Sending out a Thanksgiving newsletter might be part of the marketing strategy for your small business or part of a fundraising campaign for an organization looking for holiday donations. Ideally, you'll catch readers when they're still full and happy after a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, feeling the holiday spirit and ready to start spending on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
Or, creating a Thanksgiving newsletter might just be a fun and unexpected way to share Thanksgiving greetings with friends and family. We all get messages from retailers around Thanksgiving that are part of email marketing campaigns (all the more reason for small businesses to make their newsletters stand out!). Some of us still receive newsletters from family and friends around the end of the year. But receiving a Thanksgiving newsletter is less common, so it's more special.
Video of the Day
Video of the Day
Whatever the inspiration behind your decision to send out a Thanksgiving Day message, there are plenty of ways to create a newsletter that your target audience will actually want to open and read.
Tip
There are a ton of Thanksgiving email templates available online, making it cheap and convenient to create and send your newsletter via email. Using newsletter templates for Thanksgiving email campaigns allows you to access pre-made holiday email designs: perfect if graphic design isn’t your strength.
Give your newsletter some worthwhile content beyond the standard "we're grateful for you" message. Keep people reading by starting your newsletter with trivia or fun facts related to Thanksgiving. Maybe it's some statistics about how many turkeys and potatoes are eaten each year, or a history of the Butterball hotline, or an overview of the way the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has changed over the years.
You can even tie those facts into the subject line of an email newsletter to intrigue people to click through. For example, maybe your email opens with fun facts about the Macy's parade. Your subject line might be something like, "Remember that Thanksgiving when bears marched in the Macy's parade?" (Central Park Zoo animals were featured in the first parade in 1924!) In a sea of emails with subject lines that just say "Happy Thanksgiving," yours will stand out.
2. Pull back the curtain
What's Thanksgiving going to look like for you this year? Is there a quirky tradition you enjoy every year? A signature dish that you're always responsible for contributing to the Thanksgiving meal? A family member you can't wait to reconnect with? These are the kinds of personal details that people like reading about.
Including some holiday-specific anecdotes is a great way for a small business to familiarize customers and prospective customers with everyone on the team. Pick a question like "your favorite Thanksgiving memory" or "what's the recipe for your favorite Thanksgiving dish" and include everyone's picture and job title along with their response. Or, for a personal newsletter, ask everyone in your family for their answers to those questions.
Traditionally, a newsletter is a way of sharing, well, news. So use yours as an opportunity to catch people up on everything that's been happening in your company (or family) over the last year. Include bullet points to highlight some of the victories, funny moments and changes that have taken place for your group.
Timing really is everything.
After spending all this time crafting the perfect Thanksgiving email, you want people to open it. Open rates peak around 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., so those are the ideal times to schedule your message to hit readers' inboxes. Your best bet is to send it in the morning, before people are too full of pumpkin pie to care about checking their email.
4. Include a Thanksgiving-themed CTA
For businesses, the call to action might be the entire point of sending this message. You want customers to know about a Black Friday sale or think about your products and services as they start holiday shopping. So include a coupon or information on a new promotion, giving it a festive name. For example, advertise a "gratitude sale" or use "gobble" as the coupon code for your website.
5. Make your gratitude message specific
Naturally, you want to close a holiday newsletter with a message of thanks—but what are you going to say exactly? Make your final paragraph personal and heartfelt. Name the people or organizations that have really shown up and helped out this year. Acknowledge the specific challenges that have also shown up this year. Finally, share best wishes for a joyful Thanksgiving and the holiday season ahead. Add some festive GIFs, and your newsletter is done!
Saying "thankful for you" the old-fashioned way.
If you’re planning to send a marketing message with some e-commerce links to a list of thousands, obviously a virtual message is the way to go. But if you’re sending a holiday message of gratitude to a smaller group, like a few dozen family members or your business’s top clients, consider the merits of printing and mailing physical copies. It’s rare to receive physical mail that’s something other than junk mail or a bill. People who might skip your message in their inbox will take time to read it when it lands in their mailbox.