by Tom Shackleton

While Halloween may be fast approaching, it’s a holiday that’s often overlooked in eCommerce. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday looming over the horizon and Christmas planning in full swing, it’s easy to forget about Halloween.

While Halloween may be fast approaching, it’s a holiday that’s often overlooked in eCommerce. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday looming over the horizon and Christmas planning in full swing, it’s easy to forget about Halloween.

But a well thought out Halloween marketing campaign can make for a great start to what’s the busiest period of any retailer’s year.

Here are five scarily good Halloween eCommerce marketing tips to get your holiday season started with a bang.

Plan out the Halloween Period

Firstly, you’ll want to plan out the whole period of the campaign. Unlike Black Friday for example, the actual day of Halloween falls on a different day each year.

This means you’ll have to plan carefully in order to identify which days are likely to be your busiest, and how you want to structure your campaign.

Large order volumes are great, but unexpected spikes will put strain on your customer support and inventory management systems.

Say for example that Halloween falls on a Tuesday, you may want to earmark the weekend before as potentially your busiest time for Halloween sales. Focusing your promotion, discounts and advertising on these days will probably prove the most fruitful.

Planning carefully will help you to better target and engage customer around Halloween.

Create Standout Content

In the run up to Halloween itself, social channels, inboxes and ad space will be packed full of Halloween marketing. If you’re to make a mark with your Halloween campaign, you’ll need to stand out.

Take this example from Happy Socks. They created characterful and engaging images for their Halloween campaign last year.

Happy Socks Halloween

This goes to show just how powerful well crafted content can be. If you have the budget to put behind Halloween imagery and content, having some produced will make a big difference over standard product shots.

To go a step further, put together a user generated content campaign and have customers provide you with the imagery themselves.

Add Character

Halloween is far from a serious event, and establishing the right tone of voice for your brand without going overboard should be an important aspect of your campaign.

Expect to see a stream of content from other brands filled with cheesy Halloween puns and jokes.

The last thing you want is to come across as just taking advantage of the holiday to sell more of your products. Add real character to your messaging and avoid the obvious tropes.

Your customers will reward you for unique and well thought through content and messaging that’s actually engaging. If you get the balance right, Halloween can be a fantastic opportunity for even the most serious brands to loosen up and engage with their communities.

Make the Most of Your Email Lists

Unlike Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas promotions, your customers may not be out looking for Halloween discounts and offers.

This means you need to take the opportunity to reach out to customers. Make full use of your existing email lists to let customers know about any promotions you’re intending to run.

This makes for another great opportunity to add character to your messaging too. Just take this example from fashion accessories brand Accessorize.

Accessorize Halloween

Halloween is the perfect time to reach out to your email lists in an engaging way.

Segment your lists and target them with appropriate messaging. For example, using Halloween could be a great way of re-engaging with lapsed customers, offering them a unique discount or offer, to turn them back into active shoppers.

Think about the Wider Picture

Finally, it’s important to think about the wider picture when putting together your Halloween eCommerce marketing campaign.

As we mentioned above, this is the start of your busiest time of year, and you should be considering how you will use any traction from Halloween to help throughout the holiday period.

Use Halloween as a chance to gather email addresses, attract new customers and begin to build momentum for your brand.

Any email signups or customers can be targeted for Black Friday / Cyber Monday marketing. Plan out how you will re-engage with Halloween customers over the next few months. You could put together automated email flows to contact them with Black Friday and Christmas offers for example.

If you treat Halloween as the start of your best period of the year, you’ll get much more from it and move into November with more momentum.

Your Next Steps…

Although it’s easy to overlook Halloween as an eCommerce marketing opportunity, taking note of some of these tips can help you make the most of it.

Planning ahead, being original and thinking of Halloween as a part of your wider strategy can make it a hugely successful event for your store.

To get the most from Halloween, your next steps should be to:

  • Put together your Halloween promotional plan.
  • Invest in unique and characterful content.
  • Segment and target your email lists.
  • Add Halloween into your wider Christmas planning.

If you’d like to find out more about how Statement can help your eCommerce business with Halloween marketing, feel free to get in touch with our team.

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