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Fall and winter are a time of year that brands look forward to and plan for throughout the rest of the year; so it can seem strange that a specific holiday in the busiest time of the year for buying gives the best email marketing results when your efforts are last minute. After all: Amazon plans for its next Prime Day practically the day after Prime Day, and brands often begin planning for Black Friday in July or August. Site Impact’s experts have crunched the numbers, and when it comes to Halloween, the winning campaigns are the ones that land at the last minute. But why?
Between the finicky weather in late October and the nature of Halloween as a holiday of fun, candy, and parties, very little about the big day of spook is set in stone. While of course Halloween events for kids tend to be planned weeks in advance, and parties require a good bit of legwork to really carry off, people tend to decide on central elements of their Halloween celebration the week of the holiday--if not the day before or even day of. What might have been forecast as a mild, sunny day with a chilly-but-dry evening can turn out to be rainy, or in some parts of the country snowy; so eleventh hour changes of plans (from costumes to venues to entire events) are the norm. For brands and marketers, what this means is that you need to be there for when a last minute snafu causes a change in plans--and make sure your prospects know that you’re there and ready for them.
Everyone has had the moment when they realized that something they’d been thinking of as “weeks from now” is suddenly “this week” or worse: “Today.” Even when Halloween celebrations or plans don’t get derailed by freak weather or other contretemps, people often tend to put off their planning because it seems like so many other things are going on. To make yourself your customers’ hero, as a brand your job is to reward that procrastination. Sending out offers the week of Halloween, complete with to-the-minute relevant content, will make your brand the ace in the hole. A great example of this is the “David Pumpkins” SNL sketch of a few years ago: it went viral on October 28th, three days before Halloween, and costume shops were absolutely besieged with people looking for the costume. Those that leaped into action to make it happen made a killing; those who weren’t ready for it lost out.
Unlike many of the holidays associated with the spending drive of autumn and winter, Halloween is for slackers, procrastinators, and people with last minute changes of plans. By recognizing this, and--ironically--planning your own email marketing efforts around the eleventh hour, you can reap the best benefits of frenzied buying by people who suddenly need a very particular item, instead of spending time and effort throughout the month reminding them you exist, only to have another brand become the hero with an offer the day before. Contact Site Impact to hear how we can help you plan for on-the-spot, last minute campaigns.
