Halloween awards: get inspired by the 6 best campaigns!

Email and Halloween have great combo potential. We all know about email’s resourcefulness, however, many companies are still wary about opportunities presented by the festival of the dead.

Although Halloween turnover cannot be compared to more key events like Christmas, its spending volume increases year after year and represents an autumn peak.

Halloween is clearly an opportunity to be seized by Email Marketing, which has become ripe for creative competition.

Our inbox has been receiving little email gems of creativity for quite some years. These are alternated with more conventional ones that play with pumpkins, cemeteries, zombies, and full moons.

Here, we wanted to gather the best examples of Halloween campaigns and award them with a medal for each category. These correspond to different email elements and sections, such as graphics, the subject line, a call to action, and more. What’s the goal? Halloween is just around the corner. We want to infuse inspiring ideas of creativity and composition into your campaigns.

Let’s start by customizing an unlikely alignment: Halloween and the call to action. How can this be done with zombies and witches? It’s been done, and with a creative twist to boot. The Noun Project wins hands down by embedding a simple yet effective BOO! within the email.

Playing with a call to action is nothing new. So many brands do it to go beyond this simple push and trigger a whimsical dynamic with the recipient.

A command (click here) is worlds apart from a dash of irony (BOO!). The latter involves a radically different and much more effective relationship between the brand and its customer.

Email embedded animation offers a truly unique feature. Animated campaigns surpass any other static creativity due to their effectiveness and visual impact.

Like other occasions throughout the year, Halloween is the right time to try out a new, more engaging email approach. The results can be good, not so good, or extraordinary, like the following:

This GIF is by Tattly, whose last Halloween campaign was appreciated because of several aspects. These included not only the GIF but also the overall color combination (pastels that resemble children’s drawings), image choice, and the Halloween-inspired copy. Here’s the email:

Why on earth is there a stock photo prize? It exists because knowing how to make do with what you have is of great value.

You’re up to your eyeballs in work but need to design a Halloween email without a lot of time. What do you do? You would definitely tap into one of the many free stock image databases. Well, choosing isn’t so easy.

In our opinion, Peet’s Coffee deserves thestock photo medal. This humble yet significant prize quite possibly works forthe vast majority of companies:

Peet’s goes for a pretty standard Halloween theme—the pumpkin. However, it does so through a realistic image that evokes a movie and fits perfectly with the products’ images and copy. The whole scene evokes the warmth and comfort of coffee and cookies as sweet remedies against the cold and any ghosts. This free photo was most likely grabbed in a few seconds. Regardless, it does the job and enhances the message.

Tip: when you need a free email image, remember that MailUp’s embedded BEE editor features a search tool for finding free photos in just a few clicks. BEE sources them from Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. You can even customize them according to your needs.

Buru Buru is a decor e-commerce that makes use of another well-known Halloween theme: The Addams Family. Morticia appears as the influencer who selects a range of special offers for her own audience.

Everything is in tune with the Addams’ macabre aesthetic and its black, gray, and purple palette.

This is a great campaign. Yet we wanted to reward it for its subject line, which reads as follows:

The subject line emits a playful irony in the inbox even before the recipient opens the email. This email’s costume is tight right from the start, reinforcing the campaign’s overall effectiveness.

What’s this all about? This Email Design trend is gaining popularity. As we wrote in this recent post, illustrations and computer graphics capture attention, compelling the observer to linger as if in front of a painting. We now notice that realistic, photographic images increasingly tend to complement illustrations.

There’s so much potential in this mix, so we decided to make it a category for our very prestigious awards. Here’s the email that won the images-graphics-Halloween triangulation medal:

We like it because:

• It has a clean, single-column, and modular design
• Its copy is simple, clear, concise, and distributed over several reading levels
• The call to action is bulletproof and its color enhances both the image and the background
• The HTML background matches the image perfectly
• Finally, its image overlaps with graphics and photography while giving subtle hints and irony that hinge on spookiness

Let’s conclude by awarding not just one email feature but an entire campaign based on its concept, goal, and realization.

The award goes to Yoox for its email that creates an actual online event linked to Halloween night. This drip campaign is activated a week before October 31 to communicate a series of special discounts. What graphics trick did it use? A red carpet that touches upon both a sense of exclusivity and premeditated crime. It embodies a threshold of apprehension and glamour.

Halloween is undoubtedly an excellent opportunity to cultivate a relationship with your recipients by launching fun themes full of creative, light-hearted ideas.

We close with a practical suggestion: if you have yet to try our BEE editor, then request a MailUp platform trial and explore the powerful simplicity of this email Design tool. Halloween is a great opportunity to test it out.