Halloween marketing ideas to engage your audience and make the most of the season.
Hey Hey Hey….It’s almost Halloween! This means that all of the skeletons, ghosts, wizards, and zombies will be out in force to have some fun, and so should your company— for some Halloween advertising.
It’s time for trick-or-treaters, Jack-O’-Lanterns, and candy bags to become a big deal. And, for eCommerce merchants, it’s the season to get both excited and scared because the year’s largest sales peak officially begins then.
To enhance your store’s sales on Halloween and the subsequent holidays, you’ll need some seriously outstanding Halloween marketing ideas.
Boosting brand awareness doesn’t have to be “witchy” thinking this year.
Let’s start from the START!
Spooky Marketing Content Ahead…
- The Origin of Halloween Celebrations…
- Halloween Marketing Ideas To Boost Sales
- Halloween’s Celebration for All!
- Let the Celebration Sales Begin with Spooky Halloween Marketing Ideas!
(Jump to the section that interests you the most!)
The Origin of Halloween Celebrations…
Halloween, also known as Allhalloween, All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve, is celebrated every year on the 31st of October by many people all over the world with the festivities being most popular in the United States and Canada.
The modern day Halloween is cheered with relatively recent developments but the ancient tradition can be traced back to the ancient CELTIC FESTIVAL of SAMHAIN when Halloween first got knelt.
Halloween is one of the world’s oldest rituals as it touches on a fundamental aspect of human life: the link between the living and the dead.
Sales & Halloween Marketing Numbers Over The Years…
According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween marketing reached a record number of $12.2 billion in 2023
I hope the above stats should be very convincing for you to start planning your very own Halloween marketing ideas, and jumpstart your business this festive season. Plus. to support your planning, we have compiled a list of the best Halloween marketing ideas to make the work easy for you.
The festive season is a win-win situation for both the customers and the merchants, and if a merchant is not making the most of it, he may miss out on A LOT of profits and revenues.
Let’s start with the scary marketing ideas for Halloween…
Your Guide For A Perfect Holiday Social Media Plan
Halloween Marketing Ideas To Boost Sales
According to a recent poll by The National Retail Foundation, 74 percent of Millennial women and young parents believe that Halloween is more significant this year than ever before.
What exactly does this imply for the merchants?
Halloween is approaching quickly, and you still have a lot of work to do if you want to increase your online sales. Do not be alarmed. We’re here to assist you raise your sales with some spooky Halloween sale ideas for Halloween marketing.
1. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Active research and surveys show the growing preference for mobile devices by shoppers to search and purchase the needed items from anywhere anytime. Online shoppers are more attached towards mobile devices rather than working on desktops.
Want in-depth information on “How To Drive Sales To Your eCommerce Store?
Since purchases through smartphones are increasing exponentially, you cannot take a risk with your mobile-unfriendly website.
To escape the situation, you must design a mobile-responsive website or you may optimize your existing website to be mobile-responsive. This will smoothen your customer’s buying journey with the ease of their usage of digital gadgets. Just a single touch and your customer can deal up their purchase from your store.
Halloween Marketing Tips Just For You:
- Make your Halloween web pages responsive by designing and organizing them.
- Try using only your thumb to navigate your mobile site.
- For optimum engagement, put your most important material in the middle of the screen.
- Pop-ups and stickers for Halloween are a good idea.
- Don’t overlook the website’s loading time.
2. Upgrade Your Stores with Spooktacular Halloween Decorations
Is it enough to spread the word about Halloween promotions on social media and emails? Oh! Come on… It’s Halloween! Don’t you want to make every effort to boost your Halloween Sales?
Well if your answer is yes, then you must gear up and start decorating your website and products. Lemme explain to you how decorating your website can help you grow your sales….
For instance, take a look at your favorite pizza-delivering website during the festive season, you must have noticed the website is all decorated with the festive theme.
Why?
Just to let the customers know about the prevailing offers and deals.
Well, the top-consumer psychology surveys show that people tend to buy 2x their needs if they’re in a good mood or more satisfied with the look and feel of the website.
Moreover, there are stores like Westlake Ace Hardware that broke all the boundaries of creativity and came up with the most creative Halloween marketing ideas for their hardware store.
The Westlake Ace Hardware came up with a campaign where they spread the news that they’ve been awarded a certification for the best “Zombie-friendly Business” as they have all the aids required in case a zombie apocalypse happens. Isn’t it another level of creativity for the hardware businesses (shockingly surprised)?
Halloween Marketing Guide Just For You:
- Get festive images designed with a call to action (CTA) buttons and sale stripes.
- Install themed add-ons like gift cards, points and rewards, win-wheel, upsells, and much more.
- Send out a festive email template, such as pumpkins and bats, laden email campaigns for the occasion.
- Create another spooky look for Halloween to engage your visitors.
3. Run an Urgent Discount Halloween Promotion
Witchcraft your online store Halloween sales with a sense of urgency and FOMO.
Online buyers are always one step ahead of the competition. They are extremely intelligent and intuitive. Before making a final purchase, it is natural for people to evaluate the greatest discounts on products across numerous platforms.
Creating FOMO is and will always be one of the best Halloween marketing strategies. Businesses can utilize this during all their festive season sales.
But, it is difficult to bind your customers to your offers. So, what are your options here?
To hook up your customers with your deals and offers, you’ll need to be very dynamic and upfront with various offers on different product sections. Offer deals that are only available to a specific group of customers, such as a lucky draw or extra-hour sales, and many more.
The marketing hacks also suggest applying upsell and cross-sell strategies on products with higher demand. These tactics are proven to increase sales during festive hours. As you get into the holiday mood, you can shoot better discounts to grab the nerve of the best sale for your store.
You still have time in hand. Push out awaited discount coupons that can be best used by your customers and escalate your store sale.
Halloween Treats just for you…Using flash deals with urging messages like:
- ‘Limited for Today only’
- ‘Discounts valid until Midnight’
- ‘Deals vanish in 1 hour’
- Timer over the Shop Page
- ‘1-hour ghost discounts’
4. Takeover Social Media Platforms
It’s a festivity and it cannot be plain and simple
While your Halloween marketing ideas are taking shape, you should first crack the festive discount offers over social media because social media platforms are heavily populated and are an easy way to trigger the psyche of consumers.
Not only for discounts, but they have also brought social media platforms to light to announce the launch of live events and eerily kinds of music along with fun activities.
Driving on from rolling out improvements to your online Halloween marketing is the need of the day. Because small businesses are also moving on to social platforms, and it has set up the stage for a themed battle among businesses for Halloween.
Halloween Tips For Social Media Campaigns:
- Organize a picture contest for Halloween costumes.
- Let your imagination go wild on social media platforms with Halloween puns.
- Choose a Halloween color scheme or theme and go with it.
- Make a creepy image every day and post it on social media.
Learn about the Holiday Marketing Campaign Ideas For Any eCommerce Business!
5. Scary Halloween Creatives
As already discussed, social media is a great opportunity to pitch in the Halloween sale to spread the message in real time. Please take heed and use these tactics to upscale sales this season of the grave.
- Prepare Facebook posts, Instagram stories, and/or tweets with engaging content and interesting and scary designs before the big day.
- Use intriguing hashtags such as #trickortreat, #Halloweendeals, #Halloweensales to increase the visibility of your posts. You may also create custom hashtags to uniquely viral your offers.
- Activate your inner creator and come up with videos that will shake your audience.
Every time you plan to create resources for your marketing upheavals remember that festivity brings the reasons for celebration, joy, and acknowledgments. That is why targeting the consumers’ emotional connection in the right direction will help you grow better with your targets.
Halloween Treats Just for You:
- Create a Halloween-themed video with on-brand colors and holiday-appropriate messaging for the flash sale.
- Post how-to topics that are relevant to your business.
- Create a video that summarizes all of the season’s highlights.
- Add some Halloween-ish look to your page, such as spider webs, pumpkins, or changing color schemes.
- It is advised to keep all the ad content and creatives for different social media promotions ready before October, to avoid last-minute delays.
Increase your Holiday sales this year with festive tips!
6. Announce Halloween Marketing Collaborations
Being an active member of this society, you should take heed in helping out the society which is revolving around you and your business as well. Look for events held by a local organization that are timed to coincide with a holiday sale.
Join them to find out what’s going on in the last week of October.
If nobody is planning, then you may suggest other special occasions on the theme of Halloween promotions and events. Being an investor or sponsor in local festive gatherings puts forward a strong vision you carry immensely growing your brand image and brand value as well.
For example, Mars, the candy makers collaborated with 20th Digital Studio and Disney Advertising Sales to launch their very own horror short film series – Bite-
Size Halloween series. Mars agreed to this collaboration hoping to reach the homebound audiences who scroll through a variety of contents sitting at home across all Disney platforms.
Halloween Marketing Tips Just for You:
- Organize a Trick-or-Treating contest or pumpkin-carving competition.
- Share Halloween-themed content created by others.
- Organize a Halloween Party.
7. Run a Halloween Email Marketing Campaign
You can never go wrong with Halloween email marketing. It always stands up to the saying “Old is gold”. The data shows that even today, 91% of existing customers prefer personalized emails and coupons to social media flyers.
It will fascinate you to know, email advertising is additionally 40 times more viable at obtaining new clients than Facebook or Twitter.
As you are in the phase of implementing your Halloween marketing ideas, customized Halloween emails are indispensable. Jotting down and designing new Halloween-themed email templates for new offers is a great approach to lure in customers. Halloween-customized themes will make your clients feel the same joy and excitement for the festive sale as you.
For example, consider the Halloween customized email template from the top-clothing brand Mango. This brand is popular for its elegance and classy clothes and they have maintained the same feel over their email template too.
Additionally, there are some crazy spooky templates available in the market for your email Halloween marketing campaign ideas. Just get the templates and fill in your content and you’re all set to go.
Following through the Halloween email marketing templates, here are some varied examples from various industries like –
-
- For the Food/Restaurant Industry
-
- For Costumes & Apparels Industry
- Freebies for Halloween
- Include product suggestions with a Halloween theme.
- FOMO (fear of missing out)
8. Season Your Google Ads with Spooky Spice
We are all aware of paid advertising campaigns and how they reap the potential benefits for the business if done right. And we are also aware of how these paid ads for Halloween can prove to be a bane if not planned well.
It’s the festivity hour planning and I won’t suggest you take any risk. Therefore, you must be ready with a deep search analysis on keywords and their trends before you plan to bid on keywords for your ads.
Also, lay great emphasis on your ad copy for the best possible reach. Your Google ads incorporate a major section of your Halloween marketing ideas draft that aims to skyrocket your online sale this Halloween.
SearchEngineWatch lists down the keywords that work for the Halloween marketing campaigns:
- Halloween marketing
- Halloween horror nights
- Frozen party
- Swirl candies
- Orange pumpkin
- Spooky house hour
- Candy promotional ideas
- Spooktacular marketing campaign
- Halloween sales puns
9. Halloween Pre Advertising
According to the National Retail Foundation, 40% of active buyers tend to buy things before the festivity hits the ground (and in this case Halloween). So, rack up the preparations for the Halloween discounts and deals for your customers to grasp in the early bird sales fever. It will most possibly make a BIG start for your holiday season sales.
Get ready with your scary promos, bulks of customized stock, store decoration, and more to handle the flooded sale you hope for.
Well, if you don’t wish to start a month before the Halloween offers, you can always move toward social media and email marketing campaigns to spread awareness of upcoming sales. Make sure you spread the word nicely so that your buyers could catch the deal and enjoy the outcome!
Go for Halloween blog messages, social media advertising, email commercialization, marketing campaign ideas, or your website to Halloween decorations, home-made supplies, host a Halloween costume photo contest,…Try and test out what works best for you!
10. Start Halloween Giveaways
The festive season is the season of giving. In this spirit, you can plan a spooky Halloween giveaway. Brands can post about this giveaway on their social media platform.
Now the catch here is that you must analyze which social media platform to choose, for this giveaway. You can do this by analyzing three major metrics,
- Target Audience
- Demographics
- Geographical Aspects (whether Halloween Giveaway is suitable for the location)
After analyzing all the aspects, it is also advised to start posting about the giveaway in the first week of October (we can connect this point to the “pre-planning” point). Why? So, that you as a brand are in a position to announce the winner on or before Halloween.
11. Create a Limited-Time Halloween-Themed Product Line
As Halloween approaches, many customers look for unique, festive products to celebrate the season. You can attract these customers by introducing a special Halloween-themed product line that’s only available for a short time. This could include items like spooky-themed clothing, Halloween decorations, or even limited-edition flavors of your products.
For example, A bakery could offer “Haunted Cupcakes” with ghost-shaped frosting or “Pumpkin Spice Cookies” for the Halloween season. As shown in the above image Paris Baguette launched their halloween themed bakery products. By promoting the limited availability of these products, you create a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to buy before they miss out.Halloween Marketing Tips Just For You:
- Design special packaging that highlights the Halloween theme.
- Promote these products as “limited-edition” to encourage quick purchases.
- Collaborate with influencers to showcase these exclusive products.
- Use Halloween-themed visuals in all marketing materials to create a cohesive campaign.
12. Launch a Halloween-Themed Interactive Game or Quiz
Gamification and quizzes are a fun way to engage your customers, and you can create one that’s Halloween-themed. For example, you could have a game where customers find hidden Halloween items on your website or a quiz that tells them what Halloween character they are. Participants could be rewarded with a discount code or entry into a giveaway.
For instance, An online store could create a quiz like “Which Halloween Character Are You?” or a spin-the-wheel game of trick and treat and offer a small discount to everyone who completes it. This not only drives engagement but also keeps customers on your site longer.
Halloween Gamification Tips Just For You:
- Make the game or quiz simple and fun to encourage participation.
- Offer a small reward to everyone who plays, such as a discount code.
- Share the game or quiz on social media to reach more customers.
- Consider making the game mobile-friendly so customers can play on the go.
13. Organize a Halloween Charity Drive
Combine the spirit of Halloween with a good cause by organizing a charity drive. For every purchase made during the Halloween season, donate a portion of the proceeds to a charity. This not only boosts sales but also builds goodwill and strengthens your brand’s reputation.
For example, A store could donate $1 to a local food bank for every order placed during October. This encourages customers to shop while also supporting a good cause.
Halloween Marketing Tips Just For You:
- Choose a charity that aligns with your brand’s values.
- Promote the charity drive heavily through all marketing channels.
- Share updates on how much has been raised to keep customers engaged.
- Consider offering a small reward, like a discount or a special gift, to customers who participate.
Halloween’s Celebration for All!
Gone are the days when we only used to decorate our homes with lighted pumpkins, candles, and much more. Children from different age groups come to collect candy and toffees from home.
Today, even businesses are deeply involved in the Halloween Marketing ideas brainstorming sessions to dig in the best deals suiting the festivity while there are parties, get-togethers, and picnic celebrations planned to chuck off the darkness of the event.
Large parties take place with participants wearing frightening costumes which are making excellent news for niche business upliftments.
Well, I’m not talking about young adults having fun… but the National Retail Federation claims much more than that.
It says that starting up with the Halloween sale ideas, it goes up to the Halloween celebration which is planned by 18-25 years of age folks. 25-35 years of age people and 36-45 old people also plan to celebrate hard on this spooky occasion.
Let the Halloween Sales Begin with Spooky Halloween Marketing Ideas!
This will be a known fact that every human on this earth loves to celebrate the occasion with their family and friends. But keeping this same essence intact with the store festive sale is a slightly difficult thing. Don’t make your online business suffer anyhow.
Check All the Current Offers & Miss Out Nothing!
Check All the Current Offers & Miss Out Nothing!
Make this year’s Halloween sale the scariest discount ever and décor your Halloween online stores with something fishy yet interesting.
Do let us know in the comment section your thoughts or any doubts related to the same.
Having read this I believed it was extremely informative.
I’m glad you liked it. Keep Reading :)
A very well written article, easy to understand and I am sure I can definitely implement it.
Thanks for your kind words and I’m glad that you liked it and are willing to implement the above-mentioned tips for your business. In case, you need any help, you can always ping back to us. Will be happy to help! :)