Christmas email campaign: 9 tips to stand out before the holidays

A Christmas email campaign is a series of emails from November to New Year's Eve that helps people choose their gifts in time and reminds them of your company when they receive more emails than at any other time of the year. The emails that succeed arrive on time, reach the right people and carry a clear deadline. Prepare your plan in October, split recipients into groups, state in every email the last day to order so the gift arrives under the tree, and do not overdo the number of emails. Here you will find 9 tips for Christmas email marketing and your Christmas newsletter, the 2026 season calendar, an email schedule, subject line examples and figures from last Christmas.

Key takeaways

1. Christmas gifts are bought online. In Deloitte's 2025 survey, US shoppers planned to buy 56% of their gifts online, and global online holiday sales reached $1.29 trillion according to Salesforce.
2. People shop earlier than it seems. In Deloitte's 2025 survey, US shoppers had spent 24% of their holiday budget by the end of October, and according to the Czech e-commerce association APEK, demand peaks around Black Friday and around 10 December.
3. The most important information in December emails is the last day to order for delivery before Christmas Eve. After that, only digital gift cards and in store pickup can help.
4. People look first at who is writing to them. In a 2017 Quanda survey of 311 email recipients, 56% look first at the sender, 30% at the subject line and 14% at the preheader.
5. A blanket "everything for everyone" email gets lost in full inboxes. Three well written offers for three groups work better than one for all.
6. Too many emails drive people away: according to a 2025 Litmus and Validity survey, 49% of people unsubscribed from a brand's holiday emails because there were too many.

In short: when to start, key dates, what works and what to watch out for

• When to start: plan and segments in October, first Christmas email in November, main emails from 1 to 20 December.
• Key dates 2026: first Sunday of Advent 29 Nov, St Nicholas Day 6 Dec, Christmas Eve on Thursday 24 December 2026, last delivery date about a week earlier depending on the carrier.
• What works: segments, a specific subject line with a deadline, a sender people know, and emails that help rather than just sell.
• What to watch out for: sending only to people with consent, watching unsubscribes and keeping spam complaints below 0.1%.

What has changed since the article was first published: The original nine tips from 2019 still apply today and remain in the article. I have added the 2026 Christmas season calendar, a week by week email schedule, delivery deadlines, subject line examples, Christmas 2025 results, current mobile figures, Gmail's requirements for bulk senders and tips on what to send after Christmas.

Christmas season calendar 2026

The Christmas season in email marketing is the period from Black Friday to New Year's Eve, when people buy gifts and companies send more emails than at any other time of the year. In 2026 it looks like this:

For your emails, this means one thing. From Black Friday to Christmas Eve there is less than a month, and in the last week you can no longer deliver most goods in time. Your main Christmas offer has only about three weeks of December.

Christmas 2025 in numbers

Christmas emails are read by people who are ready to buy and who do more and more of their shopping online. This is what last season showed:

Sources: Adobe, 2025 holiday season results (7 Jan 2026); Salesforce, 2025 holiday season results (8 Jan 2026); Deloitte, 2025 Holiday Retail Survey (15 Oct 2025); Litmus, survey with Validity (22 Oct 2025); Omnisend, ecommerce statistics report 2026.

What people put under the tree tells you which segments and gift ideas to prepare. Here is what online shoppers in Czechia, where Quanda comes from, planned to buy:

The numbers hold three lessons for your emails. First, people shop early and keep shopping until the last days, and online sales grew fastest in the last two weeks of December, so your main Christmas offer belongs in the first three weeks of December, strongest around 10 December, followed by your last minute options. Second, more than a third of people want to buy gift cards, so offer them mainly after the last delivery date. And third, almost half of people unsubscribed from holiday emails because there were too many. Fewer emails with better content win.

Christmas email schedule 2026

A Christmas campaign is a series of emails, not a single email. This is what a plan can look like for an online store that wants to cover the whole season without overwhelming subscribers:

Adjust the plan to your own numbers. A smaller company may need just three emails: gift ideas, the last delivery date and Christmas greetings. In Quanda you prepare campaigns in advance and schedule the sending for a specific day and time, so in the busiest weeks you only watch the results.

9 tips for a successful Christmas email campaign

1. Pay even more attention to segmenting your recipients

Segmentation is dividing contacts into groups based on what you know about them, so that each group gets an offer that interests it. The more precisely you target the content of your emails, the more attention you get. So avoid blanket "everything for everyone" campaigns. This approach never works well, and especially not at a time when the recipient is also getting a pile of other emails.

Split your recipients by their previous activity, past purchases, purchase frequency, sales potential, product category or the way they use your product. Prepare a tailored Christmas offer for each segment, for example gift ideas for children for parents and separate ones for people buying gifts for their partners. In Quanda you create the groups with tags and the recipient filter, which can also filter by other data stored with your contacts.

But do not overdo the number of segments. If you create too many segments and then cannot prepare an individual offer for each of them, it will not help you much. Three well written offers are better than ten rushed ones.

2. Choose the right day and time to send

There is no rule that Tuesday is the best and Sunday the worst. Every company is different. Respect the expectations and habits of the people you email, and do not be afraid to send emails on Friday or at the weekend. Unless it clearly goes against the habits of your industry, you may find that Friday afternoon, Saturday or Sunday evening is the time when your email does not get lost among dozens of others. A 2017 Quanda survey of 311 email recipients showed that over 70% of people check their email at weekends too.

In December, a simple trick also pays off: do not send on the hour. At 9:00, thousands of other emails go out, so try 8:40 or 10:20 instead.

Tip: An AI assistant connected to Quanda via the Quanda MCP server can work out from your campaign history when your recipients actually open emails.

3. Fine tune the sender, subject line and preheader

The recipient sees the sender, the subject line and the preheader as soon as your email arrives, before opening it.

A 2017 Quanda survey of 311 email recipients confirms this: 56% of people look at the sender first, 30% at the subject line and 14% at the preheader. A specific name of a person or company the recipient knows works much better than a bare address like info@company.com.

Be creative with your subject line, but choose directness and simplicity over manipulation. In December, recipients get dozens of emails with the word Christmas in them, so your subject line has to say what you offer and when it ends.

The preheader is a short text shown next to or below the subject line. Use it for what did not fit into the subject line, for example "Free shipping over EUR 60". You can insert the recipient's name into the subject line and the text using personalization. You will find more in the articles How to write an email subject line people actually open and Email preheader: 9 tips for writing preview text.

4. Create real urgency and state the delivery deadline

Always tie your Christmas offer, together with a gift, discount code or other reward, to a time limit. This creates real urgency, and people who are considering a purchase will be much more motivated to actually complete it. Phrases like "today only", "until midnight tonight" or "only for the next 2 days" help get recipients moving.

Before Christmas you also have a deadline you do not need to invent: the last day to order for delivery before Christmas Eve. It is the most important information in December emails.

In 2025, carriers in most EU countries recommended handing in parcels around Friday 19 December for delivery before Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve 2026 falls on a Thursday, so count on about Friday 18 December. Carriers usually publish their exact dates in November, so check them with your own carriers. Set your own order deadline a day or two earlier so you have time to ship the goods.

Pickup lockers and express delivery help too. With them, people could order almost until Christmas Eve. If you offer these options, say so in your emails.

After the last delivery date, switch your emails to what can still be done in time:

• Digital gift cards you can email even on Christmas Eve.
• Pickup in store or at a pickup point.
• Extended opening hours and your holiday schedule.

If your email announces a discount on specific products, calculate it from the lowest price in the previous 30 days. Across the EU, this rule comes from the Omnibus directive. Details are in the article Black Friday Email Marketing: 10 Tips for a Successful Campaign.

5. Take care with design and how the email looks on mobile

Create beautiful emails. The form of an email is communication too. Always use only high quality photos and have the whole email professionally designed if you are not good at it yourself. A professional looking email attracts much more attention.

At Christmas, people don't just read on mobile, they shop there too. According to Adobe, 56.4% of US online purchases in the 2025 season were made on mobile, and on Christmas Day as many as 66.5%. So make sure your emails display perfectly on mobile too.

Emails from the Quanda editor display correctly on mobile, but a few rules still apply: one main offer at the top, one prominent button with specific text, the discount code as text rather than in an image, and the delivery deadline clearly visible. Some email programs also do not load images by default, so do not build the whole email as one Christmas picture. You will find out how in the article Can't see images in an email? Styled alt text shows a headline.

6. Pay close attention to the landing page

A landing page is the web page that opens as soon as the recipient clicks a button, image or link in your email. This page has its own rules too. Focus only on completing the action the recipient came for. Make the page as simple as possible and remove all unnecessary "stuff", distracting banners and irrelevant links.

Match the design of the email and the landing page and use as many shared elements as possible. The email should be a mirror of your landing page. Do not make recipients search for anything after clicking or wonder for long whether they are in the right place. A link to "Gifts for dads" should lead straight to a selection of gifts for dads, not to the home page. Support the page's credibility with reviews, the delivery deadline and clear return terms.

7. Keep it simple

People should understand from your email within a few seconds what you are offering and what they need to do to get it. People spend much less time reading emails than they are willing to spend reading content on a website. So if you have information that needs more text, put it on the landing page and use only a headline and a short intro with a prominent link in the email. Do not overcomplicate the email visually either, snowflakes and bells must not drown out the offer.

8. If you really want to fine tune everything, use A/B testing

A/B testing compares two versions of an email on part of your recipients, after which the rest receive the more successful one. It lets you fine tune the subject line and content to get the most out of your campaigns. If you want to find out which words in the subject line work better or which button colour or number of links brings more clicks, use a campaign with A/B testing.

Time is short at Christmas, so test right away on your first Christmas email at the end of November and use the winning subject line style in your main December campaigns.

9. Do not overdo the number of emails

Your recipients will "tell" you when you are sending too many emails. As soon as open and click rates drop and the number of unsubscribes rises, you know it is too much. In some industries, three emails a week are perfectly fine, while elsewhere it is too many.

In December, though, watch complaints more closely than at other times. Gmail requires bulk senders to keep their spam complaint rate below 0.3% and recommends keeping it below 0.1%. And too many emails drive people away: according to a 2025 Litmus and Validity survey, 49% of people unsubscribed from a brand's holiday emails precisely because there were too many, and the largest group, 25%, want to hear from brands once a week during the season. Send at most one email during the season to people who have not opened your emails for a long time. In Quanda you find them with contact scoring by open rate.

Automation helps you send fewer but better targeted emails. According to Omnisend, automated emails made up only 2% of sends in 2025 but 30% of email revenue.

Christmas emails that are not about discounts

A Christmas newsletter doesn't have to be just an offer. If you send nothing but offers, people will stop reading you before the best one arrives. So add content to your sales emails that genuinely helps people before Christmas:

• Gift guides by price, recipient or hobby.
• Practical information: delivery deadlines, holiday opening hours, support contacts.
• Practical tips on what people buy from you, such as how to wrap a gift or how to use it.
• A thank you and a review of the year without a sales message.
• New Year greetings with a personal signature, which also suit companies that do not sell anything.

In B2B, a Christmas email is above all an opportunity to say thank you. Thanking clients for working with you, a summary of what you achieved together during the year, practical information about the holidays and New Year greetings work better than a discount. If companies spend their remaining budgets at the end of the year, add an offer with a 31 December deadline. You will find more about emails for business customers in the article Email marketing in B2B: why it still works in 2026.

What to send after Christmas

The season does not end on Christmas Eve. The days between the holidays are quieter and people have more time for emails:

• A thank you to customers for their Christmas purchase and a tip on how to use the gift.
• Gift returns and exchanges: clear terms and deadlines. When buying online, consumers in the EU have the right to withdraw from the contract within 14 days of receiving the goods, and many online stores extend this period over Christmas.
• Gift card redemption and the post Christmas sale.
• Campaign evaluation: which groups, subject lines and times worked. Save your notes for next year.

Checklist before sending a Christmas email

Before you send your Christmas campaign, go through this list:

• The campaign goes only to contacts with consent and existing customers, not to your whole old database.
• Recipients are split into groups and each one gets its own offer.
• The sender is a name recipients know.
• The subject line says what you offer and until when, and the preheader adds what did not fit into it.
• The last day to order for delivery before Christmas is visible in the email.
• The button leads straight to the offer and the page works on mobile.
• The email makes sense even without loaded images.
• The spam test is fine and you have checked the test email on a computer and on a mobile.
• Sending is scheduled and you know who is watching the campaign and who solves problems.

Conclusion

Christmas is won by those who start in time, write to the right people and help them get their gifts in time. Prepare your plan in October, split your recipients, write a specific subject line with a deadline, state the last delivery date and watch for the point when there are too many emails.

If you want to go deeper into seasonal campaigns, take the free online course Email Copywriting and Design That Gets Read with a lesson on seasonal campaigns. And if you are not sure how to set up your Christmas campaign in Quanda, get in touch. We will go through it with you and advise you on what to adjust.

Fingers crossed, and I wish you a successful Christmas!