Your competitor already sent theirs. Here’s what was in it.

Nobody opens an email because there’s a pumpkin in it.

Halloween is Saturday the 31st. Most of what goes out this week will be a pun with a discount stapled underneath, and most of it will do nothing.

We pulled four Halloween sends that worked, and the difference isn’t the puns. It’s how much work the holiday is actually doing. In one of them it’s doing almost nothing, and that one might be the smartest of the four. 👇

13 things worth stealing from these four Halloween emails

Halloween is Saturday the 31st, so anything you send has to be built this week. The four emails below all landed, and they used the holiday four completely different ways. Here they are in order of how hard Halloween is working, with 13 specific things you can lift.

On timing: party and costume shopping peaks Tuesday through Thursday, and the day-of traffic is almost entirely mobile and almost entirely morning. If you only get one send, make it Wednesday or Thursday. If you get two, the second one goes out Saturday before 10am and it is short.

1. PrettyLitter: Halloween as wrapping paper

Every surface is in costume. Boo-tiful, Fang-tastic, Paw-sitively frightening, bats across the hero, a pumpkin holding the discount badge. The puns aren’t what’s working, though. The free bat toy is.

1. Attach a physical object to the offer, and name it. The copy calls the toy Robert Battinson. That’s the line people screenshot, and it only exists because there’s a real thing in the box. A pun ends in the inbox. An object shows up at the door a week later and gets posted.

2. Auto-apply the code and say so.Discount will magically appear in your cart when you click the button. They deleted the code-entry step and themed the deletion. Copy the mechanic even if you skip the pun, because manual codes are where mobile carts die.

3. Put the proof bar between the first CTA and the body copy. 45,000+ reviews, one line, full width. It catches everyone who scrolled past the button without clicking and gives them a reason to keep going.

4. Repeat the button after the proof, same words. Two CTAs, identical copy. Don’t get creative with the second one. The reader who is ready now should not have to re-read anything.

2. Blu Dot: Halloween as an excuse

One joke. A leather chair lit like a jack-o-lantern, and a Mwahahahaha that runs off the right edge of the email instead of sitting politely centered. Then it stops. One line connects the joke to the message and the rest is the annual sale, extended.

5. Use the holiday as a reason to resend an offer you’re already running. An extension by itself isn’t news. An extension with a joke on top is an email. Send it to everyone who didn’t open or didn’t click the first one.

6. Let one element break the grid. Text running off the edge reads as a human decision in a feed of centered templates. One broken rule per email, at the top, where the preview pane shows it.

7. Stop theming below the fold. Joke, one bridging line, then the normal sale module with the discount, the deadline and the button. Nobody needs a spooky footer.

8. Put the end date in the same line as the discount. 20% off and the deadline sit side by side at the same size, so the offer and the urgency are one piece of information instead of two.

3. Liquid Death: the product is the costume

No discount anywhere in this email. The offer is a free cardboard mask printed on the case, and the first line does the whole job: the most terrifying Halloween mask of the year is also 100% recyclable.

9. Check whether you already sell a costume, a party supply or a decoration. If you do, sell it as that for one week and skip the discount entirely. Packaging, scent, color, shape and size all count. This is the cheapest Halloween campaign there is because the product does the work.

10. Weld two buying reasons into one sentence.Stock up for your party AND win the costume contest in just one click. The host and the procrastinator both see themselves in it, so one email covers two segments.

11. Go plain when the product is the spectacle. White background, left-aligned paragraphs, two photos, one button. Nothing about the design is festive. Theming the template here would have competed with the thing being sold.

4. SIMPLER Hair Color: the theme carries an argument

Scary ingredients? Not on our watch. Then: meet the hair dye monsters. PPD the hair dye demon, ammonia the hazard, and the toxic five, each one a card with a villain name and a plain line about what it does to you. Strip the graveyard art off and it’s an ingredients objection email, the kind nobody reads in March.

12. Build the villain list. Name the three worst things in your category, give each one a character name, and write one plain sentence about what it does. One card each, bold name, body underneath. This is a 45 minute email and it will outlive the holiday.

13. Footnote anything that sounds like a claim. They cited an actual study under the PPD card. That one line is the difference between an argument and fear-mongering, and it’s the part most brands skip.

Which of the four you can still build this week

9 retention roles that went live this week

Coffee, denim, pickleball, furniture, bridal, beauty, stationery and phone cases. Every one of them ships physical things to real addresses, and the list runs from specialist to director.

• → Director of Retention at Trade Coffee, New York, NY

• → Director, CRM & Lifecycle at ZAGG, Midvale, UT

• → Director, Loyalty & CRM at David’s Bridal, King of Prussia, PA

• → Senior CRM & Lifecycle Marketing Manager at La-Z-Boy, Monroe, MI

• → Retention Manager at IL MAKIAGE, New York, NY

• → Email Marketing Manager at JOOLA, North Bethesda, MD

• → Ecommerce & Email Marketing Manager at Criquet Shirts, Austin, TX

• → CRM Associate at True Religion, El Segundo, CA

• → Email Marketing Specialist at Plum Paper, Vista, CA