Mon 9/28 | Ed 424 | Please don't send another pumpkin email

⚡ The retention skills that get you hired, in a certification you can put on your LinkedIn by the weekend. → Get certified

Nobody has ever bought a mattress because of a pumpkin.

Somebody at Purple still got handed “do something for Halloween” with no new product and no costume budget, same as you, and what they sent is genuinely good.

So we pulled 5 brands who solved that brief with the catalog they already had, a razor company and a cat litter company among them, and lifted the exact move behind each one. 👇

Also inside:
→ The 4 signup forms worth building before November
→ The layer your ESP was never built to handle
→ The certification you can finish this week

October traffic is the cheapest list growth you’ll get all year, and most of it leaves without giving you anything.

Omnisend’s forms are built for the 6 weeks you’re in right now, and there’s more than 1 kind for a reason:

• Teasers sit quietly in the corner and let people opt into the popup instead of fighting it

• Flyouts slide in from the side without taking over the page somebody is actually reading

• Multi-step forms collect the email first and the phone number second, which is how you build an SMS list without scaring anybody off

• Wheel of Fortune turns the signup into a game, which works embarrassingly well on a seasonal offer

You can target by URL, device, location or behavior, trigger on exit intent or scroll depth, and every form is mobile-optimized with TCPA and GDPR consent built in, so the list you build in October is one you can actually send to in November. 1 brand put an hour into their capture setup and saw newsletter signups climb 150% in 4 weeks.

→ Build the form your Black Friday list depends on

Somewhere this week a marketer is being asked for a Halloween email, and the brand sells mattresses, or razors, or cat litter, and there’s nothing new launching, and no budget for a costume shoot.

Good news, the best October emails aren’t about having a spooky product, they’re about noticing what people are already doing that week and standing next to it. Here are 5 brands doing exactly that, and the move to steal from each one.

1. Rael: make your product part of the night, not the theme

Rael sells period care and skincare, which has nothing to do with Halloween, so they went after the thing that actually happens on the 31st, heavy makeup, glitter and adhesives on your face for 6 hours.

The email is a 3-step routine, cleanser, toner pads, barrier cream, with a short reason for each one, and then a genuinely smart closer about their period care collection in case the timing goes sideways on the night. No costume, no pumpkins in the product shots, just their existing catalog answered against a real problem.

• Steal this: write down what your customer is physically doing on Halloween, then ask which product in your catalog helps with it.

2. Dollar Shave Club: a pun and a palette is a whole campaign

No new product, no discount beyond the usual free shipping, just the same razor handles they sell every day, photographed rising out of a jack-o-lantern with bats in the background and the line “No tricks, only shaving treats”.

The body copy does the heavy lifting, it points out that it’s not socially acceptable for adults to go door to door asking for candy, so treat yourself to a $7 handle instead. That’s the whole idea, and it took a designer an afternoon.

• Steal this: a seasonal color palette and 1 good pun turn a catalog product into a campaign, and nobody needs a new SKU.

3. Purple: find the thing in your catalog that can play the candy

Purple sells mattresses, which is not a trick-or-treat item, so they reached for a small accessory and repositioned it: a 30-pack of squishies as the thing you hand out instead of candy. Then, in the same email, a straight Fall Sale block for the people who came for a mattress.

That second block matters, because the seasonal idea gets attention and the sale block pays for the send.7

• Steal this: look for the low-priced item in your catalog that can be given away, handed out or stuffed in a bag, and let the rest of the email do the real selling.

4. PrettyLitter: a seasonal wrapper on an ordinary offer

Cat litter, 20% off and a free toy, which is roughly the offer they could run any month of the year. What makes it a Halloween email is the orange and black, the bats, “Boo-tiful”, “Fang-tastic”, and a line telling you the discount appears in your cart on its own when you click.

That last part is the actual lesson. The seasonal costume gets the open, and removing the code from the equation gets the order.

• Steal this: if your offer is the same as always, spend your effort on the wrapper and on making the discount effortless to redeem.

5. Pipcorn: build the night, not the bundle

Pipcorn sells snacks, so they attached themselves to what people do on Halloween weekend, which is sit on a couch and watch something scary. The email pairs 5 horror classics with a specific product, Halloween with the mini popcorn, Hocus Pocus with cheese balls, and so on, and underneath it sits a tiered bundle, $4 off a 4-pack, $8 off 8, $12 off 12.

It’s content and an offer in 1 email, and the tiers quietly move the average order up without anybody feeling upsold.

• Steal this: pair your products to an activity your customer already has planned, then put a small bundle ladder underneath it.

The version you can build this week

If you only have time for 1 send, pick the move your catalog already supports and keep it to a single idea, because a seasonal email that tries to do 3 things at once does none of them.

• Pick the angle first: the activity, the pun, the giveaway item, the wrapper, or the pairing

• Use what you already sell, because a new product isn’t what makes October work

• Put the offer in the first screen, since a seasonal email that buries the button is just a greeting card

• Send it before the 30th, because the 31st is a Saturday and most of your list is out of the house

Nobody’s inbox needs another pumpkin, but a well-timed email that fits what somebody is already doing that week gets opened, and that’s the entire trick.

Your ESP handles the sending, the flows, the deliverability. But deciding which version of an email each subscriber should actually get? That’s been on you, one manual campaign at a time.

Paid media solved this years ago: the platform sends, the algorithm on top matches the right creative to each person. Email never got that second layer.

That’s Allan. It sits on top of the ESP you already use, no migration, and becomes the intelligence layer your stack is missing, building the best version for every subscriber and learning with every send.

The one job your ESP never did is the one that decides how much each send makes. Allan finally does it.

→ Try for free at getallan.com

*Sponsored

Annnnd that’s a wrap for this edition!

Thanks for hanging with us today. If this gave you an idea for your next send, share ecomemailmarketer.com with your favorite DTC marketer.

Remember: Do shit you love.

🤘 Jimmy Kim & Chase Dimond

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