Fall is more than the few weeks squeezed between back-to-school spending and the holiday shopping avalanche. Fall is your time to keep customers focused on your brand’s value and to build trust and momentum for holiday shopping.
Campaigns that capitalize on fresh starts, renewed purposes, and shifting priorities can help your brands make a smooth transition into the holiday season.
You might be tempted to skimp on fall email marketing and do just enough to keep campaigns going out the door on time and bringing in enough revenue to meet your goals. And I don’t blame you if your attention strays to the finish line – the December holiday email campaigns that can make or break the year – especially when consumer data shows shoppers started their holiday shopping earlier than ever in 2025.
Seasonal email campaigns
Fall’s collection of tent-pole events highlights the season and gives your emails a place in your customers’ inboxes:
1. Halloween: The National Retail Federation predicts Halloween spending on everything from candy to costumes, decor to greeting cards, and more, will reach a record $13.1 billion this year.
2. Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days: While not the blockbuster that is Amazon’s Prime Days in summer, marketers can either align campaigns with this two-day event or market against it.
Even if it doesn’t figure into your fall strategy, Prime Days can foreshadow holiday sales, so it’s worth tracking even if your brand doesn’t invest heavily in it. In 2025, the October event fell short of expectations but still saw many brands running promotions that either highlighted their Amazon stores or tried to draw customers away from Amazon-related campaigns.
3. The World Series: Major League Baseball’s League and rule changes have brought audiences and interest back to baseball. It’s a natural tie-in for brands associated with towns that are in the division and league championships, but other brands can jump on the bandwagon, too.
4. Thanksgiving: While the U.S. version of Thanksgiving is technically a fall holiday, it has become one of the six shopping event days that we call “Cyber 6,” along with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Super Sunday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. We’ll share a Cyber 6 strategy plan with you in a future blog post, but you can certainly create a strategy for promoting pre-Thanksgiving planning and sales with some crossover between fall and Cyber 6 planning.
5. First day of fall: Technically, this falls at the end of Q3, but it can be a crossover event in which you launch your fall design templates, themes, and messages. Following up with the theme of fresh starts, your fall emails can encourage shoppers to throw off the lassitude of summer and start getting things done.
Fall email marketing strategy 1: Review and test
Fall can be the proving ground for your holiday email marketing campaign planning. Take time now to review the machinery that keeps your email program running and fuels it with data and structure.
1. Review standing email programs: Read our blog post, “What to Optimize Before Q4,” for a quick checklist of six programs to revisit in fall, including your acquisition program, key email automations, reactivation program, and more.
2. Adjust segmentation: Use your fall seasonal email campaigns to test some themes and tactics that you expect to rely on in your holiday emails. Look at your segmentation plan. How long since you last updated it? Do you have data that would create more relevant segments than basic preferential data?
One test to try: Learning whether one segment could tolerate higher frequency than another. You won’t find this answer if you base segments on preferences alone. But if you incorporate engagement (opens and clicks, web activity) and business metrics (recent purchases, purchase frequency, order size, returns), you could create a segment of high-interest shoppers. Then test it for higher frequency tolerance with fall-related campaigns like Halloween. (Note: Learn more about this tactic in our free guide, AI Cadence and Attrition.)
Fall email marketing strategy 2: A whole new season of email marketing
As a marketing period, autumn is short-lived compared with summer and the winter holidays. Make the most of this season with original content.
Remember when I said fall is the season of renewal? Aveda nails that concept with this simple email. It didn’t require a whole new product shoot or fall-themed products. Just a bit of design work and focused copy, and voila! A seasonal email campaign you can put together quickly.
This email went to the entire customer list. If you have the time and the data, you could create one segment of customers who don’t buy hair products and one made up of customers who do. Send the campaign to these segments as well as to customers for whom you don’t have hair-care purchase data.
Then, compare the results between segments and the rest of the list. These results won’t be definitive because you didn’t set up a proper testing structure, but they could help you set up a formal test later.
Brand: Aveda
Subject line: 25% Off—Your Fall Refresh Starts Here 🍂
Alt text: A seasonal design can help you reframe a basic campaign into a seasonal winner, as this email from Aveda demonstrates.
Fall email marketing strategy 3: Ramp up the visuals
If you want your email designs to deliver the greatest impact, they should look different from one season to another. All too often, though, brands use the same templates for day-to-day promotional emails and triggered and transactional messages all year long.
Color and design can tell a story as effectively as words and images can. Granted, your email templates should reflect your official brand colors to reinforce the branding impact and create continuity with your other messages. But your email designer can suggest ways to introduce fall colors that evoke the season and make your content stand out in the reader’s mind.
This promotional email from King Arthur Baking Company uses color to reinforce the fall theme, from the hero image at the top to the pumpkin recipes halfway down. No cliches here!
Brand: King Arthur Baking Company
Subject line: Bread Baking Season is Back
Alt text: Image shows how an email from King Arthur Baking Company uses color to express fall seasonality.
Fall email marketing strategy 4: Last-minute Halloween inspiration
If your brand naturally aligns with Halloween, your campaigns are probably winding down now. But let’s say you just had what I like to call the “screaming down the hall moment.”
And you know that moment is coming! Somebody is going to get nervous that the Halloween numbers are falling short and screams down the hall, “Send another email!” Or they send you a panicked email. Or they Slack you or haul you into an impromptu Teams call.
No matter how it happens, the message is clear: You need to send another email and hope that it will shake out more incremental revenue. You could succumb to their panic and resend an email that didn’t do well, but why risk annoying people?
Or, let’s say you market a product that doesn’t naturally tie in to Halloween. Here’s an email that serves up a seasonal email campaign for both needs.
Boxed Water found a way to create a helpful themed email for Halloween. No product redesign required. Just use clever positioning through inventive design and copy. Although I can imagine the response the average 9-year-old Spiderman or Elsa might have to getting water in their trick-or-treat bags instead of Nerds, Ropes or Skittles.
Brand: Boxed Water
Subject line: Join us for a wicked good time!
Alt text: Any brand can send a Halloween-themed email campaign even if the product doesn’t naturally align with the holiday.
Subject line examples
Here are just a few fall-related subject line examples covering the topics I discussed here. Use them to jump-start your creativity and stand out in the flood of competition in the inbox:
Fall theme:
AVEDA: 25% Off—Your Fall Refresh Starts Here 🍂
Organic REV: 🍂Why Fall Plants Don’t Have Time to Waste
Purl Soho: Last Day! 25% Off Yarn To Brighten Shorter Days
Prime Days:
At Home: Talk about prime deals: Patio Furniture starting at $29.99
Dooney & Burke: Prime Styles, Prime Prices.
Calibri: Prime Styles, Prime Prices.
Winc: 🍷This deal is in its Prime 🔥
Halloween:
At Home: Halloween is creeping up… 🎃🕷️👻
Olipop: Parent’s Halloween Survival Guide 🎃👻
IKEA: 🎃Creep it real with Halloween décor for your whole house
Wrapping up: Fall email campaigns can help you bridge the gap
As you can see, fall email marketing has evolved thanks to Halloween’s growing popularity and themed retail events like Prime Days. Each of the ideas I shared here is for a campaign that you can put together quickly, so you have it on tap when the dreaded “screaming down the hall” moment happens.
(P.S.: That’s a great strategy to follow for your holiday campaigns, too. Take a few minutes during your holiday email planning to come up with a great-looking and strategic campaign you can send at a moment’s notice. You’ll look super-smart to your boss, and you won’t end up making a panic-stricken mistake.)
Besides offering your customers something besides the “same old same old” weekly promotional email, these fall email campaigns give you more relevant ways to connect with subscribers and keep reminding them about your brand value and why you deserve a place in the inbox.
That can lead to more clicks on your campaigns – which, in turn, can improve the engagement stats that inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook use to decide whether to send your emails to the inbox or the spam folder.
And, as always, the RPE Origin team is here to help. We’ve all been there, so we know what you’re facing. Email or call us to start exploring more ways to use email marketing to keep the customer conversation going.
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