What’s in this article:
- ShopRunner sent an email to customers giving them the option to pause all Mother’s Day communications
- Mother’s Day marketing may feel like spam to some while it may remind others of unfavorable events in their lives
- This is such a great idea – it should be applied to all occasions that might just not be relevant to some
I just got an email from ShopRunner that really got my attention far more than anything I’ve ever seen in a marketing email. The subject line was “Skip our Mother’s Day emails this year.”
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With so much clamor to sign up for emails, some of which have already pushed Mother’s Day marketing in mid-April, this subject line really stood out. So even though I delete most of my ShopRunner emails automatically, just as I do most marketing/promotional emails, I clicked on this one. It showed me this:
Pressing pause took me to a landing page that showed this:
As it says, the pause on Mother’s Day communication doesn’t mean that it is pausing all marketing messages. In fact, right under the banner acknowledging my pause were two banner ads for products it is promoting now.
So, it’s not like ShopRunner is giving up its raison d’etre to promote brands that participate in its program. It’s actually doing them a favor to not push their Mother’s Day marketing in the face of people for whom it is just so much spam.
People can have any number of reasons to find Mother’s Day messaging a pain, whether it is merely irrelevant or a sad reminder that they’ve lost their mothers or mother-figures or even their children. Linking a brand with those negative associations is not the way to make people like it better.
The move is smart because it offers to lessen email fatigue and reduce the irritation of spam. It also puts the shopper in the driver’s seat; they get to decide if they want to receive promotional offers for the holiday, and what we learned about women in The Answer to What Women Want in a Swimsuit Ad applies to shoppers in general.
In fact, I think this is such a great idea that it should be applied to all occasions marketers like to seize on for messaging: Father’s Day, graduations, back to school, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. To really show customers you care let them pick what occasions they’d rather not hear about.