What moms can teach us about email marketing

Every May, a certain type of email shows up in inboxes alongside the gift guides and discount codes: the empathy email. The one that gently offers to let you opt out of Mother’s Day content, just in case. It’s well-intentioned. It’s also kind of a mess, and it says more about how we think about email marketing than it does about how we think about people.

My mom hates those “opt out of Mother’s Day emails” messages. 

Not because she’s grieving. 

Not because she had a great relationship with her mom either, actually. 

She hates them because they feel…weird. 

Before her mom died, their relationship was painful and complicated. A generic “flowers for Mother’s Day” email? Fine. Easy to ignore. Maybe even nice—she’s a mom herself, after all. Could mean something completely different depending on the day. 

But the opt-out email? 

That one lands like: “Hey… quick question… are you sad about your mom?” 

And suddenly, instead of just scrolling past a promo, she’s being asked to define herself in relation to it. 

Which got me thinking: what exactly are we calling empathy here? And why does it feel more like a marketing strategy than genuine concern? 

There’s a growing trend in email marketing to let subscribers opt out of “sensitive” campaigns; Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and increasingly, any holiday with even a whiff of complicated feelings attached. 

The idea is simple: give people control, respect their preferences, avoid causing harm. On paper, it sounds thoughtful. Even kind. 

And to be clear, I get the idea! But the execution is where things start to fall apart. 

You Don’t Actually Know Who You’re Talking To 

Mother’s Day isn’t a segment. It’s a context, and a messy one at that. 

Your subscriber could be a mom, someone with a mom, someone who lost a mom, someone estranged from their mom, someone who just went through a miscarriage, someone buying for a partner who’s a mom, or someone who would very much like to not be perceived in relation to motherhood at all, thanks. 

And that’s just the categories. Within each one: complicated feelings, complicated history, a relationship with this particular holiday that you have absolutely no visibility into. 

The entire opt-out strategy assumes there’s a group of people this campaign will hurt—and that they know who they are, and that they want to tell you. 

Do you actually know who that is? Or are you asking your customers to do the emotional triage so you don’t have to? 

Here’s the crux of the problem: The goal of these opt-outs is to avoid causing pain. But in practice, they often do something else: they move the emotional weight from the campaign into the opt-out itself. 

Instead of: “Here’s a Mother’s Day promotion” 

You’re sending: “Do you want to opt out of Mother’s Day emails?” 

Which requires the recipient to stop and think: Does this apply to me? Should this bother me? Am I the kind of person who needs this? 

That’s not neutral. That’s an emotional prompt. In some cases, it’s more direct—and more uncomfortable—than the campaign you were trying to soften. 

Empathy isn’t asking people to raise their hand and say “this hurts me.” Because some things aren’t neutral questions. “Do you want to opt out of Mother’s Day emails?” isn’t the same as “Do you prefer weekly or monthly newsletters?” It’s closer to: “Hey, just checking—are you dealing with something painful we should know about?” 

And not everyone wants to answer that. Not because they’re hiding anything—but because it’s not something they want to engage with at all, especially in their inbox. 

Grief, relationships, and identity are not stable preferences. These are preferences that change throughout someone’s life.

Someone who opted out last year because they miscarried might be celebrating this year with a newborn. Someone who was fine last year might have lost their mom in January. The person who opted out because of a painful relationship might have reconciled—or might have lost their mom before they got the chance to. 

Which means your “empathetic” system eventually becomes: “Hey… still want to opt out of this?” Every year. Until they don’t. 

Because nobody wants to say out loud: everyone’s mom eventually dies. You are going to keep sending this email, year after year, until one year your customer is genuinely, newly sad. And your little preference flag won’t know. And neither will you. 

That’s not what we mean by “good data hygiene”. It’s more “accidental yearly emotional audit that your customers definitely did not sign up for when they gave you an email address for occasional coupons”. 

These opt-outs are usually justified with retention, churn prevention, and protecting high-value customers. All valid business goals! 

But if your empathy strategy is primarily designed to protect your metrics, people can feel that. Because empathy that exists as a performance tactic is basically risk management with better copy and a floral motif. Cute, but not exactly compassionate. 

The reason these opt-outs exist in the first place is because of how we send email: broad campaigns, loose targeting, heavy reliance on the calendar. So when something goes wrong, we add a layer. An escape hatch. A little “you can opt out of this” to absolve ourselves. 

But it doesn’t fix the underlying issue. 

Also worth noting: Mother’s Day is just the most visible version of this problem. Valentine’s Day hits differently if you’re newly divorced, newly widowed, or just newly single in a way you didn’t choose. Father’s Day is its own minefield. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Thanksgiving all carry enough family and grief baggage to fill a therapist’s waiting room. If you’re building an opt-out infrastructure for every emotionally complicated holiday to perform empathy for your audience, you’re actually just building a very elaborate feelings database that will still be wrong half the time. 

If you don’t know enough about your audience to confidently send a highly specific, emotionally loaded campaign, maybe don’t send it that way. 

Not everything needs to be a “Mother’s Day Gift Guide .” It could be a May promotion. Seasonal new arrivals. A sale that happens to fall in spring. Let the customer decide what it means. The mom shops for herself. The kid shops for their mom. The grieving person scrolls past. The estranged person doesn’t have to engage with the framing at all. 

No opt-out required. Because—here’s a secret—if someone is shopping in May, they know why. You don’t have to tell them it’s Mother’s Day. They have a calendar. 

Whatever you sell, you can probably just run a sale and let your customer decide what it means! Relevance doesn’t require you to define your customers’ relationships for them. 

Fine. Actionable advice. Here it is: 

• Know your customer better. Not just what they click, but how they behave, what they buy, when they engage. Use what you actually know before you assume what they feel. 
• Send more carefully. Not everything needs to go to everyone. And not everything needs to be explicitly framed around a holiday. Intentional segmentation goes a long way.
• Ask yourself if you actually need a holiday angle. If the answer is “we always do Mother’s Day,” that’s just a calendar reminder you’ve been calling “strategy”. 
• If you are going to do opt-outs, do them thoughtfully. Broad, low-stakes preference options (“opt out of holiday content”) are better than prompting someone to reflect on whether their mom is still corporeal. 
• Don’t perform empathy you haven’t earned. Customers can tell the difference between thoughtful and theatrical. If you’re not willing to actually know your audience, a well-copywritten opt-out email isn’t going to fool anyone. 

Know your customer better. Not just what they click—how they behave, what they buy, when they engage. Use what you actually know before you assume what they feel. 

Send more carefully. Not everything needs to go to everyone. And not everything needs to be explicitly framed around a holiday. 

Ask yourself if you actually need a holiday angle. If the answer is “we always do Mother’s Day,” that’s just a calendar reminder you’ve been calling “strategy”. 

If you are going to do opt-outs, do them thoughtfully. Broad, low-stakes preference options (“opt out of holiday content”) are better than prompting someone to reflect on whether their mom is still corporeal. 

Don’t perform empathy you haven’t earned. Customers can tell the difference between thoughtful and theatrical. If you’re not willing to actually know your audience, a well-copywritten opt-out email isn’t going to fool anyone. 

The bottom line: giving people the option to opt out of sensitive campaigns isn’t a bad idea. But it’s not the same thing as empathy. 

Because empathy is more than giving people a way out of your message; it’s knowing whether they should have received it in the first place. 

Author: Alison Gootee