Halloween Marketing: 22 Eerily Effective Ideas for Online Sellers

Halloween marketing is a smart way to boost sales in October, no matter what you sell. But when you think of seasonal marketing, you probably go straight for the big guns, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

But pump the brakes for a second because there is another opportunity lurking in the shadows of your marketing campaigns… Halloween! Don’t worry — you don’t need to sell costumes or candy to cash in on Halloween marketing.

So lock the doors and draw the shades because 22 eerily effective Halloween marketing ideas for online sellers are coming for you right now.

Make a Killing This October With Halloween Promotional Ideas

Below you’ll find 22 Halloween sales ideas you can use to encourage immediate purchases from your existing (and new!) customers to help you make a killing in October.

1. Get Creative With Your Existing Items

No, you might not sell pumpkin outfits for dogs or homemade gummy bears to drop in trick-or-treaters’ bags. But — you can’t afford to be shortsighted about this either. Enter… creativity!

Consider what’s currently in your online store or e-commerce site that you can repurpose as Halloween-friendly.

Here are some ways to get creative with existing items in your Halloween marketing campaigns:

• If you sell handmade clothing, including vintage-style dresses, put a little marketing magic into your cauldron and promote them as “pinup-girl costumes” or send emails to your customers saying, “Go retro this Halloween with this handmade 1950’s-style dress.”
• If you sell handmade jewelry, you also have the same opportunity. Promote your avant-garde jewelry as the perfect complement to a 60’s-style costume or your stackable gold bracelets as Queen of the Nile-style pieces.
• Makeup sellers can promote lipstick shades that go best with specific costumes, like a “devilish red,” or “pin-up pink.”
• If you sell camping or outdoor items, you can promote it as “zombie survival gear.”
• If you sell desserts, promote them as tempting treats for Halloween parties or as goodies to bring to your child’s school party.

2. Treat Your Customers to a Sweet or Spooky Surprise

Looking for Halloween marketing ideas that’ll surprise your customers and encourage them to buy again?

Drop a few spooky goodies into each package to delight your customers.

Here’s how to get into the Halloween spirit and boost sales:

• Fill a small bag with a few hard candies (or other non-perishable items) or drop in inexpensive spooky items, like spider rings
• Drop a business card in with your online store’s URL
• Include a special promo code for their next purchase (promo code: BOO15, THANKS31, SHOP50, TREAT10)

3. Hop Aboard the Seasonal Bandwagon

As far as Halloween promotions go… if you are able to create something specifically for the spookiest season of the year, you might want to give it a whirl!

Promote these items as “limited edition” creations to entice shoppers to buy immediately.

Here are some examples of items sellers can create for the Halloween season:

• Home-decor sellers could create Halloween decor signs, centerpieces, wreaths, yard decorations, etc.
• Candle creators could create Halloween-specific scents, like black licorice (perhaps named Witches’ Brew?), candied apple, candy corn, caramel corn, forbidden fruit, fireplace, pumpkin, harvest moon, toasted marshmallow, and more.
• Bath and body sellers could create wickedly seasonal bath bombs in scents like “magic potion,” “Dracula’s delight,” and “pumpkin spice.”

4. Offer Halloween Discount Codes

Just because you don’t sell costumes doesn’t mean you can’t still try to sway Halloween shoppers to visit your online store.

Get in on the fun of the season by offering Halloween discounts to shoppers.

Here are some Halloween discount code ideas:

• OCT50
• BOO25
• FALL15
• EEK50
• TRICK20
• TREAT30
• FRIGHT10
• CANDY5
• BOGOBOO
• HAUNT15
• SPOOKY10

5. Hold a Halloween Contest

Halloween marketing ideas, like holding a pumpkin carving contest for your followers, are versatile enough for all online sellers.

Tell your followers to submit their best photo for a pumpkin carving contest, and then have everyone vote on the top three winners. Give a prize, like X amount, to your online store or a Visa gift card to the winners.

Here are a few more ideas:

• If you have seasonal scents, food, decor, clothing, etc., you could ask fans to submit a picture of your product in use to win a prize.
• Hold a Halloween costume photo contest by asking Facebook fans to upload a picture of their favorite costume to win one of your products.
• Ask followers to share their best Halloween decorations to win a product of their choice under X amount from your online shop.

6. Change Up Your Marketing Messaging

If you want to evoke the spirit of Halloween, try switching up the words you use in your marketing materials, social media posts, email marketing, and more throughout the month of October.

Here’s a fun Halloween-themed list of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives to get you started:

Creepy	Boo-tiful	Scare Up	Spooky
Wickedly Good	Devilishly Delicious	Spook-tacular	Scary-Good
Magical	Hair-Raising	Eerie	Haunting
Ghoulish	Supernatural	Bewitching	Spellbinding
Witchy	Vampy	Mysterious	Frighteningly
To Die For	Frightful	Tempting	Fang-tastic
Bone-Chilling	Freaky	Blood-Curdling	Nightmarish

7. Send Halloween-Themed Emails

Email marketing should be a part of your year-round marketing arsenal. But you can send seasonal- and holiday-specific emails to appeal to shoppers and shake up what they expect from you.

Here are some email subject lines to try for your Halloween promotions:

• A frighteningly good deal awaits you…
• Open for a scary-good deal (if you dare)
• 50% Off all seasonal scents (3 days only!)
• Get free shipping till October 31st
• Free candy bag when you spend $50
• Get 15% off your purchase with code TRICK15
• A fang-tastic sale is happening now

Want to try emojis in your email subject lines? Grab them from a site like this one to ensure they’re visible on all mobile devices.

8. Create Halloween Social Media Graphics

Halloween marketing ideas don’t always have to involve spending money. Spend a little time creating new Halloween visuals for your business using a site like Canva or PicMonkey. (Canva is free at a basic level, and PicMonkey is $7.99 a month.)

Here are some ideas for your Halloween promotions:

• Create a new Facebook cover — maybe it’s a collage of your products with a Halloween theme.
• Create fun Halloween-themed images of your individual products to share on sites like Instagram, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and Facebook.
• Update your e-commerce site with a few Halloween elements (like a spider dropping down) on your homepage.
• Make a new template for your email marketing efforts that incorporates a Halloween theme.

9. Offer a Frighteningly Tempting Freebie

Perhaps the bulk of your items don’t have anything to do with Halloween — but you can still put a Halloween spin on things by offering a frighteningly fun freebie.

Here are some ideas for your Halloween promotions:

• Try the candy-filled trick-or-treat bag mentioned above, but make it available only if shoppers spend $25 or more at your online store.
• Offer a “spooky surprise” of your choice that you will drop into each order. (Like spider window clings or cobwebs.)
• Give away trick-or-treat bags for kids (not filled with goodies) if you sell items for children.
• Offer a mysterious free gift of one of your most popular (but lower-priced) items for anyone who spends $75 or more.

10. Encourage a Seasonal Conversation

It can be difficult to get fans talking on social media. But once you get the convo going, others tend to follow suit. Ask direct questions that relate (at least somewhat) to the products you sell on social media.

Here are some ideas for your Halloween promotion:

• If you sell bath and body products, ask your followers what their favorite seasonal scent is for the month of October.
• If you sell coffee, ask your followers what Halloween coffee designs they’d like to see you make in an Instagram Story tutorial
• If you sell home decor, ask your followers to show you pictures of how they decorate their homes and lawns for October.
• If you sell clothing, ask your followers to share photos of DIY costumes they’ve made.
• If you sell makeup, ask your followers to share photos of their best DIY Halloween makeup creations.

You might want to randomly reward those who comment with a $5 gift card to your online store to entice more followers to comment. (Tell them to DM you with their email address so you can send them the discount code or gift card.)

11. Create a Product Collage

Whether you have any Halloween-themed products to promote or not, a product collage is a great way to highlight what you have to offer. Create a collage using Canva or PicMonkey, use some of the silly Halloween verbiage shown above, and post it on your social media accounts.

You can also email your collage to subscribers (use one of the subject lines above) to promote any deals you’ll be having for the month of October.

12. Give Halloween Tips to Followers

Not too into creating new images just for Halloween or using seasonal puns?

Try something a bit more practical, like offering safety tips.

Here are a few more ideas:

• If you create handmade dog treats, offer tips to followers on how to keep their dogs safe on Halloween. (Send these tips out in emails, use them on your blog, and create text-based images with them.)
• If you sell children’s toys or clothing, offer tips on how to check Halloween candy to make sure it’s safe or send out a list of safer trick-or-treating options (like at local businesses rather than in neighborhoods) to your followers.
• If you sell food products, post themed recipes or ideas for healthier trick-or-treat items.

This fun marketing idea can easily become a Halloween tradition for your small business.

13. Use Disappearing Content to Keep Followers Spellbound

Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat all offer ephemeral content, which is video and text-based images that are available for a limited amount of time.

You can post Halloween discount codes, funny videos, demos of Halloween-themed products, and so on, on your accounts to keep customers spellbound throughout the month of October.

Take advantage of Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook’s filters to show your followers the lighter (and spookier) side of your brand.

14. Give Out Candy-Filled Trick-or-Treat Bags With Purchases

This is one of the sweeter Halloween marketing campaign ideas you’ll see. (Pun intended.)

Buy small bags and fill them with a few pieces of non-perishable candy along with your business card and a coupon for a future purchase and put them in packages as a virtual trick-or-treating event of sorts.

You could also give out a code word (“Trickortreat” or “Boo!” etc.) on various social media sites like Facebook and Instagram that customers will need to put input as a discount code to receive the free gift.

15. Offer a Free Reusable Trick-or-Treat Bag With Purchase

If your target audience is likely to have children, have bags printed with your logo on them and put them in packages of customers who spend ‘X’ amount.

Parents can use the bags for shopping long after Halloween is over, making this great publicity for you. If your target market doesn’t have kids, you can give away reusable shopping bags with a fall theme instead.

16. Create Themed Bundles

Regardless of what you sell, you can cash in on the spirit of October by bundling some of your products together and giving them fun names.

For example:

• If you sell food items, put some complementary items together and call it your “Zombie Apocalypse Survivor Kit.”
• If you sell jewelry, put a few of your bestsellers together and call it the “Halloween Hottie” bundle.

Offer the bundles for less than what a shopper could buy the included products for individually and you’ve got a brand-new way to promote old products.

17. Hold Flash Halloween Sales

Warning: This will only work if you already have an established email database and/or a strong social media presence with a decent amount of followers.

Tweet/Facebook/thread/email out the information on your flash sale, which would normally be for a very limited amount of time that same day.

For example:

Hurry! Today only between the hours of 4–6 p.m., MST, get 31% off our entire line of products. Use code 31OFF online and in-store!

18. Incentivize With Free Tickets to a Local Event

If you have a local following, entice these customers to buy with tickets to local events. If customers spend ‘X’ amount at your store, give them two tickets to a local event going on in the month of October. (Local haunted house, pumpkin patch, festival, or fair.)

Advertise this Halloween special everywhere you can, and ensure the tickets are affordable enough that you still see an increase in profit after purchasing them.

19. Create Halloween-Themed Social Media Posts

While staying relevant to what you sell, try to mix in some fun, Halloween-themed posts.

For example:

• A local bar could post recipes for spooky cocktails followers can make at home (and use this as an opportunity to highlight any October- or Halloween-themed drinks available during the month)
• A clothing store could ask who’s the most stylish Halloween movie villain and post pictures for comparison
• A pet-accessory store could ask followers to post pictures of their pets in costumes

Make it fun and interactive to encourage more followers to engage with you. While social media marketing is a year-round tactic you can (and should) use, putting a Halloween spin on it is how you can get in on the excitement of the season.

Followers get bored — don’t let them by capitalizing on seasons, holidays, trends, and special occasions.

20. Hold a Virtual Halloween Costume Contest

Halloween-themed promotions are a fun and creative way to engage with your customers and get user-generated content as well.

Hold a virtual Halloween costume contest by asking customers to tag you in a social media post or story wearing their best costume in order to receive an exclusive discount. DM participants a discount code to boost sales and exclusivity.

You can do categories like adults, kids, pets, couples, family, and more, and share the best entries on your social profiles.

Consider offering 13% or 31% off purchases for those who participate.

21. Hold a Virtual Halloween Party

Use Facebook Live or Instagram Live to hold a virtual Halloween party where you offer Halloween-themed tips related to your products (house decorating ideas, cocktail or food recipes, Halloween or fall clothing or costume ideas, etc.)

Encourage your followers to comment with their favorite Halloween memory, cocktail, costume, party, decorations, trick-or-treating tips, etc. (bonus points if you can relate it back to what you sell) and offer exclusive promo codes while live to incentivize followers to attend.

You can also teach your followers how to make a spooky cocktail, do a Halloween craft, make a decoration, carve a pumpkin together with your followers, or even decorate a haunted gingerbread house while live — get creative and have fun with it.

22. Send out Halloween-Themed Email Newsletters

Email newsletters are a great way to reach your target audience, and when you switch things up by giving yours a theme, you’ll recapture your subscribers’ interest.

This great Halloween marketing idea allows you to promote your products — no matter what they are — to people on your subscriber list, which means they are actively interested in what you sell. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have seasonal items — people know that holidays mean deals, and that’s what they’ll be looking for during the Halloween season.

Try something silly, like an email subject that says, “Prices so low it’s SCARY!” and then change up the names of some of your products (like the themed bundles mentioned earlier) and use a discount to entice buyers.

Include any other Halloween sale details you want your subscribers to know, and don’t forget to include discount codes.

Create a Spookily Effective Halloween Marketing Campaign

Ready to use these Halloween marketing ideas to bring in more traffic and sales this October and beyond?

Halloween marketing is a month-long chance to promote existing products in a new way. Get into the spirit of the season by switching up the words you use to promote your products to capture the attention of your consumers, and always offer discounts and giveaways when possible.

Why should you create a Halloween marketing campaign this October? Because Halloween marketing, or seasonal marketing in general, gives you the opportunity to shake up what your customers normally expect from you – and grab their attention at the start of the largest and most profitable shopping season of the year.

No matter how you feel about Halloween personally, you can’t deny that seasonal marketing works. So don’t be afraid to break out your cauldron, add a dash of creativity, and stir up some sales for your online store this October!

Remember, there are plenty of companies vying for consumers’ interest — will you make your small business really stand out by trying some of these Halloween marketing ideas this year?

Frequently Asked Questions

More Seasonal Marketing

• A Valentine’s Day Marketing Strategy That’ll Make ‘Em Swoon (and Spend!)
• A Mother’s Day Marketing Guide for Small Business Owners
• 10 Easter Marketing Ideas That Will Boost E-Commerce Sales
• An Easy Father’s Day Advertising Strategy for Online Sellers
• Low-Cost Spring Marketing Ideas That Will Skyrocket Your Sales
• Summer Slowdown: How to Prevent a Sales Slump This Season