Behind the build: Halloween Email Weekly

How we conjured a personalised Halloween inbox experience

Meet the team

For our Halloween Email Weekly takeover this year, we partnered with the team at Multiplied – South African-based personalised media wizards, known for creating data-driven campaigns at scale.

We let them run wild with our newsletter audience, blending basic CRM behaviour data, creative firepower, and their automation platform to bring you an inbox haunting that might just keep you up at night.

Below, the Multiplied team walks us through how they did it.
P.S. Jump to the end if you’re just here to see the cards you didn’t get.

Inbox Hocus Pocus

For this year’s Halloween campaign, we wanted to push GIFs-in-inbox to their absolute limit.

Creatively, that meant bold illustration, a limited colour palette, and a determination to make ridiculously long GIFs while keeping file sizes (just about) under control. Tarot-style cards felt like the perfect storytelling device – strong visuals, mobile-friendly, and a nod to that Halloween mystique.

The concept soon took shape: “Your data, your reading.”

But fancy visuals only work if there’s a story behind them. And that’s where the magic of data came in.

Turning behaviour into storytelling

We started with the basics – opens, clicks, join date, device, and email client – and turned that raw data into something meaningful.

By layering in group-level stats (like averages across our entire list), we gave individual insights more depth and context. From there, we used simple logic to create secondary insights – for instance, transforming a date joined into tenure and linking that to our tongue-in-cheek “lunar cycles.”

Once the mechanics were in place, the creative team got to work. Dynamic templates are the engine of any personalised campaign, and each one was built specifically for this project.

We also introduced playful data visualisation – designed, tested, and occasionally broken until it behaved itself. Because data is rarely perfect (looking at you, First name Kkjaufhasdjhfdyurehg), trusty fallbacks kept the spell intact for every subscriber.

From vision to inbox

When the design files landed, the ActionRocket team got straight to work, bringing every animated detail to life in code. With automation prepped and tests complete, we hit send – and watched our Halloween reading spread through inboxes far and wide.

What we learned

This project reminded us that personalisation doesn’t have to mean complexity. Sometimes, all it takes is a clever creative idea, a few well-chosen data points, and a team willing to experiment.

Halloween may come once a year, but the magic of good storytelling, sharp design, and smart data never fades.

Want to see more of our work (and maybe your future fate)?
Take a look at what else we’ve been conjuring over at ActionRocket.co.