The holiday season is fast approaching, and businesses across industries are gearing up their marketing efforts to drive maximum sales. It is the busiest time of the year, and customers are swamped with ads and messages from brands across channels. Companies run various offline and digital holiday campaigns during this time to get customers to buy from them.

Email is a widely used marketing channel during the holiday season. The subscribers’ inbox is usually very crowded with holiday emails from various brands. And, for brands to make the most out of their email marketing campaigns, they must create and send well-strategized and beautifully designed emails that stand out from the rest and succeed in capturing the subscribers’ attention.

During the holiday season, people are in the mood for celebrations and indulge in a lot of shopping. People look for discounts, gifts, giveaways, fun events, etc. while shopping, and businesses introduce enticing discounts and activities to deliver them a fun, engaging, and memorable experience. Your emails, too, should be designed to make an impact and engage your subscribers.

Have a look at this email from Fracture.

It is a simple email created using a standard email template. The email doesn’t have alluring colors, elements, or visuals associated with the holidays. While the simple and minimalist design works in engaging customers during the rest of the year, it might get lost and unnoticed in the customers’ over-crowded inbox during the holiday season.

Now, take a look at this email from the brand Uplers.

This interactive email was sent with a message to celebrate Easter while staying at home and maintaining social distancing. This custom-built, novel template design makes this Easter email stand out from the rest.

Although ESPs offer pre-built editable templates to create emails faster and more efficiently, in order to design emails from such out-of-the-box ideas, one must use custom email templates. Let us understand custom email templates in detail.

Custom email template- what is it?

A custom email template is an email template created for a company from scratch based on its unique brand guidelines. It is a reusable template customized using the brand color, fonts, etc. Such emails can be tailor-made to suit the specific needs of the business and hence have more chances of engagement and conversion than emails created using ready-to-use templates.

Custom Templates for Holiday Email Marketing

Holiday email marketing is all about demonstrating positive emotions like joy, empathy, hope, generosity, etc., and creating a sense of excitement in the users, while also understanding the uncertainties and catering to the negative emotions in your subscribers. When the emails are conceptualized and tailor-made to cater to the specific moods and emotions of the holiday season, it sets you apart from the crowd. You can create the custom email template the way you have imagined by using an unconventional email design and interactive elements such as GIF, cinemagraph, videos, countdown timers, etc. You can experiment with multiple layouts and fonts to swoon your subscribers.

Let us look at some visually appealing holiday email examples.

Check out this email from the brand e-Village.

This email sent during the holiday season creates an interactive parallax effect using GIF. The font styles, color, layout, and illustrations are in line with the company’s branding. The visually appealing illustrations and GIFs keep the subscribers engaged throughout the email and entice them to click on the CTA to find out more.

Here’s another email example from the brand 1973.

This minimalist Christmas greetings email from 1973 uses a simple layout and brand colors. The hero image has a GIF animation which adds life to the email. The right use of colors and typography makes the text-heavy email visually appealing and interesting to read.

Key Things to Remember:

• With custom email templates, you can either create a reusable template or a one-off design based on your requirements.
• Custom email templates give you the freedom to experiment with your creative ideas and build the email the way you want.
• There are more people involved in designing, coding, and testing custom emails, and hence it is recommended to hire a professional email design company to take care of it.
• The overall cost of creating custom email templates is higher than creating emails using ready-to-use templates and drag-and-drop editors.
• The turn-around time for designing, coding, and testing a custom email template is higher than that of ready-to-use templates.
• It is very important to start planning your custom holiday emails well in advance and not leave them for the last moment.

Wrapping Up

Even though there are umpteen ready-to-use templates available to serve your holiday email needs, creating custom email templates to match your unique branding and business needs will work wonders in improving engagement and conversion. All you need to have is a clear innovative idea and the support of a professional custom email template building company to help you impress your customers and engage them with your brand.

Author: Kevin George is the head of marketing at Email Uplers, which specializes in crafting Professional Email Templates, PSD to Email Conversion, and Mailchimp Templates. Kevin loves gadgets, bikes & jazz, and he breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on an email marketing blog.