Holiday email marketing strategy & tips for 2025

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An effective holiday email marketing strategy sends targeted offers and promotions directly to your subscribers’ inboxes when they’re most ready to make seasonal purchasing decisions.

Successful holiday campaigns use segmentation and personalization to create messages that connect with subscribers. Combine this with automated cart recovery and transactional emails, and you have an excellent formula for achieving your marketing goals. 

This guide will walk you through proven strategies, essential best practices, and common pitfalls to ensure your emails stand out in crowded inboxes. Join us below to learn how to make the most of your holiday email campaigns.

Why holiday email marketing is essential

Holiday email campaigns give you direct access to customers during their peak shopping moments. Instead of hoping shoppers find your brand through social feeds and ads, your emails land in their inboxes with timely solutions and offers.

Omnisend research shows that emails in the “Holidays & Seasonal” industry have the highest open rate of any industry, at 35.9%, and an impressive 1.5% click rate to drive ROI. 

That’s because these emails cut through the noise when customers need guidance most. While they juggle gift lists and deadlines, your targeted messages deliver recommendations, gift guides, and exclusive deals that simplify their holiday shopping experience. 

Email marketing is especially powerful during the holidays when other channels become costly or saturated. Rather than competing for attention in packed advertising spaces, you’re reaching an audience already connected to your brand. 

Holiday emails also let you spread revenue throughout the season instead of relying on single shopping days. Crafting a mix of early-bird offers, last-minute deals, and exclusive previews helps capture sales opportunities other channels miss. 

Key steps to plan your holiday email marketing strategy

Follow these five steps to plan your holiday email campaigns effectively:

1. Setting campaign goals 

Your holiday email marketing goals could include driving sales through promotional offers, engaging first-time holiday shoppers, recovering a percentage of abandoned carts, increasing website traffic, or a cross-promotional goal like increasing Instagram subscribers through email. 

Once you have your goals, monitor your campaign metrics closely to establish performance baselines and identify opportunities for improvement. You can monitor your metrics within the Omnisend dashboard. Here’s an example:

Your open and click rates tell you the effectiveness of your subject lines and email designs. Track daily performance during peak shopping to quickly identify which email elements drive the best results. 

Compare metrics across different subscriber segments and promotional types, using those insights to adjust your strategy before significant shopping dates.

2. Segmenting your audience for personalization 

Holiday shoppers usually respond best to messages that match their gift-buying plans, making audience segmentation your key to better campaign performance.

Segmentation enables targeted emails by dividing subscribers by demographics, behavior, and preferences. For instance, Omnisend’s dynamic segments automatically group subscribers based on engagement levels and purchasing patterns.

The point is to send personalized or targeted emails to different segments, from welcome series messages to early-bird holiday shoppers and VIPs.

You’ll need to monitor how each customer group responds to different promotional approaches and adjust your targeting strategy based on actual performance data.

3. Creating a holiday email calendar 

Most brands intensify their email marketing between Black Friday and Christmas, creating a saturated marketing landscape. The good news is that you can stand out among that inbox clutter with an email marketing calendar. 

Your holiday calendar will schedule campaigns from Black Friday through New Year’s, and you can harness Omnisend’s latest research on the best times to send emails to enhance open rates with convenient and timely delivery.

Another crucial step is setting automated abandoned cart reminders, shipping deadline notifications, and post-purchase follow-ups to align with your calendar. 

For instance, you could set your automated messages between promotional campaigns to prevent inbox overload and not after 11 PM (when most people will be in bed). 

4. Designing eye-catching email templates 

Your template design directly impacts conversion rates. Focus on these elements to create holiday emails that encourage engagement:

• Clear hierarchy with your key offer front and center
• Mobile-optimized layouts that work across all devices
• Strategic placement of shipping cutoffs and guarantees
• Social proof elements like reviews and bestseller badges
• High-contrast CTAs with urgent holiday messaging
• High-quality images and GIFs to display multiple products

Use Omnisend’s templates as your foundation, then customize them to match your brand. You can also save your templates for reuse in other campaigns. 

5. Writing holiday-specific subject lines 

Craft compelling subject lines using seasonal keywords, emojis, and personalization to stand out in crowded inboxes. 

Test different approaches like “Nikki, 10% off your holiday wishlist 💫” against “Wishlist items now on sale.” Create urgency through limited-time messaging like “ends tonight” while maintaining authenticity in your messaging.

Omnisend’s subject line generator can generate ideas for you, and you can also use its testing tool to optimize your subject lines for the perfect length and preview them. 

Best practices for successful holiday email marketing

You’ve built your holiday email marketing strategy, so now you can start creating campaigns and sending out emails to subscribers. Following a few best practices will ensure your emails have the best chance of achieving your goals. Start with these:

1. A/B testing subject lines and designs

A/B testing compares email and subject line variations to identify which emotional triggers, word choices, and approaches resonate most with your audience.

Your split tests could reveal optimal template layouts, color schemes, and visual hierarchies that maximize engagement. You can then use that data to enhance open rates, click-through rates, and overall campaign performance.

2. Optimizing for mobile devices

It’s best practice to use responsive templates that automatically resize and restructure content to maintain readability and interaction capabilities.

However, even responsive templates can have poorly sized elements. For instance, your call to action buttons should be large enough to easily click on but not overly disproportional on a computer. Test all your elements across multiple devices before sending. 

We also recommend using lightweight images to improve email load times and short, concise text to communicate your offers.

3. Using automation for abandoned cart recovery

Sending out automated abandoned cart emails is a proven revenue recovery strategy during the holidays. These emails target potential customers who initiated but didn’t complete purchases to capture sales that are otherwise lost.

Omnisend lets you trigger personalized email reminders with dynamic content showcasing abandoned items, potential savings, and limited-time incentives, such as “10% off your basket if you order within 24 hours.”

4. Ensuring emails are GDPR/CCPA-compliant

Regulatory compliance for marketing communications will protect your business and subscribers during data-intensive holiday marketing campaigns. 

Data protection regulations, such as the GDPR and CCPA, mandate transparent data collection practices. These practices include obtaining explicit consent via opt-in and including a clear opt-out/unsubscribe option in all your emails.

Complying with what’s required will also build trust with your audience and differentiate your brand in an increasingly privacy-conscious marketplace.

How to measure the success of holiday email campaigns

There are four metrics you should track to measure holiday email marketing success:

1. Open rates and click-through rates

Open and click-through rates provide detailed insights into email performance beyond surface-level engagement.

Subject line effectiveness directly impacts open rates, with personalization, urgency, and curiosity-driven language prompting higher interaction. Click-through rates drill deeper, revealing content relevance and design impact.

A low open rate might suggest weak subject lines. In contrast, poor click-through rates indicate misaligned content or ineffective call to action placement within your holiday email campaigns.

Tracking your campaign open and click rates is easy in Omnisend’s Reports section:

Additionally, you can use the Channel Performance section in Omnisend to see the open rate, click rate, and more from automated messages:

2. Conversion rates

Conversion rates track the percentage of email recipients who take a specific action you want them to complete. Your conversion goals could include sales, signups, promotional redemptions, or click-throughs to your website. 

Monitor your conversion rates to see how your emails perform, and consider changing your template designs and messaging to boost conversions. 

3. Revenue generated per campaign

Revenue per campaign calculates the total sales directly attributed to a specific email campaign, accounting for immediate purchases triggered by your emails. 

You can use this email marketing metric to compare multiple holiday campaigns and identify your most effective ones. 

Once you’ve got that revenue data, input your total sales into Omnisend’s email ROI calculator to discover the return on investment of your previous or next email marketing campaign.

4. Unsubscribe rates

Your unsubscribe rates are a window into audience sentiment and holiday email strategy effectiveness. These numbers aren’t just a simple dropout count but a nuanced signal of how your content resonates with subscribers. 

A sudden spike might reveal email fatigue or misaligned messaging, while gradual increases could suggest your content has drifted from subscriber expectations. 

Tracking unsubscribe rates will help you fine-tune communication frequency, content relevance, offers, and more to keep your subscribers onboard. 

Common holiday email marketing mistakes to avoid

Avoid these four common holiday email marketing mistakes: 

1. Over-emailing your subscribers

Flooding your subscribers’ inboxes with endless holiday emails can lead to rapid audience burnout. Instead of sending daily messages, develop a strategic communication plan that respects your audience’s attention. 

Plan campaign emails around key shopping moments, such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and segment your audience to ensure everyone receives appropriate messages. 

2. Using generic templates or copy

Generic holiday email templates scream laziness and demonstrate a lack of understanding of your audience. Your templates should have brand-appropriate colors, fonts, and images to ensure a consistent customer experience. 

Invest time in creating distinctive, engaging content that reflects your brand’s voice and resonates with your audience’s holiday expectations.

3. Ignoring mobile optimization

Emails that don’t render correctly on smartphones become instant delete candidates. Follow these steps to optimize your emails for mobile:

• Use responsive, single-column layouts that automatically adapt to different screen sizes
• Create large, tappable call to action buttons
• Keep subject lines concise (under 40 characters) to prevent mobile truncation
• Compress images to reduce file size and improve loading speed
• Select readable font sizes (minimum 14px) for easy mobile reading
• Add high-contrast color schemes for better visibility
• Thoroughly test emails across multiple devices and email clients

Here’s an example of a mobile-friendly email:

4. Forgetting to analyze past campaign performance

Launching holiday email campaigns without reviewing previous campaign performance is like navigating without a map. Your past campaigns hold critical insights that can dramatically improve future strategies.

Metrics like total revenue generated per campaign and the individual open and click-through rates of emails can help you create more effective holiday marketing approaches through better design, targeting, and personalization. 

Conclusion

A well-executed holiday email marketing strategy puts your brand ahead by connecting you with subscribers when they are ready to buy. 

Start planning early to give yourself time for testing, refinement, and building momentum with subscribers. Test different templates and subject lines, monitor your metrics, and adjust your approach as you discover what resonates best with your audience.

Some trial and error is to be expected with your first few campaigns, but it won’t take long before you’re creating emails that deliver results.

Holiday email marketing FAQs