If you use email marketing, you are doing permission-based marketing. Someone handed you access to their inbox. That’s not a small thing, and it’s worth treating with care. A recent lawsuit getting attention (Shahpur v. Ulta) is a useful reminder of why.
The allegation, broadly, is that urgency-heavy subject lines like “ends tonight” or “2 days only” were misleading because promotions were later extended or repeated. I’m not here to litigate that case, and I don’t know the specifics. But I do know this: email marketing moves fast, and it’s easy to optimize for what works right now without thinking about what it’s doing to trust over time.
Email marketing is permission-based. Treat it like a relationship.
When someone opts in, they’re saying, “Yes, you can talk to me.” That “yes” is the foundation of everything your email program is built on, and it comes with a responsibility.
A simple way to think about it is this: every email you send either makes a deposit into the relationship or makes a withdrawal.
- Deposits look like honest offers, clear expectations, and subject lines that match the content inside the email.
- Withdrawals look like pressure tactics that don’t hold up or messaging that says one thing while the business does another.
Most of the risk in email marketing does not come from doing something obviously wrong. It comes from doing something that became so common nobody stopped to ask whether it was building trust or just borrowing it.
Urgency is not the problem. Manufactured urgency is.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with urgency when it’s rooted in reality.
Real urgency might be:
- A sale that genuinely ends.
- A product that truly is running low.
- A seasonal moment that won’t come back.
But urgency became so effective that it started getting used as a default. Not because there was something true and time-sensitive to communicate, but because urgency drives clicks and conversions in the short term.
That’s where things get messy. When the subject line stops reflecting reality and starts trying to create it, your email program starts relying on pressure instead of trust.
Why do urgency tactics spread so fast in email marketing
Part of what makes urgency appealing is the way the inbox works. There is no algorithm keeping your email visible the way social platforms do. If someone does not act quickly, the message gets buried, and the moment passes.
So urgency fills that gap. The problem is that “it fills a gap” and “it builds a relationship” are not the same thing.
Reactive decisions are where this breaks down most often:
- A promotion underperforms, so the sale gets extended.
- A team brings an offer back at the last minute.
- A subject line gets written to spike opens, without thinking through whether it will still feel honest tomorrow.
None of those choices have to be malicious. But if the external promise and the internal reality do not match, subscribers feel it.
The trust cost of misleading subject lines and rolling promotions
When an email says “last chance” and the same offer comes right back next week, what you’ve trained your subscribers to believe is the words in your inbox are not reliable.
That has consequences beyond the immediate sale:
- Lower engagement over time because people stop believing the urgency.
- Worse deliverability when subscribers ignore, delete, or mark messages as spam.
- More pressure is required to get the same response, which pushes the messaging even further.
- Legal exposure when urgency claims drift into “misleading” territory.
Manufactured urgency works by borrowing against your audience’s trust. Eventually, that debt comes due. The legal risk may be newly visible. The trust problem is not.
How to audit your urgency language (without spiraling)
You do not need to overhaul your entire email calendar overnight. Start with a simple audit.
1) Audit the last 30 days of subject lines
Pull your last month of campaigns and flag anything that used urgency language:
- “Ends tonight”
- “Last chance”
- “Only X left”
- “2 days only”
Then ask one question: Did the message hold up?
Did it actually end? Was it actually limited? Or did a near-identical offer show up again within days?
You are not looking to punish the team. You are seeking patterns.
2) Treat your promotional calendar like a trust document
Subscribers keep score, even if they cannot articulate it. If your calendar is stacked with rolling, overlapping, never-really-ending promotions, every urgency cue gets weaker.
The long-term answer is not to avoid urgency. The long-term answer is to build a promotional rhythm where urgency can mean something again:
- Fewer promotions with real deadlines.
- Subject lines that reflect what is actually happening.
- Offers that end when you say they end.
When subscribers learn that your deadlines are real, they act on them. You do not need to manufacture pressure. The pressure is already there because you’ve built a track record of meaning what you say.
Permission-based email marketing that scales without burning trust
If you want an email program that lasts, treat the inbox like access you have to earn, not a resource you can spend down indefinitely.
Permission-based marketing is a relationship. The fastest way to damage that relationship is to train people that your words do not mean what they say. The best way to protect it is also straightforward: be accurate, be consistent, and only use urgency when it’s true.
