I counted, because it was raining and I was avoiding a deck. Between Sunday night and this morning, forty one emails in my personal inbox used grateful, thankful, or thank you in the subject line. Thirty eight contained a percent sign in the first two lines. One thanked me for being part of the family and then gave me until midnight.
Gratitude with a deadline on it.
This year makes the whole performance louder. The big retailers closed their doors on Thanksgiving Day, which was the right call and also removed the stampede that used to absorb everyone's attention. So the discounting spread out. It started in October, it lives online, and it now has to share an inbox with the sentiment.
Thanks that arrives attached to a promotion is not thanks. It is a subject line wearing a cardigan.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Somebody says we should do something warm for the holiday. Somebody else says we cannot waste a send during peak. The two ideas get married in a single email, and the warm part becomes the wrapper for the transactional part, which is the one with a KPI on it.
Your customer is not confused by this. They read the first line and scroll for the code.
Three ways out.
One, be specific. Real gratitude names a thing. Salt & Straw spent the spring telling people exactly which shops stayed open and which of their people were still working. Specificity is the difference between thanks for your loyalty and thanks for ordering pints to your porch in April when we had no idea if we would make it to June.
Two, separate the sends. If the thank you cannot survive on its own without a discount stapled to it, you have learned something important about the thank you. Learn it in a planning meeting rather than in an unsubscribe report.
Three, give the moment away. REI closed on Black Friday and told everyone to go outside. It worked because the company gave up the day rather than decorating it. Patagonia ran an ad telling people not to buy the jacket. Both cost real money on the day and bought a decade of belief.
Most brands will not do any of this, because a send is measurable and restraint is not.
If the thank you cannot survive on its own without a discount stapled to it, you have learned something important about the thank you.
Thursday will be four people at most, a small bird, and a call to my parents on a laptop propped against a cookbook. Truffles will sit in the empty chair like she was invited. Barnaby will be under the table waiting for something to fall. Neither of them will thank me, which is honest of them, and more than I can say for my inbox.