Happy Mothers Day!

The beauty of the modern advertising apparatus is its ability to be specific: targeting key demographics to ensure consumers are not bombarded with irrelevant or insensitive messaging. On Mother’s Day, that latter point is paramount--effective campaigns acknowledge the realities of motherhood and stay sensitive to those who might not want such content.

Sendinblue lists five ideas for Mother's Day email marketing:

1. Give readers gift ideas
2. Focus on outcomes or benefits
3. Use simplicity and personalization
4. Use humor in your Mother’s Day email
5. Optimize your “inbox envelope” to boost email open rates.

The first two are simple: give readers easy to recognize and actionable CTAs that focus on the holistic benefits for an often overtaxed Mother.

Personalization, however, is key. Indeed, as companies become increasingly adept at micro-targeting ever more siloed demographics, it should be just as important to allow consumers to opt-out as it is to bring them in, especially for a holiday set in the second year of a devastating worldwide pandemic. It is important to acknowledge the possibility that many have suffered loss and might view Mother’s Day content as insensitive.

As Elizabeth Entenman of Vox wrote in 2019, “There’s something insulting about the default assumption that everybody’s mother is alive and that they have a good relationship with her -- especially for an industry that increasingly prides itself on the ability to precisely target audiences with relevant messaging.”

“We worked with our technology and CRM teams to devise a way to kindly ask if our customers didn’t want to hear from us about Mother’s Day marketing and then opt them out of specific emails during the period,” said Sara Gordon, VP of Brand & Creative at UK based company Wild & Bloom.

Other brands have gone even further. The online retailer Very.co.uk emailed customers in February asking if they’d like to opt-out of Mother’s Day advertising content. Waitrose and Sainsbury’s followed suit.

Bianca Neumann, the head of bereavement at the charity Sue Ryder, said it was a welcome move for those who may still be grieving, especially in a year where the pandemic has taken so many lives unexpectedly.

The most effective campaigns on Mother’s Day

Many people agree emotion is one of the most powerful drivers of Mother’s Day ad campaigns. As drtv.agency wrote in their blog, attaching an emotional element to an advertisement contributes to long-term brand associations for viewers and TV advertisements manage to build an emotional connection with viewers that most online advertisements fail to replicate.

At one time, these ads would have aired exclusively on TV, but now they can be cross-promoted and boosted by social media channels.

For example, in 2019, Google released an ad campaign titled “#HeyMom” to advertise the Google Nest Hub. The ad honored moms as the original source of information and support and finished with the tagline “give your original helper a little help of her own.”

Google followed this up by sharing the ad on its Twitter channel and encouraging users to reply with the #HeyMom to generate additional engagement with consumers--often replying and speaking directly to those who left comments.

Many advertisers might be wary of investing heavily in TV advertising--concerned that they can’t adequately measure their campaign’s effectiveness. However, advertisers can rest easy knowing Attributy’s multi-touch attribution platform will track the campaign’s results. For purely offline advertising, Attributy will apply dynamic response windows to measure traffic and track conversion lift from linear TV, radio, billboard, etc.

And, for those multichannel campaigns that utilize both online and offline media, Attributy’s deep-learning algorithm for multi touch attribution combines predictive buyer analysis and campaign response windows to build true multi channel attribution for both online and offline campaign efforts.