency by highlighting the deadline. Limited-time offers to motivate customers to act on the deal immediately, and that feeling intensifies during special days. Ensure you include relevant wording in the subject line to increase your email open rates.

Subject line: Happy Halloween! Get 30% off Designmodo Shop and Market

This email example from Design Modo is an excellent example of how Halloween emails can be compelling and spot-on without using too many elements.

All it took was bold and clear colors, Halloween-related images, and the spooky background the holiday demands.

Moreover, the subject line, the copy, and the eye-catching CTA are centered around the discount. The sense of urgency is also there since they highlight that the offer lasts only three days.

Final Words

As time passes, Halloween is turning into a vital marketing event that you‘d better not ignore if you want to increase holiday sales and move already interested email recipients down your sales funnel.

Prospective customers look forward to your email campaigns to give them all the ideas they need to have a memorable time during the holiday.

If you are unsure where to begin, this guide will provide you with all the necessary information to create spooky and compelling email campaigns that tap into the holiday spirit and help you connect with your target audience.

Draw inspiration from all the hacks and Halloween email examples shared above to ensure your Halloween email is the spookiest of them all and wins the holiday battle in your subscribers’ stuffed inboxes.

What’s Next?

Apart from Halloween email, there are a lot of tactics to utilize this spooky holiday to boost your sales and conversions, such as social media, website popup campaigns, banners, and more. Here is more helpful content for you:

Author: Maria Fintanidou works as a Copywriter for email marketing automation software Moosend, creating the Help Articles (FAQs) and overseeing the platform’s translations in Greek and Spanish.