Glad to see major brands are taking my advice to enable customers to opt out of themed promotions.
Now that I'm on DoorDash's email list, it wants to use any and all occasions to market to me, including the upcoming holiday of Father's Day. But someone at the company realized that such messaging may not be appropriate for all customers and that it would be a nice gesture to ask before pushing out promotions around that theme.
I especially appreciate it this year because I did lose my father just last month. That doesn't mean I feel upset by Father's Day marketing, but I can imagine some people would be.
Last year I wrote about the email I got from ShopRunner ( see The Pause that Refreshes Marketing Relationships) that drew enough of my attention to warrant a click (very rare for me, I assure you). Its subject line was “Skip our Mother’s Day emails this year.”
For those who clicked the preference to pause, it explained that the pause on Mother’s Day communication doesn’t mean that it is pausing all marketing messages -- only the communication linked to that theme. As I noted, it's really a smart move that reduces email fatigue and the irritation of spam. It also lets you hear directly from your target market what they consider irrelevant.
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 their children. Linking a brand with those negative associations is not the way to make people like it better.
I said this then: "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, and Christmas, etc. To really show customers you care let them pick what occasions they’d rather not hear about."
It makes sense, right? Certainly, DoorDash got that message, though the company probably paid some consultant huge sums of money to get the guidance they could have had for free by reading my blog last year.
Related posts:
Posts
