by Lisa
Mothering Sunday can be a sensitive time for lots of people for so many reasons - people who are missing their Mother, people who are missing not being a Mother - the list goes on. And it seems Thorftul are very aware of the issue.
If you're not aware of Thortful, they're an onling greeting card marketplace where you can order cards from many different independent designers. They were actually my #WebsiteOfTheWeek a while ago over on Instagram as I've used them so much during lockdown.
As such, Mother's Day is a big deal to them.
They sent me an email a couple of weeks before Mothering Sunday asking me if I'd like to opt out of Mother's Day communications. I didn't, but I wondered why they bothered with emailing me? I mean, it was very nice but surely I could just ignore them if they bothered me?
Then it dawned on me that actually, lots of people might have not ignored them and might have unsubscribed from Thortful's list completely if they didn't want to risk seeing another. And that then could have dented their mailing list for future mailings. People may also have marked them as spam if they didn't like the email - which wouldn't have been fair on Thortful but may well be an action people take when they get an email they don't want. And that could harm their deliverabilty for all of their future mailings.
Their actual message was:
"We understand that Mother's Day can be a particularly difficult time for some and we don't want to make it any harder than it already is. If you’d prefer not to receive any Mother’s Day emails from us, opt-out by clicking here and we’ll take care of it.
Don’t worry, we’ll still keep you updated about everything else! "
It won't have been a quick job to put together the opt-out email and ensure that it worked all the way through the rest of their communications systems, but I guess for them they figured it was worth it. Or, they were purely motivated by the desire to save people from seeing some email content they didn't want, which is lovely of them if that is the case.
It made me wonder, if we're going to see more marketing teams taking this approach? Personally my household celebrate Easter and Christmas but plenty don't, and all the supermarkets and shopping sites of all description send plenty of message about those evets. Will more gift / card websites copy Thortful when it comes to Mother's Day, and will Thortful do the same for Father's Day? Marketing list segmentation isn't rocket science so whilst it's not a super quick job for a big organisation to organise - when even the copy for a simple email needs to go through layers of sign off - it's perfectly possible and something we might see more of going forwrads.