Mother's Day is upon us: but what can often be forgotten in the show of love and support for the women who put up with us through the teenage years (thanks again), is that for some people Mother's Day can also be a painful or difficult time.
Cue flower company Bloom and Wild who won the internet this week in the simplest of ways by showing their support for those people by sending customers an email offering the opt out of their Mother's Day marketing emails. In the email which was sent over the weekend, they wrote:
'Want to opt-out of Mother's Day emails? No Problem. I wanted to get in touch as I know that Mother's Day can be a very sensitive time for some of us. So if you don't want us to send you any Mther's Day reminders this month, we won't. Just let us know by opting out here. Then we'll do the rest. And don't worry, if you opt out we'll still keep you up to date with everything else, like normal. Best wishes.'
It's an example that we can all follow, because on a holiday that celebrates the women that raised us, in 2019 shouldn't we also be finding ways to show love and support for those for whom it's a difficult time?
Since then, Bloom and Wild's customers have taken to social media in their droves to point out why the gesture from the brand is so important. Blogger Lottie L'Amour shared the email on Twitter, writing 'Can we just talk about how fantastic @BloomandWild are at customer satisfaction? This email is so thoughtful - I don’t know of any brand that does this. I’ll always buy my flowers from them for this reason!'
Grazia caught up with Lucy from Bloom and Wild, who wrote the email, to find out more:
What made you come up with the idea for the email?
Last year we had a lot of customers write in and ask to be removed from Mother’s Day marketing because they found it too difficult, so it was just completely obvious that we needed to give everyone the option to do it. We try to do things like that all the time because we’ve got really core customer values so every decision we make is based on what’s best for our customer, I can’t even tell you how overwhelmed I am by the response though.
Did you think it would have this much of a positive response?
Absolutely not! I had no idea. I sent it on a Sunday because I thought people were more likely to spend a bit longer looking through their emails, but I had no idea that so many people would find it so touching. Lots of people have been sending us stories on Instagram to say thank you for being so sensitive. On Monday morning our customer support email address was completely full of emails from people saying thank you so much for being considerate, it was amazing. My first reaction was ‘we should have done this years ago!’ I hadn’t thought to do it until now. But we’re definitely going to be actioning it for other key events, because we do market things like Father's Day and Valentine's day and I think those can be hard for people as well.
Do you think it’s something small that brands can do for Mother's Day (or any day really) which has a big impact for their customers?
Definitely. We’re very lucky because we have a great tech team that support us, but it should be really simple for customers to just ask to opt out – even if they’re temporarily opting out. We’re also going to be sending out emails alongside the Mother's Day one that are non-Mother's Day focussed so you can continue to get emails with no mention of Mother's Day whatsoever - just spring blooms and things like that.
Let's hope that Bloom and Wild have set a positive trend and that we'll see more brands reaching out to customers to offer them the choice of opting out of marketing emails around holidays that can be sensitive. Oh and if you haven't already yet, you'll definitely want to check out Bloom and Wilds beautiful blooms on their Instagram @bloomandwild.