Halloween is coming up! Children will be marching up and down your block dressed as ghouls and goblins in a matter of weeks. You should start receiving party invitations anytime now.
For marketers, the lead-up to the haunting holiday can boost sales before the year-end crunch. And for the last two years the dark day has been a bright spot in a spooky economy.
Halloween retail sales reached a record-breaking projection of $6 billion in 2009, up 4.2% from $5.77 billion in 2008, according to industry market researcher IBISWorld.
Do you have any Halloween promotions planned for your email marketing? Take a look at six proven ideas we’ve pulled from MarketingSherpa case studies and how-to articles for some inspiration.
Idea #1. Make Halloween a month-long, multichannel theme
Using the entire month of October as your Halloween selling season gives you a lot of flexibility. You can develop a month-long marketing plan that mixes different types of promotions and uses all your channels.
That way, you’ll avoid overusing any single Halloween promo tactic, such as sending a rash of email offers right before October 31.
For example, last year the team at baking accessory company Wilton coordinated a month-long series of Halloween promotions that offered party tips, cookie- and cake-decorating ideas, and product promotions in several channels:
- They created Halloween party-planning videos that they posted to YouTube, their blog, and their Facebook page.
- They used Twitter to promote Halloween baking ideas and specific products, such as cookie cutters. Then, on Halloween, they sent a tweet encouraging customers to post photos of their creations on Wilton’s Facebook page.
- They made Halloween the theme of their October email newsletter, offering ideas for cookie, cake and cupcake decorations.
By combining email and social media promotions, they generated a 120% increase in Halloween product views on Wilton.com.
Idea #2. Time email promotions for different customers
When developing email campaigns for October, you’ll want to target the organized Halloween planners as well as the last-minute shoppers. If you’re a multichannel merchant, this means developing different email campaigns for online sales and in-store purchases.
We spoke with Diana Voigt, Marketing Manager, HalloweenExpress.com, about her company’s October email planning. She recommends:
- Emailing ecommerce promos two weeks before Halloween.
- Emailing brick-and-mortar promos during the week of Halloween to capture sales from last-minute customers with no time to have orders shipped.
Idea #3. Offer Halloween-appropriate incentives for purchases
Your Halloween promotions are likely to include discounts and other special offers. But Voigt also recommends testing a free gift for every seasonal purchase.
Find a low-cost product that’s small and easy to ship with every Halloween order — such as pumpkin carving kits. These sweeteners will push more reluctant customers to make purchases, and will help regular customers feel like they’re getting a better deal.
If your company does not normally offer any Halloween-related products, these freebies will lend more credibility to your holiday-themed marketing. Their product shots will also give you additional seasonal imagery to use in your emails.
Idea #4. Encourage user-generated Halloween content
You can also ask your audience to explore its creative side by sending you Halloween-inspired creations.
User-generated content such as photos, stories, drawings and jokes can build excitement among customers, generate search traffic, and give you content for Halloween promos. You can also repackage the content to share with partner sites to earn in-bound links from holiday-related content.
For example, Dan Roberts, Senior SEO Strategist and Analyst, Hearst Digital Media, worked with his team to create a gallery of images on their Good Housekeeping website of pets wearing Halloween costumes. They had enough images to gather them into subtopics, including a “Star Wars” theme.
“Good Housekeeping is not the typical kind of brand that resonates [on sites like Digg]. But if it’s Star Wars, they’ll look at it,” Roberts says.
The team built a page to host the gallery and submitted the link to Digg. The strategy worked, and within a week they were ranking well for competitive search engine phrases around Halloween costumes.
“This was going into the Halloween season. It couldn’t be better. This was like a lightning bolt,” Roberts says.
Idea #5. Tie regular products to the Halloween theme
Running Halloween-related marketing campaigns does not require selling costumes, party supplies or pumpkins.
For example, Thom Pharmakis, VP of Internet, Lands’ End, described how his team created a special email newsletter for Halloween. The newsletter included a feature called “Spooky colors” on how to use Lands’ End clothing as a Halloween costume.
Even if your promotional calendar is filled out to Christmas, 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.
If you want to sell a few Halloween items, fun novelty products are fairly easy to find by searching for specialty wholesalers and making a few inquiry calls, Voigt says.
Idea #6. Buck the traditional Halloween theme
Of course, with so many Halloween promotions in the air, you might decide that the best way to stand out is to present customers with an alternative to ghosts and ghouls.
For example, The Greenbriar, a luxury resort, designed an email campaign that promoted a “Different kind of Halloween” for its audience of upscale travelers.
The email featured:
- Rich red and gold autumnal colors, as opposed to the typical black and orange color scheme of most Halloween promotions.
- Imagery of a mother and daughter lying on fallen leaves, and copy that reinforced the notion of a unique family vacation, such as: “Make this Halloween one that the whole family can enjoy. Your kids may never beg for candy again.”
Images and links to fall activities at the resort, including:
- Fly fishing
- Falconry
- Hunting
- Golf
- Mountain biking
Source: Marketing Sherpa by Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter
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E-mail marketing industry experts shrugged off Google’s debut of the “Priority Inbox” enhancement in Gmail this week, saying it may even help them target consumers more effectively. The feature prioritizes e-mail messages for consumers.
Priority Inbox filters incoming e-mail messages into three sections: “important and unread,” “starred” and “everything else.” Messages are automatically categorized as they arrive to a consumer’s inbox. Google is offering the feature to consumers on a rolling basis.
“Gmail uses a variety of signals to predict which messages are important, including the people you e-mail most and which messages you open and reply to,” Google explained on the Google Blog.
“This is a welcome change to mailers like us,” said Marc Haseltine, manager of e-mail marketing at the National Geographic Society, noting the “incredible amount of inbox clutter” many consumers experience. “I think some of what we’ll do is to be a little more proactive on segmenting our reports by ISPs so we’re not seeing any problems with what they are implementing.”
Haseltine said the company will examine deliverability, inbox placement and response rates by ISPs more closely with every campaign it develops.
Tom Sather, director of professional services at Return Path, said the move is no cause for concern for marketers who use best practices and have active user files.
“They will get an extra bonus by having their e-mails prioritized more effectively if their subscribers are engaged,” he said, adding that brands should be able to improve the subscriber’s experience in the process.
Relevancy will be key for marketers to navigate the ISP changes, said Spencer Kollas, director of delivery services at StrongMail, an e-mail marketing firm.
“If you are not relevant, it won’t matter - you never will be. You’ll always be in that ‘everything else’ bucket,” he said. “It’s really about what consumers want – and if you’re not giving that to them now, it doesn’t really matter.”
A Microsoft spokesperson told DMNews that the company released a series of enhancements to Hotmail in May and will unveil more in coming weeks.
“There are going to be a lot of false positives. [Marketers] may have a knee-jerk reaction to a decrease in response of e-mail addresses,” said Melanie Attia, product marketing manager for Campaigner, an e-mail marketing service provider. “I would try to address those more on an ad hoc basis, especially if he or she is an existing customer and you know he has been reading your e-mails.”
Attia added that marketers could even point out to customers, in a subject line, that they are no longer reading messages.
Dennis Dayman, chief privacy and deliverability officer at Eloqua, a marketing automation and demand generation firm, said marketers have had a tendency to use “batch and blast” while not focusing on relationships with consumers. The changes made by the ISPs, he said, may force marketers to monitor these more closely.
“If you can watch their digital body language and monitor their behavior, you can [begin to better] target messages,” he said.
Haseltine added that the changes to Gmail will force his organization to be more creative – “not too predictable” – in its promotional e-mails.
“We’ll look to mix it up and not have similar subject lines when we send them out,” he said.
The ISP changes will also force brands to try new strategies to see what works, said David Daniels, CEO of The Relevancy Group, an e-mail and digital marketing consulting group.
“The notion of direct marketing — digital, measureable direct marketing — is built on the notion of testing and failure, which if embraced drives optimization,” he said.
Source: DMNews
