Mother’s Day is big business for retailers. With 84% of U.S. adults celebrating the day, it has become the holiday with the fourth-highest average per-person spend. If you combine back-to-school and back-to-college into a single event, it becomes the third-highest.

But while holidays are a cause for celebration and serve as major marketing opportunities for brands helping shoppers find the perfect gift, outfit, and decorations, they have the opposite effect for some people. Instead of joy, they conjure unpleasant memories and emotions, such as reminders of a loved one lost. This makes marketing around holidays a tightrope for brands, especially highly personal ones like Mother’s Day.

The good news for consumers, including the 16% that don’t celebrate Mother’s Day, is that the days of holiday batch-and-blast marketing campaigns may finally be nearing an end. New data from Omnisend shows that many brands are starting to rethink their approach to marketing around these special days.

While 10% of people surveyed find Mother’s Day marketing emails to be an upsetting reminder of losing a loved one, nearly the same number of retailers (20%) offer customers the chance to opt out of Mother’s Day-related emails entirely.

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t 20% small? Though it may seem like a small number, it signals something much bigger: brands are beginning to consider what their customers actually want instead of treating them as nothing more than an email address that might buy something. This change is welcomed. Nearly a quarter (24%) of people say they appreciate brands that allow them to opt out of receiving emails related to these potentially sensitive occasions.

Walking the holiday marketing tightrope

Online shopping remains the top destination for purchasing Mother’s Day presents, and with nearly one-third of all marketing emails being opened by recipients, email is a crucial marketing channel for brands. This is why finding the right balance between generating sales and showing empathy is highly important — and why a campaign opt-out becomes an important tool.

For retailers, adding a campaign opt-out, where shoppers can choose to stop receiving emails around events like Mother’s Day, is a vital way to be empathetic and still run holiday marketing campaigns. More than one-third (36%) say they find Mother’s Day emails to be a helpful reminder, so being able to send effective marketing campaigns without alienating customers is important for maintaining healthy customer relationships and revenue.

After analyzing marketing emails from thousands of retailers and how they were communicating about Mother’s Day this year, findings show that emails designed to offer opt-outs or acknowledge the complexities of the occasion generated an average click rate of 5%, compared to an average of 1.2% for traditional scheduled campaign emails. This level of increased activity indicates a clear consumer interest in having control over their marketing experiences.

Here are a few ways brands can show empathy around holidays and special events:

1. Create a year-round preference form that allows subscribers to opt out of specific holidays. Having a permanent form allows subscribers who joined your email program after specific holidays to avoid receiving, and potentially missing, opt-out campaigns. This form can be linked in both your email welcome series and even in the footer of your scheduled email campaigns.

2. For those who can’t use a manage preference form, consider running opt-out campaigns before each holiday and then having an automated click-based segment for those who click on the opt-out button. Brands can then use that as a suppression segment for future related campaigns.

3. Whether it’s Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or Valentine’s Day, make a list of other holidays that may have more personal emotions associated with them and execute a plan to address those vulnerable email subscribers. Preparation is key to planning. 

Consumers increasingly expect personalization from brands, and that goes beyond relevant product recommendations and new styles they might be interested in. It extends to the individuals themselves.

For brands, showing empathy and allowing email subscribers to opt out of receiving holiday-related emails is more than another checkbox item: it’s a continuing evolution of the brand-customer experience. Ultimately, taking small steps to show customers you care helps build brand trust and avoids alienating consumers. Not to mention, it’s also the right thing to do.

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