As Thanksgiving gives way to Black Friday, the peak sales season of the year begins. In 2024, online retail sales during the fall and winter holidays reached an impressive $296.7 billion.
A well-rounded email marketing campaign can help you capture a slice of the holiday pie. Festive content and promotions can help you engage your email audience and boost sales. That said, cutting through the noise isn’t easy. The holidays bring an influx of messages into customers’ inboxes that dwarf what they receive throughout the rest of the year.
Most consumers now include online purchases in their gifting plans, with around one in three consumers planning to do most or all of their holiday shopping online. In a 2025 survey, about half of customers identified “getting a great deal”—being able to take advantage of coupons, flash sales, exclusive offers, and the like—as the main driver behind where they shop during the season.
Beyond driving sales, email marketing can deliver a strong return on investment (ROI)—between $10 to $36 for every $1 spent. A dedicated holiday marketing strategy can help you boost brand awareness, engagement, and loyalty among existing customers.
Major holidays of the winter season
Not all holiday shopping revolves around Christmas. Other major holidays fall around the same time of year, and gifts and gatherings are a beloved part of many of them:
Diwali
The Hindu festival of lights celebrates good triumphing over evil and is centered around peace, hope, and togetherness. Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists also often celebrate Diwali, which typically falls between October and November. Common motifs include diyas, rangoli, fireworks, and lanterns.
Thanksgiving
Falling on the fourth Thursday of November, Thanksgiving is a celebration of gratitude that’s followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Hanukkah
The Jewish festival of lights falls between late November and late December. Its most famous symbols are the menorah and the dreidel. Values of the holiday include gratitude, resilience, and community.
Christmas
Nearly 85% of Americans, religious and secular, celebrate Christmas. With traditions centered around giving gifts, the holiday drives more than $900 billion in retail sales.
Kwanzaa
This weeklong celebration of Black culture and heritage begins on December 26 and continues through the end of the year. In addition to the pan-African colors of red, black, and green, familiar sights during Kwanzaa include the kinara, the mkeka, and harvest symbols like corn and fruit. Each day is associated with one of the holiday’s Seven Principles, which include unity, self-determination, creativity, and faith.
Lunar New Year
Lunar New Year celebrations can happen as early as January or as late as the end of February. People celebrate this holiday across many parts of China, Vietnam, and Korea. Cultures have their own traditions and symbols associated with it, many of them involving renewal, good fortune, and family. Red and gold are common colors in some Lunar New Year traditions.
How to create a holiday email marketing strategy
- Start well before the holiday shopping season
- Define your metrics and goals
- Personalize your approach
- Promote discounts and incentives
- Get creative with your content
- Be mindful of marketing fatigue
If you’re ready to build your own holiday email campaign, follow these steps to stay on track and drive results:
Start well before the holiday shopping season
You might not send your first holiday marketing email until the run-up to Black Friday, but planning ahead is always a good idea, especially if you have ambitious graphics or other visual assets in mind. Consider running a pre-campaign to grow your list of email subscribers—discounts for signing up are a popular strategy—to ensure that your holiday emails reach more people.
Define your metrics and goals
The best holiday email campaigns align with your company’s broader strategy and business aims. Identify which metrics matter—such as revenue, conversions, or even read rates—and set achievable goals for each. If you’ve done this before, be intentional about learning from past holiday seasons—historical data can illuminate what worked, what didn’t, and where there are opportunities to improve.
Personalize your approach
Not all customers are the same, even if they’re all shopping during the holiday rush. In a recent survey, 91% of respondents said offers and recommendations relevant to them make them more likely to shop with a given brand. Customer segmentation can help you tailor an email to reach a specific target audience, and data about past purchases can show who is most likely to be shopping at a given time.
Promote discounts and incentives
Easy-to-find savings can make customers more likely to shop with a company. Use emails to spread the word about holiday promotions, such as a themed flash sale or a free gift with purchase. Tiered incentives for high value customers can also help solidify customer loyalty. For example, you might offer members of your VIP program exclusive discounts or early access to holiday sales.
"One of the best performing emails we ever do is like an early invitation to shop the sale,” said Ridge CEO Sean Frank in an interview with Shopify Masters.
The email doesn’t need to be fancy. Sean says the successful Ridge email was plain text, welcoming people to the sale, welcoming them to the brand, and giving them early access to inventory.
Get creative with your content
Increase customer engagement with your emails by incorporating new formats and editorial approaches, like gift guides featuring bestselling items. You can also look to holiday traditions for inspiration, dropping new products or discounts each day in the style of an advent calendar—a fun way to keep customers coming back. Get creative with engaging subject lines, too. Try to be both playful and direct—but keep whatever you say relevant to the content.
Be mindful of marketing fatigue
When you’re ready to send, schedule your emails strategically. Be mindful of not bombarding customers: two out of three respondents in a recent survey said they already felt marketing fatigue (a sense of being overwhelmed by marketing content) by the beginning of November.
With increasing inbox competition, Jacob Sappington, director of email strategy at Homestead Studio, suggests strategically increasing your marketing to stand out, but not overwhelm.
“We’re recommending, for all of our brands, to send three emails on Black Friday, multiple emails on Cyber Monday, multiple texts on Cyber Monday as well,” he said in an interview with Shopify Masters.
Tools like Shopify Email can help you optimize send times for when your target audience is most engaged. It also automates many parts of your workflow—instantly applying your visual branding to your emails, for example, or using AI to suggest subject lines and create sample copy.
6 holiday email marketing examples
Here are some email marketing examples—featuring smart messaging, imagery, and promotions—to inspire you as you plan your holiday marketing strategy.
1. Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel
If you’re in the northern hemisphere, “winter” is a reliable theme for the holiday season. The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, a spa resort in southern California, recasts this as “hot spring soaking season.” It positions the property as a perfect winter getaway—one that’s worth visiting, or even best visited, when the weather gets chilly.
For those who want to get away during the holiday and still celebrate, the hotel highlights special events for Friendsgiving, a tree lighting celebration, and a New Year’s Eve party.
2. Hatch
Playing on the popular Christmas-time theme of gift-giving, sleep device brand Hatch’s holiday email campaign includes alarm clock features framed as a wish list. It’s implied that the reader can easily fulfill the list for a loved one, thanks to a $20 discount.
A tiered discount means the savings increase with additional purchases. By invoking self-gifting, people feel empowered to buy a second clock for themselves—creating a win-win for both customers Hatch.
Using traditional Christmas colors and product photography helps Hatch market a product not typically associated with the holidays as a great Christmas present and useful all year round.
3. RECO
The holiday season often includes gatherings, parties, and other reasons for dressing up. French accessories brand RECO uses email marketing to highlight its festive bags and how founder Bea Recoder incorporates them into her holiday looks. The “how to style” approach brings an editorial (and actionable) edge to the marketing, helping customers see how they can incorporate Parisian chic into their looks.
4. Brownie Points
The apparel and accessories brand Brownie Points targets lapsed customers in this email for its Black Friday sale. The email entices them with a massive discount while encouraging them to support a small business. It reiterates the latter by using a collage-like graphic with an almost handmade feel, emphasizing that this is an indie brand led by real people.
5. Chillhouse
This holiday email from Chillhouse includes an animation that “opens” like a holiday card, making it feel more like a celebratory email from a friend than marketing content. A model (wearing Chillhouse press-on nails, of course) blows a glittery kiss directly at the viewer, giving the graphic a personal touch. The subject line caters to Christmas, but the “Szn’s Greetings” messaging inside is more inclusive and aims to foster a connection with the brand’s young target audience.
The email doesn’t directly ask customers to buy its product. Sometimes generating goodwill and interest is the goal in and of itself.
6. Row 7 Seed Co.
This ad from seed company Row 7 targets last-minute shoppers with friends or family members interested in gardening. The email points to gift cards as an easy (and instant) option, even when shipping deadlines have passed—a potential relief for the customers who might be panicking as things get down to the wire.
The email’s visuals are bright and fresh, a departure from typical holiday motifs. In a crowded inbox, this can help a brand stand out, as well as appeal to customers shopping for various holidays.
Holiday email marketing FAQ
What is the best promotional strategy for the Christmas season?
The best strategy for holiday marketing around Christmas and other winter holidays is a well-rounded one. Holiday marketing strategies typically include special sales and discounts, themed products, festive social media content, and a robust email marketing campaign.
What is a “12 Days of Christmas” marketing campaign?
This marketing strategy riffs on the concept of the 12 Days of Christmas with a series of promotions, released daily over the 12 days leading up to the holiday. This approach gets customers excited and engaged, while boosting sales through seasonally themed drops and discounts.
What makes the slogan of a holiday marketing campaign effective?
The goal of a holiday marketing campaign is to create urgency around holiday shopping and increase customer engagement, ultimately boosting sales. When developing a slogan (or similar language, like an email subject line), make sure it ties into the holiday season and drives customers to action while keeping things simple and on brand.
