As it’s well known in the email marketing community, occasions are a great way to engage your email list. They present an opportunity to design a special message to engage, inform, and eventually promote your products. We’ve seen Valentine’s day campaigns do wonders for gift and product sales, and we’ve seen Women’s day campaigns serve as an opportunity to celebrate womanhood, give a nod to special women, and of course sell more women-targeted products.
Mothers’ day, celebrated on May 8th in the US, is no different. Most brands would have a campaign or two up their sleeve to send to their customers urging them to celebrate mothers with an appropriately selected gift.
However, more and more brands are now letting their email list opt out of mother’s day (or any other day that celebrates a familial relation for that matter) And it’s a great thing and another step towards being responsible marketers. Here’s why.
While most people are lucky enough to have mothers, and mothers that deserve being made to feel special on this day, for many people this isn’t the case. Some may have lost their mothers, some may not be able to become mothers, or some may not have the greatest relationship with their mothers or another reason why they can’t celebrate the day. And for those people, this day may be far from a celebration and an email around it may trigger negative emotions, discomfort or even more extreme mental agony to the point they unsubscribe to your emails altogether! An email purported to make a mother or children of one feel good may end up backfiring if any of the above-mentioned unfortunate scenarios apply to them. Not to mention, it’s rather tone deaf. In the light of Covid19, where millions of people in the US alone, especially amongst the elderly have lost their lives, there’s a high chance that some members of your email list have lost a parent or know someone who has. Given that the typical target audience of an ecommerce store is in the age group of 25-45, many of whose parents could have been affected by Covid19. So for these reasons and more, it’s best for brands to not assume that all their email list will be receptive to a mother’s day marketing message and it would serve them well to make it strictly opt in. It’s the right thing to do, it shows the brand is not engaged in a mindless, insensitive cash grab, and that the company actually has empathy.
The beauty of email marketing is that it can be highly customised and segmented and you choose whom to include and exclude instead of blasting the same message to a mass audience. So, if you’re a brand or an ecommerce store which is planning to do a mother’s day blast, hold on. First, send a pre-email asking your email list to opt out, well in advance. This will eliminate the chance of hitting a raw nerve and inadvertently hurting your customers’ feelings. Plus, it’s actually a smart marketing call since it will project your company as one that has empathy, that respects the diversity of their customers and that will in turn garner your brand a lot more brownie points than an email blast or two could.
Fortunately more brands are now realising this, embracing a responsibility towards their customers’ personal state of mind, instead of mindlessly blasting campaigns at large. There are several examples of emails wherein a brand has asked their recipients to opt out of any occasion specific email campaign if they so wish to.
Here’s an email we did for one of our own clients, letting them opt-out of Mothers’ Day specific marketing this year.
How to create an email campaign that lets your audience opt out of a future campaign without unsubscribing?
It’s simple. You create a campaign which explains to the audience that if they wish to do so, they can opt out from any mother’s day related content by clicking on the opt out button.
On Klaviyo, on that button you set a link to the website + a UTM that allows you to monitor the clicks on it. Then you create a segment with all the people who have clicked on the link that contains the UTM. And then for every Mother’s Day related content you send you exclude this segment
Here’s another example of such a campaign from Kitsch that goes into a little more detail about why Mother’s Day reminders can be painful for some.
That said, do continue to plan a great mother’s day campaign all the same. Those amazing mothers need to be reminded of their awesomeness, acknowledged for all their work and of course be pampered silly with a gift or two. But just be sensitive to those who do not have that privilege.
