Make your Halloween newsletter a treat with these fangtastic tricks 🎃

I love all things spooky, you could say… it’s in my blood. 🧛‍♀️

I’m not alone—Halloween spending in 2025 is projected to hit $13.1 billion in the US alone. As far as marketing opportunities go, Halloween hits the jackpot!

If you’re thinking it’s all just a bunch of hocus pocus or your business isn’t spooky enough to get in on the action—think again. There are heaps of ways you can add a touch of Halloween spirit to your emails to boost sales, delight subscribers, and show your fun side!

By the end of this article, you’ll have ideas for Halloween subject lines, newsletter designs, sign-offs, and more with email examples to take your campaigns from boo to woo. 🎉

Read on… if you dare!

Subject lines can make or break your email marketing campaigns at any time of the year. Halloween is a time to get creative and have fun with your email subject lines to make them stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes. 

Think beyond a simple “trick or treat”. It’s quite possibly the punniest time of the year, so don’t be afraid to be a little candy-corny—that’s what Halloween is all about!

We asked the MailerLite AI subject line generator for some haunting subject line ideas and this is what we got back:

All you need to do is include your personal campaign goals in the prompt, tweak until perfection and voila! You'll have a clever Halloween subject line generated in seconds.

For some more fun and inspiration, we’ve created a list of industry-specific subject lines you could use to get the Halloween party started:

Once you’ve zeroed in on your subject lines don’t forget to check how they stack up against best practices with our free email subject line tester. 

Your “from” name is usually your own name or your company’s name: it tells your subscribers who an email is from. Believe it or not, your “from” name influences your open rates just as much as your subject line and you can easily update it to make it Halloween-themed. Just remember not to change it too much; you still want your subscribers to recognize that the email is from you. 

One idea to spook-up your “from” name is by adding a Halloween-themed word that starts with the same letter as your name. For example, “Eerie” Erin, “Arcane” Amy, “Dreadful” Duncan. 

Just don’t make the name too long or it’ll get cut off in your subscribers’ inboxes. Thankfully, MailerLite gives you a preview of your “from” and subject line before you send out your campaigns. 

We recommend always showing your personality and being human in your emails. Holidays, Halloween especially, offer the perfect opportunity to let loose and use your wit and humor to bring life to your emails. After all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. 🪓

• Use wordplay alternatives: Get creative with adjectives like "eerie-sistable" and "fangtastic". These clever twists make your copy memorable with Halloween fun.

• Leverage pop culture references: Weave in famous quotes and references from horror movies, books, and TV shows. For example, a travel brand could say, "This Halloween, we're taking a trip to Transylvania. Would you dare?"

• Embrace puns: Give your subscribers "pumpkin to talk about"! Puns like "Eat, drink, and be scary" or "Witchful thinking" are easy to use and can be highly effective at catching attention. The possibilities are endless!

• Tell a spooky story: Frame your product or service as a solution to a "scary story." For example, a tech company could write a subject line like, "SCARY STORY: Your data is unprotected 😱" and then offer their security software as the solution.

• Create a sense of urgency: Use Halloween-themed language to create a sense of urgency without being too pushy. Phrases like "Don't be haunted by FOMO" or "Our deals are about to vanish... poof!" are playful ways to encourage a quick response.

Want to see how other brands have skele-fun with their copy? Check out these two examples:

Lumosity makes a joke about zombies to promote an offer for their brain training game.

And Deliveroo has a lot of Halloween fun with wordplay and puns in their Halloween Krispy Kreme promo email. We particularly love the alliteration and pun combo on Shake N Skremes 🤌. 

Do you usually use the same sign-off for your emails? Now’s the time to switch it up! It’s the one night a year that you get to be someone else, so have fun with your Halloween newsletters too!

Here are some quick ideas for your sign-off:

• Stay spooky

• Happy Halloween!

• Have a haunting Halloween!

• Wretched/repulsive/revolting regards

• Keep it gory

• Keep it scary

• Beastly wishes

• Creep it real

Lumosity is a great example that your product or service doesn’t need to be scary, gruesome, or Halloween-related to get in on the fun. 

On the other hand, fans of your business with a soft spot for spookiness will appreciate specific offers and content created, or curated, specifically for the holiday. 

Retail/e-commerce

Curate a collection of Halloween products (or those that fit the theme), and maybe even throw in a special offer! 

If you sell decorative items, you could feature a "Haunted House" or "Spooky Office" product bundle. Instead of just a sale on individual items, create a curated kit with everything a customer needs to decorate a space. This could include items like eerie candles, cobweb string lights, or themed mugs.

You can showcase these bundles using MailerLite's Product block, which automatically pulls product images, descriptions, and links directly from your e-commerce store, making it quick and easy to set up your spooky shop.

Cooking/food

At the foundation of any good Halloween, you’ll find costumes, candy, scary movies and… a good ol’ Halloween party! And what party is complete without an incredible selection of party food? Put together a few of your favorite, fun Halloween recipes to share with your email list. You can also ask them to share their own creations with you to drive up engagement.

You could also host a "Mystery Ingredient Challenge" where you provide a list of common fall ingredients and challenge your subscribers to create a Halloween-themed dish using them. This can help you collect user-generated content and build a sense of community.

Drive engagement by asking subscribers to reply to the email with photos and their recipes. You can then feature the best entries in a future email, making them feel like part of the community.

Travel

Sure, beautiful beaches and scenic mountain landscapes are great. But what about the creepier local haunts? Share the darker (still fun!) side of travel with a list of your top creepy places and events to visit around the world—think Dark Tourist for inspiration. 

You could get more imaginative and create a "Spook-tacular Staycation" guide. For those who can't travel far, put together a list of haunted hotels, ghost tours, or spooky historical sites in their local area. 

Use Dynamic Content Blocks to tailor the recommendations based on your subscribers' location data, ensuring they see relevant haunted spots and local attractions.

With MailerLite's editor, you can easily turn any content block—like images, text, or CTAs—into dynamic content and choose who sees it.

Learn how to set it up here:

Movies/books

Share a list of your all-time favorite horror/Halloween movies, latest book releases, movie reviews, scariest horror reads, most celebrated horror directors/authors, and so on. If you’re a horror author or filmmaker, some unique content, such as a short story or film, is a great way to get creative and engage subscribers with something they’ve never seen before.

You can go beyond simple lists and create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" automation email. Based on a subscriber's horror preference (e.g., jump scares, psychological thrillers, or slasher films), they click a link that leads them to a personalized list of movie or book recommendations.

Petcare 

Halloween might be a blast for us, but it can be stressful for our furry family. Pet-based businesses can use Halloween to educate their subscribers on how to keep their pets calm around fireworks. It’s also a chance to promote any products you have that help reduce anxiety in dogs and cats. 

For a fun activity, you could host a "Pet Costume Contest" and encourage subscribers to share photos of their pets in costume for a chance to win a prize. This can create a highly engaging and shareable campaign while subtly promoting pet-friendly products.

Good email design follows a set of rules that helps to showcase what your brand is about, delivers your message effectively, and drives conversions. At Halloween, however, it’s time to dress up your design with striking visuals that are lighthearted and engaging. 

Although it’s still important to follow the basic guidelines of email design, Halloween email campaigns allow you to be more creative, so think outside the box when it comes to color, font and images. Show subscribers your spooky (and fun!) side.

Try switching out your colors for a more Halloween-friendly color scheme such as black, orange, purple, green, and red. Darker colors with bright accents are the way to go—if your logo is black, play on that or invert it to make it stand out against a dark background. You can even edit your logo to be themed (think dripping with blood or slime!) or just change the color to fit the design. 

To ensure that your copy displays in subscribers’ email clients, you should stick to web fonts and web-safe fonts. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with Halloween-style fonts in your graphics, though! For a Halloween newsletter, choose fonts that are disheveled, use brush strokes, vintage horror style, historical-looking, or all caps. For inspiration check out these 50 best Halloween fonts, and for a huge library of cool, free fonts check out dafont.

Use Halloween-themed images and graphics to tie everything together and set the mood. Try to have fun with your images, but don’t get too spooky. Keep all imagery lighthearted and fun in the spirit of Halloween, don’t include anything too dark or gory! Although some subscribers might be horror fans, it doesn’t mean they want to see the famous foot scene from Saw in their inbox! You can also show a bit of your personality by using emojis in the copy and subject: 🧙‍♀️ 🧛‍♀️ 👻 💀 🎃 🧟‍♀️ 🔮

If you’re looking for stock imagery, Unsplash has a beautiful collection of free Halloween stock photos.  

Here are some ideas that you can use for your Halloween images:  

• Pumpkins/jack-o-lanterns

• Slime

• Ghosts

• Witches

• Broomsticks

• Candles

• Monsters

• Fangs

• Eyes

• Spooky houses

• Cauldrons

• Potion bottles and books

• Bats

• Spiders/spider webs

• Black cats

• Skeletons/skulls

• Graveyards

The Storyworth Podcast, who also happen to be MailerLite users, add a hint of haunt into their newsletter with a black and white image of a spooky old gate. Simple yet effective!

Don’t forget to keep all your Halloween graphics and images neat and tidy so you can easily find them again next year. In MailerLite, you can create a Halloween-specific folder in your File manager so you don’t have to go hunting through all your images every time you do a new Halloween campaign.

Even our teammates at MailerLite love the Folders!

Adding movement to your Halloween emails gives an extra spooky factor, or sometimes, comedy factor: 

You can have fun with your call-to-action (CTA) text, but you should follow the general guidelines on creating CTAs for your email. Fit them into your overall design but be cognizant of how you use them to ensure you get the best results with click-throughs.

• Make sure your CTA is eye-catching and clear in a contrasting color that fits your Halloween email design

• Be creative and use Halloween-related phrases and words but make the message clear

• If your email contains multiple buttons, make sure your main CTA is the one that stands out most

We’re always on the lookout for out-of-the-box thinking and we loved these terrifyingly terrific examples. 

Team up for a Halloween jackpot

When you went trick or treating as a kid you didn’t just go to one house, right? Your trick-or-treat bag was filled to the brim with treats from all the neighborhood houses. Recreate this feeling for your customers by teaming up with other businesses to offer a bucket of treats in the form of exclusive discount codes. 

Software company RankMath did this and made it extra special by only sharing this discount extravaganza (worth $14,000) with their existing customers.

Create a Halloween-themed quiz

Quizzes are a great way to grow your list and turn subscribers into customers. You can take advantage of the Halloween period to use a Halloween-themed quiz to give personalized product recommendations to your subscribers. 

Ben & Jerry’s made great use of this to help subscribers make the right ice cream choice. 🤤 They strengthened it by then sharing recipes they can make with their ice cream.

Use animation to enhance your design

Adding movement to your Halloween emails gives an extra spooky, or sometimes comedic, factor. BestSecret uses an animation to bring their design to life in a fun, engaging way that goes beyond a simple, static image.

Design a themed collection

Use Halloween as an opportunity to promote a limited-edition collection that fits the season, like Allsole did with Vans’ Nightmare Before Christmas collection (is that a Halloween or Christmas movie? Who cares, it’s great!). They included photos of the shoes along with images of characters from the movie for an email design that was a hit with fans.

Craft a punny and clear CTA

You can have fun with your call-to-action (CTA) text, but the message should always be clear. MeUndies gets its CTA right with a clear message and a contrasting purple color that fits the design and stands out against the black background. They also managed to get punny with their CTA while still making the message clear.

Now you’ve learned all the best practices to create scary fun Halloween emails, it’s time to plan your campaign!

1. Decide on the topics and goals for your campaigns

Think about the types of content you can share with subscribers—do you have a creative idea that will drive them through to your blog? Or perhaps you can create a creepy discount code or Halloween sale on a selection of your items. Maybe it’s the ideal time to promote a new product or service.  

2. Add your Halloween emails to your newsletter calendar

Sending out a single email on October 31st is fine but to really increase conversions and engage subscribers, planning a few Halloween email campaigns for 2-3 weeks leading up to the big day is the best way to go.

If you already have a bunch of email ideas mapped out, see if there is any way you can add a Halloween twist to them. This could be as simple as making tweaks to the language and design! 

Curious about more October newsletter ideas besides Halloween? Check out the article below:

3. Create your Halloween email design

Don’t skip out on design! A few emojis here and there aren’t going to cut it. 

Using the design best practices above, along with a professional email marketing tool like MailerLite, you’ll be able to create stunningly scary emails in no time at all. You can use one of the ready-made email templates for a professional email design that can be easily customized to be spooktacular!

Use our AI Email Generator to kickstart your creative process. Just give it a spooky prompt, and it can generate text and even suggest images to build a chillingly good email draft in minutes.

For even greater personalization, use MailerLite's new AI-powered Model Context Protocols (MCP) server to craft an entire Halloween email draft or suggest high-performing subject lines based on your past campaign data.

Want to learn more? Check out our ultimate guide to email design:

4. Build a dedicated Halloween landing page

Do you have a Halloween deal or sale that’s simply to die for? Use it as an opportunity to collect more subscribers by creating a dedicated Halloween landing page where people can sign up to participate in the limited-time offer.

Take advantage of our AI Landing Page Builder to create a custom, on-brand page outline in seconds. This saves you time and ensures your page looks professional and is optimized for conversions.

Check out the article below to learn more about building a landing page that converts:

5. Build excitement with automated emails

Create a buzz that’ll rattle bones with a pre-Halloween email automation. Send a series of emails leading up to your Halloween offer to build excitement and create urgency as the sale comes to a close.

Your pre-Halloween build-up workflow could be made up of these five emails:

1. Teaser email: Let subscribers know that something wicked this way comes, tease your offer and pique their interest.

2. Details of the sale: The second email can let subscribers know what they’ll get in your Halloween offer, make sure to highlight the benefits here.

3. The Treat: Launch the offer and include an irresistible CTA

4. Reminder email: Let subscribers know that the sale is ending soon. Include a countdown timer to create urgency.

5. Last chance email: Tell subscribers that this is the last day they can participate in your offer before it closes.

Utilize segmentation in your automation to separate subscribers based on their purchases and engagement with your automation.

6. Send your Halloween newsletter at the right time

Depending on where your subscribers are located, Halloween for them could be a full day before or after Halloween for you. Consider delivering your campaign based on timezones so that your campaign arrives at the same time of day for everyone depending on their geographic location. Or, use our smart sending feature to automatically send emails to each subscriber when they're most likely to engage.

Wanna know the best time to send an email? Check out the article below:

Now you know that Halloween email campaigns really aren’t scary at all, and are a super fun way to show your personality, connect with your audience, and increase conversions.

Get the right balance of creepy content, devilish design, and haunting humor, and your subscribers won’t be able to break the spell!

Try out a Halloween email marketing campaign this year and let us know how it goes in the comments!