Common Customer Empathy Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)

By October 2020, most inboxes had absorbed months of crisis-toned marketing email, and a set of specific mistakes had become easy to spot precisely because so many brands made the same ones at the same time. Here’s what tripped businesses up, and what to do instead.

Leading every email with “unprecedented times”

The phrase itself wasn’t the problem in March. By the fourth or fifth month of every brand using some version of it, it had become white noise, a signal that what followed was boilerplate rather than a message written for this specific audience. The fix was simple: open with something concrete and specific to the business or the customer’s actual situation, a real update, a real change, a real question, and skip the throat-clearing entirely.

Using empathy as a wrapper for a sales pitch

The pattern was recognizable within a sentence or two: an acknowledgment of hardship followed immediately by a discount code or urgency-driven call to action. Customers noticed the seam between the two halves, and it read as using a crisis as a sales hook rather than caring. The better approach separated the two. If a business had something useful to offer, a payment plan, a flexible return policy, a helpful discount, it stood on its own without needing sympathetic framing to justify it.

Assuming everyone’s situation was the same

A single “we’re all in this together” message sent to an entire list ignored that some customers had lost income and others hadn’t changed jobs at all. Segmenting messaging, even roughly, by what was known about a customer’s likely situation (a B2B list of small business owners versus a B2C list of general consumers, for instance) let businesses avoid tone-deaf blanket statements and instead speak to something closer to a real shared experience.

Going silent instead of communicating changes

Some businesses, uncertain what to say, said nothing, and let customers find out about closures, delays or reduced hours secondhand. That silence read as worse than an imperfect update. A short, factual note, what’s changing, when and what customers should expect, did more to preserve trust than staying quiet while waiting for a perfect message that never got written.

Treating empathy as a one-time campaign instead of an ongoing practice

Brands that sent one heartfelt message in March and reverted to standard promotional cadence by May often undercut the goodwill they’d built. Customers remembered the gesture and noticed when the follow-through stopped. The businesses that held up best kept checking in periodically through the year, adjusting tone as circumstances shifted rather than treating the crisis response as a single deliverable to check off.

Speaking for the customer instead of asking

A number of well-meaning campaigns declared what customers “needed” or “wanted” right now without ever asking. A short survey or even a simple reply-to-this-email prompt consistently surfaced more accurate, more useful information than internal guesswork, and it had the side benefit of making customers feel heard rather than talked at.

None of these mistakes required bad intentions to happen. Most came from moving fast under real pressure, borrowing language that was everywhere and skipping the harder work of writing something specific to one audience. The fix for nearly all of them was the same: slow down enough to ask what would help, then say that plainly.