Mother's Day Email Examples and Strategy

Get inspired by some of the best Mother's Day email subject lines and emails to benefit from one of the biggest gift-giving holidays of the year.

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Celebrated on the second Sunday of the month in the US and Canada, and on the fourth Sunday of Lent in the UK, Mother’s Day is one of the biggest gift-giving holidays of the year.

We’ve hand-selected examples of great Mother’s Day emails to help you set up your Mother’s Day marketing campaigns.

Mother's Day Email Examples

Help them create their own gifts

Crafts brand Brit + Co recognizes that most moms still treasure the gifts their kids once made for them. Instead of just promoting its classes, the brand has created a Mother’s Day gift guide full of craft kits subscribers can enjoy together with their moms. Each kit is presented with vibrant images and an actionable description, followed by a clear call-to-action. It’s a clever That’s a clever way to help customers make Mother’s Day special.

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Curate a selection of Mother's Day gifts

The email subject line of Ralph Lauren’s email reminds subscribers of mom’s holiday one month beforehand to give them ample time to shop Mother’s Day gifts. The email itself lists shop categories to browse through and takes the budgets of its recipients into account with a special selection of gifts for under $150 and one with luxury gifts.

Notice how Ralph Lauren steps away from the hearts and flowers that tend to dominate Mother’s Day email marketing campaigns and opts for a more sleek design with just a touch of pink in its email copy.

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Speak to your crowd

Paperchase doesn’t just celebrate moms, it celebrates fierce moms. And it does so in a creative way.

The animation at the top of the email tells the story of a fierce female (Eleanor of Aquitaine) and should hold viewers’ attention longer than the estimated 2-8 seconds it takes to read an email. The secondary animation showcases a rotating card collection, and in between them, the recipient can find the perfect Mother’s Day gift for their type of mom. This email is a great example that Mother’s Day email marketing doesn’t need to all soft and sweet.

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Focus on moms-to-be

Instead of relying just on the usual appeal to mom and grandma, Pai focuses on moms-to-be by promoting a stretch-mark remover for pregnant women and those who care about them. The brand’s subject line (“On your marks”) is clever wordplay, and the email copy ensures that their curated gift store holds something for all sensitive skin types.

Don’t sell maternity-related products? Then think about what you do sell that might make a mom-to-be’s life easier and include it in your Mothery’s Day email marketing campaign.

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Address moms directly

We love how Purple urges moms to get themselves a gift. Their hero image features a mom looking utterly relaxed using Purple products, and which mom wouldn’t want to feel that way?

The green call-to-action button pops out against the otherwise purple email design and the 20% discount is a nice incentive for moms to treat themselves.

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Get the laggards to shop for Mom

This email marketing campaign by Di Bruno Bros. speaks to all the procrastinators out there. Sent nine days before Mother’s Day, it uses product images that could have been taken right in mom’s kitchen. The email content is written in quite a light-hearted and casual way, pointing to a “fun mug” and including calls-to-action such as “she’ll love this” underneath each gift idea.

At the bottom of the email, there’s another reminder that the holiday is approaching quickly, paired with the note that the recipient can pre-order their gift. That way, they can shop now and avoid forgetting to do so later, while still having their present delivered on the day itself.

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Stay on-brand

Tiffany & Co. stays on-brand with this elegant email that follows the design of its regular email marketing campaigns. While it may not be so creative, it does communicate the feeling you’d get shopping in a Tiffany’s store. The copy is concise yet powerful and the image of the jewelry with the gift box makes it easy to imagine how you could dazzle mom.

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Give Mom thanks

Target’s subject line makes it clear what to do: thank mom. The email itself focuses on women’s fashion and highlights products within a wide price range. Other than the repetition of the suggestion to give mum thanks, the only thing that makes it clear that this is a Mother’s Day email marketing campaign, are the pink backgrounds of the product images.

If you’re a bit short on time but still want to send out a Happy Mother’s Day email, you can always take an old campaign or your standard email template and adapt it for the occasion.

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Offer free shipping

Adding a sense of urgency to your Mother’s Day email subject lines is always a good idea to get them clicked. That’s what The Origins does here, and they add an extra incentive by offering free shipping on all of their Mother’s Day gift sets. The sets are presented as “wrapped and ready-to-give”, making it easy for shoppers.

Note how The Origins offers subscribers the choice between shopping online and coming to one of its stores. While this might slightly decrease instant-buys, it’w a good strategy when your customers prefer to come in and hand-pick their presents.

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Focus on emotions

This email campaign from Pottery Barn is more hard-core promotional than other Mother’s Day messages we reviewed, but it’s an excellent example of an email with a strong hero image. The soft lighting and colors, the invitingly rumpled bed covers and the casual arrangement of items on the bed-tray make it look as if mom just got up after lounging in bed on her special day.

Although there are no people in this image, the look tells a story, more so than a static placement of products would.

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Strategies for Mother's Day Email Campaigns

The Mother’s Day email campaigns and Mother’s Day email subject lines above are a good source of inspiration for your own campaigns, but you might want more. That’s why we’ve distilled a few general quick tips from the thousands of email campaigns in our database for you below.

Forget the discount. Go for exclusivity!

On this holiday, exclusivity reigns over “SAVE 50%.” You’ll see plenty of discounting in the week leading up to Mother’s Day, but if you launch your campaign two to three weeks before the holiday, you’ll have the inbox almost to yourself. This early-bird approach gives you time to promote pleasure-giving over penny-pinching and engage your subscribers with creative, memorable messages.

Even incentive-driven emails should look special

Once again, we’re talking about Mom here. Even for heavy discounters, elegant design (attractive copy and typography with appealing imagery) wins over the hard-sell, discount-driven, and anxiety-inducing last-minute messages that may be part of your other holiday email marketing campaigns.

Go for the experience as well as (or instead of) the products

Statistic Brain found 36.5% of all the mothers surveyed wanted “something handmade” for Mother’s Day. If that’s not what you sell, do the next best thing: show your shoppers how to create an experience for mom using your products or services. You could even write a dedicated blog post and include it in your Mother’s Day email marketing.

Amp up the emotion

Mother’s Day is an emotional day and emotional content (copy and images) tends to convert better than product or incentive-driven emails. If you have the time, run an A/B test on each Mother’s Day email you plan to send: have one version that piles on the hearts and flowers and one that shares a more straightforward product message.