Nicola Faulkner — October 28, 2016 
Halloween is fast approaching and is a prime email campaign opportunity for the travel, leisure and retail industries. Here we focus on promoting local deals and pushing those last minute sales leading up to Halloween.
Targeting by Location
If you’re promoting local Halloween events make sure you get your definition of local right – is this by postcode, region or county? We’ve all received offers from popular ecommerce websites, but how many of them are truly local to you?
Segment your customers accordingly around your events. We previously talked about using location data to target customers in the restaurant industry, which is particularly useful for this topic. The danger with using regions is that someone could be on the outskirts and over an hour away, which to them isn’t exactly local. Instead, it’s far better to look at the radius around your event and target by postcode.
For online retailers you can go as far and wide as you want to with delivery to your customers. Don’t forget to push people offline as well. Tell customers where their nearest store is in every email campaign. If you don’t have the ability to merge this into the email, perhaps because you don’t know where the customer is based, at least display a store locator option to give them the option of searching.
Remind, Remind, Remind
Sending an email campaign for a second or third time will usually generate a lot more interest and revenue than sending it only the once. Remember, people are busy and may not have checked their emails on the day you first sent it. This easy tactic is often overlooked, and if your emails are relevant it’s ok to increase the frequency.
Your reminder emails should start now with only a week to go until Halloween, especially if you’re selling products. There will be lots of people panicking that they haven’t had time to shop for a costume and decorations. For those pushing last minute deals on Halloween events, there’s no reason why you can’t ramp up emails from Thursday through to Monday 31st October.
Clear That Stock
How many Halloween products do you see discounted after the event, and how many of these sit in the warehouse until the following year? Give your subscribers a reason to buy from you, whether it be a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ or ‘Free Delivery’ promotion pushed via email that allows you to shift stock. If you don’t sell the products leading up to the event it’s lost profit, so try enticing your customers rather than leaving stock unsold.
Same goes for Halloween events, if you haven’t sold all tickets by 30th October how about running an email campaign promoting last minute deals to all those subscribers in the local area?
Cross Sell and Up Sell
Have you already got a bunch of people coming to your Halloween event? Come up with some promotions for these customers and fire them out via email over the weekend to drive revenue on the day. It’s can be easier to increase sales through those who are already bought into the event rather than targeting new customers.
For retailers, try pushing a promotion at the basket stage to clear stock and increase revenue. Make sure the product is useful and low value too as many people are likely to add to their order just in case they do need it.
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