It is nine in the morning on Thanksgiving and I have forty-one emails from brands that are thankful for me. I counted. Eleven are thankful for me in twelve point serif directly above a discount code.
A mattress company is grateful for my trust. A software tool I used once in 2019 is reflecting on the year we shared. Somebody's founder has written me a letter about family, and the letter has a button on it, and the button says SHOP EARLY ACCESS.
The turkey is not even in the oven.
I have written this email. That is the part I want to be honest about. I have sat in the October room where someone says we should do something for Thanksgiving, and the calendar has a hole in it, and the only object anyone knows how to put in a hole in a calendar is a send.
Most brands have nothing to say today, silence is fully available to them, and they will not take it.
There is one test and almost nobody runs it. Would this message survive without the offer? Strip the code, strip the button, strip the tracked link. If what remains is four sentences of warmth a human being wrote and would say out loud to a customer's face, send it. If what remains is nothing, you never had gratitude. You had a promotion in a cardigan, and your customers have been receiving this same email for a decade and can smell it through the envelope.
Two kinds of brands get to talk today and I would defend both. Patagonia gets to, because their holiday position is years old and costs them money, which is what makes it a position rather than a sentiment. Salt & Straw gets to, because what they have to say is which shops are open and until when, and that is information, not feeling.
Everybody else has the better option, the one that never survives a planning meeting. Send nothing. Let the day be the day. Come back Monday with something useful and you will have spent the holiday not being the forty-second email in somebody's morning.
If you genuinely cannot let it pass, the version that works is small, specific, and expensive to you. Close the store and say why. Pay the people who worked. The measure of a gratitude message is whether it would still make sense if you sold nothing at all.
Would this message survive without the offer?
I am going to a friend's place in Sellwood at two, in the rain, with a pie I did not make and intend to take credit for. Truffles will locate the warmest laptop in the house and hold it. Barnaby will yell about the door. Neither of them is thankful for me in any font. They just show up and sit down. That is the higher form.