Jacquard Valentine’s Report 2026: Your Customers Are Sick of “Love” 2026 Marketing Predictions

Every year, as Valentine’s Day draws closer, brand inboxes fill up with the same things: heart emojis, the word “love”, a flash sale, a countdown timer. And every year, consumers largely ignore them. New research from Jacquard – drawn from over 61,000 email subject lines sent during the Valentine’s period between 2015 and 2025 – reveals just how much is being left on the table when brands reach for the obvious.

The person, not the occasion

The single most instructive finding in the data is also one of the simplest. Subject lines that refer to “your Valentine” – the person receiving the gift – outperform those that reference “Valentine’s Day” – the event – by 22%. If we drill down further, “Valentine” as a noun for a person drives a 10.8% uplift, while “Valentine’s” as a possessive tied to the holiday causes an 11.1% drop.

People buy gifts for someone specific, as opposed to buying solely for a date in the calendar. Messaging that acknowledges that human relationship, rather than the retail occasion, consistently resonates more. The linguistic shift is small, but the performance gap is significant.

Love language

Surprisingly, “love” – arguably the defining word of Valentine’s Day – actively reduces email engagement by 6.6%. “Heart” drops performance by 15.6%. “Sweet” is down 14.3%. Meanwhile, “adore” drives a 16.9% uplift, and “romantic” an 11.7% increase.

Generic romantic vocabulary has been deployed so heavily and so uniformly across Valentine’s campaigns that it has essentially lost its charge. More specific, less reflexive emotional language cuts through precisely because it feels considered. The data rewards brands that put genuine thought into their word choices over those that reach for the nearest cliché. 

The Galentine’s effect

Valentine’s Day is no longer a holiday that belongs exclusively to romantic couples, and the email data reflects this clearly. “Friend” drives a 10.9% uplift in engagement, whilst “partner” causes a 4.1% decline.

With 25% of consumers in 2025 planning to mark Galentine’s Day, campaigns oriented around friendship are reaching a genuinely large audience. Brands that continue to default to couple-focused messaging are not only excluding a significant portion of their customer base – they’re also producing content that, according to the data, performs worse.

Practical messaging, unpushy

The highest-performing word in the entire dataset is not a romantic term at all. “Shipping” drives a 28.3% engagement uplift. “Free” and “offer” also perform well. By contrast, “shop” causes a 21.3% decline, “save” is down 10.3%, and “limited” drops performance by 18.8%.

Valentine’s Day is a deadline-driven purchase. Consumers want to know whether a gift will actually arrive in time – not to be pressured into a transaction they’ve already decided to make. Answering that practical question outperforms manufactured urgency by a considerable margin.

What it all points to

The findings point toward a consistent underlying principle: Valentine’s Day shoppers respond to language that treats them as thoughtful people rather than targets to be converted. Every year, inboxes grow more crowded, and competing for attention gets harder. Reverting to simple, predictable language no longer cuts it. Small, thoughtful linguistic choices, made deliberately, are what separate the brands that cut through from those that don’t.