How to Cook Up Special Holiday B2B Emails for Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is more than just turkeys, touchdowns, and time with family. It’s a chance for you to strengthen your customer relationships, build loyalty, and get a fast boost to your annual revenue before the year’s end.
Writing a holiday email for Thanksgiving that feels fresh isn’t easy though.
To make life easier, here are some tactics to use when creating special Turkey Day messages 🦃
Keep Thanksgiving cliches at arm’s length
Your first and foremost priority is to eliminate generic Thanksgiving references and cliches from your B2B copywriting. They work for your Thanksgiving cards to family. Not to B2B clients.
Here are a few Thanksgiving phrases that are overused, overcooked, and best left unmade like that green bean casserole your family never finishes:
- “Grateful for your business”
- “Feast your eyes on our latest offers”
- “Giving thanks for you”
- “Stuffed with gratitude”
Fortunately, Thanksgiving isn’t stuffed (pun intended) with as many natural puns as Halloween or Christmas. This gives you plenty of your dictionary to work with.
At the same time, this means people have already seen the majority of the easy, go-to Thanksgiving references.
Why else do you think Americans started calling Thanksgiving “Turkey Day”? After 200+ years of only calling it Thanksgiving, we were ready for something, anything just to spice up the season 🍃
And turkey happened to be the easiest answer at the time.
So instead of emphasizing thanks, gratitude, and food (especially turkey), try out new ways to weave Thanksgiving into your message. If you’re stuck, you can use ChatGPT to brainstorm Thanksgiving ideas, just like with Halloween.
You should also consider:
- Does your audience even celebrate Thanksgiving?
- Note: Canada has its own Thanksgiving, but it’s in October. Otherwise, Thanksgiving is a strictly US holiday, so it wouldn’t make much sense to send a Thanksgiving email to your leads in Germany or England.
- Will they appreciate puns, wordplay, and Thanksgiving references?
- Can you match Thanksgiving puns to visuals that feature your brand?
- When, where, and how will you use wordplay?
Last but not least, don’t force yourself to write a Thanksgiving reference. There’s no point if it doesn’t add value.
Connect Thanksgiving with your business goals
When writing Thanksgiving-themed B2B emails, your mission is to keep your email focused on delivering value to your customers. Nothing stops you from using Thanksgiving as the reason for a touchpoint, but there must be some sort of value in it for customers.
Here are a few ideas of what you can do:
- Ungate and share a certain resource like a Buyer’s Guide or a task checklist
- Provide free, limited access to one of your tools or features
- Offer a partnership opportunity or referral bonus
You can explain to customers that because it’s Thanksgiving and you’re thankful for their business, you wanted to show your gratitude in a meaningful way.
Leverage Black Friday deals for effective Thanksgiving emails
The simplest angle for any Thanksgiving email is a Black Friday deal. Not only does it give you a reason to write (i.e. share news about special offers and discounts), Black Friday has become an international event.
You can even use a “Thanksgiving-to-Black Friday Countdown” special to build a sense of urgency with a limited-time deal. Or maybe you create bundles with Thanksgiving-inspired names for customers to om nom on.
However, if you do run a Thanksgiving-themed Black Friday campaign, you’re better off targeting just your US customers since other countries don’t celebrate and won’t be as inclined to click. Also, you’ll want to build in some time before and after Thanksgiving for people to claim the offer. Otherwise, they won’t be very happy if they have to sacrifice family (and football) time just to make sure they don’t miss out.
Check out pop culture and viral Thanksgiving trends
Thanksgiving B2B emails have to meet 4 challenges:
- Be relevant to the holiday and the audience
- Be timely
- Avoid cliches
- Offer something unique without overlapping with Halloween or Christmas
To achieve all four, you can try recent pop culture, viral trends, and even nostalgia.
Thanksgiving doesn’t get as many movies as Halloween or Christmas, and the message of ‘family’ is heavily shared with the latter.
Still, you do have A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, You’ve Got Mail, and the Thanksgiving episodes of Friends or How I Met Your Mother (Slapsgiving, anyone?). We’re intentionally omitting the “Thanksgiving” horror film.
For viral trends, you’ll need to scroll TikTok or YouTube shorts. Maybe there’s a fun turkey recipe that sounds more horrifying than tasty.
And if all else fails, there’s always football. This might not work though if the Detroit Lions or Dallas Cowboys are having a down year.
Add a clear call to action
We’ve said it before. We’ll say it again.
Every email needs a clear purpose that drives company growth and delivers value.
So don’t send B2B Thanksgiving emails for Thanksgiving’s sake.
A good, clear CTA will drive engagement, especially if there’s something in it for the customer. This might be:
- Claim my offer
- Get my discount
- Download my guide
Notice the slight personalization? Not just “Download guide” or “Claim offer”. You sneakily add “my” between the verb and object to add a sense of ownership and emotion.
To get people to engage faster, you might restrict your Black Friday deal to the first 50 customers.
Find a balance between fun and professional
If your solution has nothing to do with Thanksgiving and you have nothing to offer, you shouldn’t be writing a Thanksgiving B2B email. Especially if you’re not even targeting American prospects and customers.
No one will stop doing business with you because you didn’t send a Thanksgiving email. But they might stop doing business if they think you’re wasting their time with pointless, irrelevant emails.
So before you send a fun Thanksgiving message, take a second and think about whether it will actually help you move toward your business goals.
