6 Thanksgiving email campaign ideas to connect with customers this holiday season

---

Thanksgiving is a marketing goldmine waiting to be tapped.

As ecommerce brands prepare for the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales frenzy, Thanksgiving is the calm before the storm—a time when brands can still engage customers, but when their inboxes are (slightly) less crowded.

Thanksgiving may be inseparable from the BFCM rush, but that doesn’t mean your messaging has to be purely promotional. Customers are already reflecting on what they’re thankful for, giving you the perfect opportunity to connect with them on a deeper level before the sales kick off.

Whether you’re sharing heartfelt stories, offering early deals, or simply expressing gratitude, a well-crafted Thanksgiving email can strengthen loyalty and keep your brand top of mind when Black Friday hits.

As we explore Thanksgiving email campaign ideas and tips, you’ll discover ways to connect with your audience, spread some holiday joy, and boost sales while you’re at it.

1. Send an early-access BFCM discount to loyal customers

Thanksgiving is about expressing thanks, and one of the best ways to get a head start on BFCM revenue is to thank your most loyal customers with an early-access discount.

Depending on your goals, you can segment your most high-value customers in several ways:

• General high spenders: people who spent above a certain threshold throughout the year
• BFCM high spenders: people who spent above a certain threshold during BFCM last year
• Frequent purchasers: people who made more small purchases throughout the year
• Referrers: people who have recommended your brand to others
• Loyalty tier: people who have a certain amount of loyalty points
• Omnichannel buyers: people who shop across multiple channels, such as your brick-and-mortar store, mobile app, online storefront and self-service customer hub, etc.
• High-margin shoppers: people who tend to buy in product categories with high margins

If you want to generate more complex segments, consider using a plain language AI prompt to home in on more specific groups. For example, you may want to target omnichannel buyers within a few miles of a specific store, or people who have referred your brand and have a certain number of loyalty points.

Especially when your customer profile database is large, specificity is your friend when you’re segmenting. The more complex the segment, the more relevant the offer will be.

Thanksgiving email marketing example: Égard sends a special BFCM treat to loyal customers

In this Thanksgiving email, luxury watch brand Égard thanks their customers with a 25% BFCM discount.

This is a great baseline example for a BFCM-related Thanksgiving email: it’s Thanksgiving-themed and intended for loyal customers, and it offers a discount ahead of Black Friday.

One way Égard could increase relevance would be to send a higher discount offer to a smaller subset of their audience, such as high spenders who are predicted to churn. This is a great way to win back loyal customers during a busy season.

Source: Deal Town

2. Link your Thanksgiving email campaign to charitable giving

Many brands use Thanksgiving as an opportunity to highlight how they give back to their communities.

By sharing your brand’s charitable efforts in your Thanksgiving email campaign, you can show that your purpose goes beyond sales and build stronger connections with your customers. This can motivate them to support your business, knowing their purchase contributes to a meaningful cause.

To keep engagement rates high, consider gathering more data about your customers before this campaign launch to make sure it’s reaching the right people.

If your brand has an established partnership with a charitable organization, consider launching a form on your website that gathers contact information specifically for a charity-related newsletter. For your existing subscribers, send an email encouraging them to visit a custom landing page or form on your site to sign up.

That way, when you launch a revenue-generating charity initiative, you’ll have the option to send to the specific subset of your audience you know has an interest in your charitable giving.

Thanksgiving email marketing example: Latico Leathers connects Thanksgiving to feeding families

Here, Latico Leathers thanks customers for their support and their role in helping provide meals to families in need.

The email copy emphasizes how customer purchases have contributed to donating over 100,000 meals to nonprofit organization Feeding America, making customers feel like an essential part of the brand’s charitable initiatives.

Source: Deal Town

3. Send product education to high-intent shoppers

High-intent shoppers are people who have taken certain actions that indicate they’re almost ready to buy. They’re shoppers who:

• Browsed a product page a certain number of times on your website
• Placed an item in their cart but didn’t complete a purchase
• Created a wishlist in their self-service customer hub but haven’t bought yet
• Downloaded your mobile app but haven’t purchased yet
• Took other actions to indicate a predicted next order date that’s coming soon

You can identify these high-intent shoppers by collecting first-party customer data that tracks subscriber interactions with your brand. When you have this data, you can determine who is in the consideration stage of the customer lifecycle and send them product education that can nudge them toward a sale.

For Thanksgiving, this is especially important if you sell products in the food and beverage or home and kitchen categories. Or if you’re a luxury brand with higher priced items, Thanksgiving could be the perfect opportunity to assure undecided shoppers that your products are worth the investment.

Thanksgiving email marketing example: Work Sharp helps shoppers have a great Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving email from Work Sharp, a knife sharpener brand, recommends the chef’s knife and the paring knife for Thanksgiving cooking activities. The brand also reminds subscribers that the best time to sharpen their knives is when the turkey is resting, which will ultimately keep them safe while using their knives.

Source: Deal Town

4. Gather customer reviews for Thanksgiving emails

Thanksgiving is a time to express gratitude, and what better way to do so than by highlighting customer reviews in your Thanksgiving email campaign?

Collecting customer reviews should be an easy process through automated flows. Automated flows are messages that are triggered by certain events, such as ordering a product. With customer review flows, you can set up a review request that goes out automatically after the customer has had a chance to get the most out of your product. This is one of the best ways to get high-quality, detailed reviews.

If you sell in product categories that are particularly relevant for Thanksgiving, you may even want to collect reviews that specifically mention the holiday. You can encourage reviews like this by creating custom review questions that allude to the holiday and capture holiday-specific sentiment.

Thanksgiving email marketing example: Even Realities sends a detailed product use account

Smart glasses brand Even Realities doesn’t sell a Thanksgiving product, but that doesn’t stop them from highlighting a detailed customer story for the holiday.

Levi Michalski, a software developer and “creative soul,” submitted a detailed account of how his Even G1 smart glasses have helped him with creative writing, learning new languages, and writing code. The only indicator that this is a Thanksgiving campaign is at the beginning and end of the email, when the brand expresses a desire to make this Thanksgiving a stylish one.

Source: Really Good Emails

5. Encourage people to create a Thanksgiving wishlist on your website

According to Klaviyo’s latest state of B2C marketing report, 73% of marketers report rising customer acquisition costs (CACs) in 2025. This places a lot of pressure on brands to reduce their acquisition costs by turning customer service into a revenue driver.

As a result, more brands are creating self-serve hubs that can double as a customer service touchpoint and an extension of their online store. One of the ways these hubs are generating revenue is through wishlists.

When customers create an account on your website, they can add products they’re interested in to their wishlist for later purchase. This is a win-win situation for customers and brands: customers get to curate their own mini-store and brands get more customer data for better targeting.

For Thanksgiving, send an email to high-intent shoppers letting them know they can create a wishlist for Thanksgiving-related items. To sweeten the deal, include a bundle offer that gives people a discount for buying a certain number of wishlisted items. This is a great way to boost average order value (AOV) around BFCM.

Thanksgiving marketing example: POPFLEX encourages people to create a wishlist on their website

In 2023, activewear brand POPFLEX launched a shopping spree giveaway in October, ahead of Thanksgiving. But instead of engaging on social media, participants had to create a holiday wishlist on the POPFLEX website in order to partake.

Nearly 100,000 customers entered to win, which gave the brand a ton of valuable customer data to use for targeted holiday messaging throughout the rest of the season. This strategy helped contribute to a 91% YoY increase in ecomm revenue from their BFCM sale.

6. Promote a Thanksgiving-inspired collection through email

As we’ve seen with POPFLEX and Even Realities, you don’t need to offer traditional Thanksgiving items to entice your customers to buy your products on Thanksgiving. Even if your products aren’t explicitly tied to the holiday, you can capture the Thanksgiving spirit by promoting items that reflect the season’s colors, themes, or moods.

Thanksgiving email marketing example: Dashing Diva launches fall-inspired nail designs

Check out this creative example from nail care brand Dashing Diva. In their Thanksgiving newsletter, they introduce “The Thankful Edit”—a collection of fall-inspired nail designs featuring autumn colors and unique patterns that evoke the spirit of Thanksgiving.

Source: Deal Town

Segment customer data and send more relevant emails with Klaviyo B2C CRM

No matter the holiday, a large part of your revenue is in no small part determined by how well you can personalize your campaigns year-round—and that means centralizing customer data, segmenting those profiles, and sending offers that are relevant to them.

Klaviyo B2C CRM makes it easy for brands to collect the zero- and first-party data they need to deliver personalized experiences for their customers. As a data platform with email and SMS automation, customer service, and analytics under one roof, Klaviyo B2C CRM is making it possible for brands to scale personalization for thousands or even millions of customers.