It's that time of the year again! Summer has seen its last days and, as we enter October, we're well on our way to the start of the major holiday season. As marketers, you will likely already be thinking about how to build the perfect email newsletters this Halloween - here are five tips to help you along the way to ghoulishly good email campaigns...

Spooky subject lines

We always stress the importance of a good subject line and Halloween is no exception. Halloweenify your customers' inboxes by putting together a clever subject line. This will make your email stand out from the rest and should drastically improve your open rates. Here are some quick tips:

• Use emojis: There are plenty of Halloween themed emojis around. Use them in your subject lines to add a splash of color and fun to your readers' inboxes. ??‍♂️???‍♀️?‍♀️
• Be punny: Everyone loves a good (or bad) Halloween pun! The aim here is to attract the attention of your readers.
• Provide an incentive to open: When it comes to email marketing, it can get competitive at this time of the year. Make sure your subject line is able to explain why the reader should open your email over all the others they're receiving. This could be a sale, special offer, or exciting news...

ASOS get pulses racing with the use of an emoji and a special Halloween offer directly in their subject line.

Experiment with color

With costumes and candies galore, Halloween can also be a super colorful event. Reflect this in your email campaigns by opting for a bold and daring design. After all, this is the time of the year where you can afford to go a little crazy and experiment with new design techniques.

Hawke & Co. turn heads with this bold and colorful Halloween email campaign.

In Mail Designer 365, there are so many ways to incorporate color into your design. To quickly and easily add a splash of color to your email, try out a Duotone Filter (Business Premium) With just one click, you can transform any image into a unique and colorful masterpiece. For this time of the year, reds and oranges are particularly effective, but the more creative the better!

Blend Modes (Business Premium) also provide you with a unique way to create striking feature images by combining graphic elements for incredible effects:

We created this spooky Halloween kitty using Blend Modes to blend two separate images together.

Use Unsplash to find powerful images

We all know the power a good image can have in any design. Often, it's the first thing which will draw your reader in once they've opened your email. Halloween is unique in the sense that you can really get creative with images... The crazier the better!

To help you on your search, try checking out Unsplash integration in Mail Designer 365, where we've collated some hair-raisingly good images for you! If our choices aren't quite what you're looking for, use the search tool to search the entire Unsplash library for the perfect license-free image for your email.

Trick or Treat?

Halloween is a super fun holiday for kids and adults alike. Playing on this sense of fun and mystery is a great tactic for your email marketing campaigns.

The well known trick or treat slogan is a popular method used by many brands to get more traffic on their website from customers excited to get involved in the fun. This example from Whistlefish is a fun way of getting customers to click through to their website and offers a huge incentive to buy by  offering a mystery discount. We also love the cute pumpkin illustrations!

Create a sense of urgency

One effective way of sparking your readers' interests is by using a sense of urgency in your email.

Particularly at Halloween, people are prone to leaving costume and party-supply shopping to the last minute. If you sell any of these items, let customers know you have some tantalising offers for them and they'll be much more likely to click through to your landing page - especially if you put a clear time limit.

This fun and seasonal design by Land's End effectively promotes their Halloween sale and creates a sense of urgency to give customers that final push to get shopping.

Those were our five top tips on how you can build spellbinding email designs this Halloween. You can try out all of these techniques in Mail Designer 365 and build the perfect email campaign (with no black magic required!)