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The Gist
- Empathy requires intentional design. Respecting sensitive moments like Mother’s Day isn’t automatic—it requires deliberate choices that prioritize customer emotions over short-term gains.
- Small audiences, high stakes. Even if fewer than 1% opt out, those customers may represent high lifetime value—and losing them risks long-term revenue erosion.
- Zero-party data beats assumptions. Explicit preferences (like opt-outs) outperform behavioral guesses, especially for life events that data can’t predict.
- Respect drives retention. Ignoring sensitivities risks disengagement or churn, while honoring preferences strengthens trust and future engagement.
- Consistency across channels matters. If customers opt out in one channel, brands must honor that preference everywhere to avoid appearing tone-deaf or disingenuous.
Being empathetic is hard. If it were easy, then every brand would do it. Because it takes time and effort, that often means getting approval from your boss, who may not see the ROI in catering to the sensitivities of sometimes relatively small segments of customers.
A great case in point is Mother’s Day opt-outs, where brands give their subscribers the opportunity to be suppressed from receiving Mother’s Day promotions. Here’s a dramatization of how you might respond to your boss if they’re not seeing the value in providing this option.
Table of Contents
- Time for Empathy, Not Feeding the Marketing Funnel
- The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Customer Sensitivity
- Customer Choice Isn’t a Trend — It’s Table Stakes
- Virtue Signaling or Smart Customer Experience?
Time for Empathy, Not Feeding the Marketing Funnel
Boss: Why would we let our subscribers opt-out of Mother’s Day messages?
You: Because some of our subscribers have lost their mothers and our Mother’s Day promotions will make them feel sad—or even traumatized. We don’t want our brand to make our customers feel that way. That’s bad for our brand image.
How much revenue are we going to lose if we let them opt out? Even people who have lost their mothers have mother-in-laws, step-mothers, and other mother-like figures in their lives.
While that’s true for many but not all people, the revenue opportunity is negligible, because anyone who would opt out has already decided they aren’t in the market to buy near-term. Could we change their mind with a really compelling offer or product suggestion? Maybe. But it’s a long shot that carries risks.
Related Article: The Unsubscribe Experience Is Part of CX. Treat It That Way.
The Hidden Cost of Ignoring Customer Sensitivity
What’s the risk of sending Mother’s Day campaigns to people who would prefer not to receive them?The risk is they ignore our campaigns for a few months, which could turn into many months once they’ve gotten into the habit of tuning us out. Or, even worse, they could decide to opt out completely. Then we wouldn’t be able to send them messaging they’d actually be interested in. We either lose out on revenue from these customers for many months, or forever. We should avoid both other scenarios and let them opt out of Mother’s Day messaging and send them something else instead.
We run a data-driven marketing program. Why don’t we just pay attention to who doesn’t engage with our Mother’s Day campaigns and then suppress them in the future?
Besides the fact that we’d be driving inactivity and churn rates among this audience, sensitivity around Mother’s Day is not a backward-looking phenomenon. To state the obvious, people often lose their mothers without warning. Implied preferences are inherently limited in their ability to respond to sudden changes like this. Even in the age of AI, there’s no way for us to predict that from our first-party data. The only other option is to ask and collect zero-party data, which is what a Mother’s Day opt-out is.
Also, using backward-looking data like that might cause us to start suppressing Mother’s Day campaigns to a subscriber around the time that they’re coping with the loss better and actually open once again to getting this messaging. As you pointed out, many people do have mother-in-laws, step-mothers and other mother-like figures in their lives. So, relying on engagement data in this case might actually cause us to mis-time the opportunity in both the near-term and medium-term.
Related Article: How Ethical Are Your Digital Marketing Tactics?
Customer Choice Isn’t a Trend — It’s Table Stakes
If we were to allow our subscribers to opt out of Mother’s Day messaging, how long would that opt out last?
It would last for the current year, but we could do an A/B split test and see what the difference is between suppressing Mother’s Day email, SMS and push messages for 1 year versus 2.
Wait. I thought we were only talking about our Mother’s Day email campaigns. Why would we also suppress our Mother’s Day SMS and push campaigns?
If they feel strongly enough to opt out of Mother’s Day campaigns in the email marketing channel, why would we ignore that clear and explicit preference in other channels? We wouldn’t want them to think we’re ignoring their request on a technicality that they didn’t make the identical request in every marketing channel that they’re opted into with us. That’s not very customer-friendly.
What percentage of our subscribers would opt out of our Mother’s Day promotions?
Probably less than 1%.
That’s small. Why would we go through all the trouble of offering Mother’s Day opt-outs for such a small audience?
Because of the 80-20 rule. Some of these subscribers will be among our best customers that drive 80% of our revenue and profits. We can’t afford to lose any of them. Also, it’s an opportunity to grow our Mother’s Day market share in future years.
How do we grow our market share by suppressing Mother’s Day campaigns? That’s the opposite of growth.
That’s how many of our competitors will see it. While they alienate and churn their subscribers who are sensitive about this issue, we’ll give them options and respect their preferences—and then get more of their business going forward because we’ll have fewer competitors in the inbox.
Plus, some of these subscribers might share on social media that we gave them the option of opting out of Mother’s Day campaigns, or mention it to their friends and family members. That evangelism is free advertising.
I’m doubtful about those two points, because I’ve heard that a lot of other brands are doing this, and I don’t want to follow the crowd. Seems like a fad.
It’s not as prevalent as you might think. It’s not even close to being a majority practice. But even if it was, offering subscribers choices and respecting those choices is hardly a practice that’s diminished by increased adoption. It’s not a zero-sum game.
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For instance, nearly every brand sends responsive emails, and a growing majority of brands also use dark mode-optimization and inclusive design. Increasing adoption of these practices actually makes them more valuable and more essential, because it solidifies consumer expectations that they deserve these kinds of positive experiences. Could we stand out by going against the grain? Yes. But we’d stand out in a bad way, putting us at a competitive disadvantage.
There are other ways to stand out strategically. Let’s blend in on creating respectful and functional customer experiences.
Related Article: Things I’ve Read About Email Marketing That Are Simply Wrong
Core Tenets of Mother’s Day Opt-Out Strategy
Editor's note: A breakdown of the strategic, data and CX principles behind offering sensitive campaign opt-outs.
| Tenet | What It Means | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Empathy Over Efficiency | Design campaigns that account for emotional context, not just conversion potential. | Prevents brand damage and builds long-term trust with customers during sensitive moments. |
| Zero-Party Data First | Ask customers directly about preferences instead of relying on inferred behavior. | Captures real-time intent that behavioral data and AI cannot predict. |
| Small Segments, High Value | Even sub-1% opt-out audiences may include your most valuable customers. | Losing them risks disproportionate revenue and lifetime value impact. |
| Retention Over Short-Term Revenue | Avoid pushing campaigns that may generate immediate sales but harm long-term engagement. | Protects against churn, disengagement, and full unsubscribe scenarios. |
| Cross-Channel Consistency | Honor opt-out preferences across email, SMS, push, and all touchpoints. | Prevents perception of insincerity or technical loophole exploitation. |
| Timing Matters More Than Targeting | Avoid relying solely on backward-looking engagement data for sensitive moments. | Prevents mistimed outreach during periods of grief or recovery. |
| Clarity Over Creativity | Use familiar, straightforward language for opt-outs rather than clever messaging. | Improves comprehension and reduces friction in sensitive interactions. |
| Respect as Differentiation | Compete by honoring preferences while others ignore them. | Creates long-term competitive advantage and potential word-of-mouth advocacy. |
| Action Over Intent | Focus on what customers experience, not internal motivations like ROI or optics. | Customers judge brands by behavior, not strategy rationale. |
| Scalable Empathy | Extend opt-out logic to other sensitive occasions (Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day). | Builds a repeatable, systemized approach to respectful CX. |
Virtue Signaling or Smart Customer Experience?
I’ve also heard this is just virtue signaling for the purpose of getting extra clicks. I don’t want us to come across as insincere.As a click strategy, it’s not very effective. Again, click rates on Mother’s Day messaging opt-outs are less than 1%. So, I hope that’s not a motivation for other brands, because they’ll be disappointed.
In terms of virtue signaling, let’s focus on action and impact, not motivation. Will everyone at our brand believe this is the right thing to do? Probably not. Will everyone believe this practice generates a return on our investment? I’m confident we can prove that. And if we do the right thing only because of the ROI, I’m fine with that. Our customers won’t know the difference. They’ll only know that we gave them a choice and respected it.
Can we at least use different subject lines and messaging for our Mother’s Day opt-outs? All the examples I’ve seen use very similar language.
We can look for opportunities to put our own stamp on our messaging, but the goal is clarity and efficiency of communication. By using language that’s similar to our peers, that makes our message easier to understand, which is a plus.
In addition to in our campaigns, we should mirror the language of our peers on the landing page we’ll use to let our subscribers opt out of Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and other occasions.
Wait. We’re letting them opt out of Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day too? Why would—? Actually, never mind. I get it. We’d do it for all the same reasons.
Wonderful. I’m glad I have your support.
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