Halloween is fast approaching but there is still time to get in some last minute messaging to keep your emails engaging and relevant. Over the past few years, consumers have spent roughly $6.5-8 billion a year on Halloween alone. So if you’re not tailoring messages to try and get a piece of that pumpkin pie, we’ve compiled some easy ways for you to start now.
Think Halloween is just for kids? According to a National Retail Federation Survey, 71.5% of Adults (18+) planned to celebrate or participate in Halloween activities, 75.7% said they would hand out candy, 51.4% indicated they would decorate their home or yard and 36.2% planned to throw or attend a party themselves.
Getting your subscriber’s attention doesn’t have to be an exclusive party, either; you don’t have to be selling costumes, candy or decorations in order to spook-up your October marketing campaigns. Halloween is a hauntingly fun time of year that can keep up engagement and/or revenue between your Back-to-School and Holiday marketing pushes.
We’ve referenced a post from Marketing Sherpa’s Article Archive and have compiled a list of tips and suggestions if you’re still on the fence:
1. Get Social! “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is” (Scott Cook, Co-Founder Intuit). Getting your customers involved in a conversation or photo-sharing is a great way to increase email engagement and brand awareness! We recommend having your customers use an Instagram hashtag of their costumes or decorations and deep-linking a pre-populated tweet of their #scariestmoment. Using Movable Ink’s social capabilities, we can include one or both of these feeds in your October campaigns. American Apparel ran a campaign similar to this idea but didn’t incorporate any of the submissions into their email campaign or deep-link to their social sites for submissions. Here’s what they did (on the left) versus what they could’ve done (on the right) to maximize their social engagement and number of submissions:
2. Get Personal! Movable Ink offers a plethora of personalization and real-time targeting applications to help you deliver that 1-to-1 experience that consumers prefer. Personalization is an easy way to utilize your database to increase click-through rates and conversions on your next campaigns. You can start off with a simple image personalization and work your way towards hyper-personalized API integrations which serve up true personalized live content from your website. The below example from Krispy Kreme is a screen shot of a campaign that had been sent out (on the left) versus how it could have gone out using Movable Ink’s image personalization tool (on the right), which is now easier to use than ever before!
3. Get Creative! Feature some DIY or How-to videos for your customers that show creative ways to use your products for costumes or decorations. This great email from American Eagle and Rent the Runway with Etsy suggests great DIY costume compilations using items from their own product line. These can be compiled on your website and fed into your emails via Web Crop to ensure you only serve up compilations which are still in stock.
All in all, Halloween is about fun and we’d hate for you and your recipients to miss out. Reach out to your account team to discuss and strategize any of these ideas for your next campaign and keep an eye out for our next installment for Halloween coming soon!