Mother’s Day is one of the biggest retail holidays of the year. Americans spent over $34 billion on it in 2025, making it the second largest consumer spending event in the country, behind only winter season holidays like Christmas. The marketing that surrounds it is massive, relentless, and for most people normal, expected and no more bothersome than any other marketing blitz.

But this isn’t true for everyone.

A member of the Wild Iris team lost his mother recently, just a couple of weeks before Mother’s Day was celebrated this year. The holiday and its leadup still occurred despite his loss and grief. Promotional emails showed up every day, social posts and ads kept popping up in feeds, and commercials aired on both radio and TV with what felt like brutal regularity. Most of these ads were lovely and perfectly appropriate for the coming holiday. But they didn’t feel that way for him in that moment.

And then in the middle of all this marketing flurry, a few emails arrived that felt different.

Rather Not Hear About Mother’s Day?

Within the same week, three separate companies sent emails with a simple offer: if Mother’s Day is a difficult time for you, you can opt out of hearing about it. No explanation required, no questions asked. There was a button, an acknowledgment that this holiday isn’t necessarily joyful for everyone, and an assurance that you’d still hear from them about other things, just not this one.

The companies were DoorDash, Ancestry, and Nespresso. Three very different businesses with very different customers and very different products. And all three emails arrived with the same thoughtful offer.

DoorDash kept it direct: “Rather not hear about Mother’s Day? We understand if you’d prefer not to receive reminders or promotions about this holiday. Just let us know and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Ancestry said, “We realize that for some, Mother’s Day or Father’s Day may be a tough time.” This company whose entire product is built around genealogy and family connections acknowledged that Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can be difficult on some people and offered the option to opt out of marketing for one, both, or neither of them.

Nespresso was similarly warm: “With Mother’s Day coming up, we understand this can be a difficult time of year for some. If you would like to opt out of Mother’s Day emails, you can simply click below.”

None of these emails were long, and none of them were complicated. They cost very little to send and did not require an extravagant amount of thoughtfulness to come up with. But if you were the one receiving them while surrounded with raw grief (or navigating infertility, or processing a difficult relationship, or just not in a place to celebrate) the effect could be enormous. This felt like a company reaching out that saw a customer as a human being rather than just an address on an email list.

Holiday Aren’t Always Joyful for Everyone

Mother’s Day can carry a lot of emotional complexity that marketing efforts seem to rarely acknowledge or be aware of. There are people who have recently lost their mothers, people who lost them years ago but still feel it deeply, people struggling with infertility or miscarriages, and mothers who might have lost or be estranged from their children. For these people a holiday celebrating motherhood can be genuinely painful.

The number of people celebrating Mother’s Day with joy and tribute is large. But the number navigating this holiday with sadness or loss is not insignificant. The blanket assumption that everyone on your email list is in the first category is at best an oversight and at worst something that can actively damage a relationship you’ve worked hard to build.

This isn’t an argument against marketing for Mother’s Day. The amount that consumers spend makes clear that it is a real and significant commercial event and appropriate businesses need to participate. But it is an argument for being thoughtful about how you do your marketing.

How Can You Market with Sensitivity?

The opt-out email is an easily visible version of this kind of sensitivity, but it isn’t the only one. The broader principle is about recognizing that your audience is made up of individual people with individual needs and emotions. Your audience is not a monolith.

Email segmentation tools make it possible to give subscribers choices about the content they receive. This technology has been available for years. Almost every time you unsubscribe from an email list you get an option asking you to differentiate what kind of emails you want to receive. What the DoorDash, Ancestry, and Nespresso emails represent isn’t a technical achievement, it’s cultural sensitivity. Someone inside those organizations decided that the emotional experience of their customers mattered enough to act on it.

There are simpler ways of acting on the same instinct, like keeping holiday campaigns focused on celebration rather than urgency, not sending constant and aggressive promotional emails in the days leading up to a holiday, and letting your words and message communicate your point without hammering your customers over the head with it. These are small things, but they add up.

The businesses that get this right tend to share a common belief. They think about their marketing from the customer’s perspective rather than from a purely business perspective. That shift in intention changes the decisions you make, and for the better.