Temperatures below 30? Check.

Leaves everywhere? Check.

Holiday decorations all over the place? Check.

It’s fall, and it’s holiday season, and all of your competitors are vying for consumer attention. How do you stand out? How do you make sure your customers are shopping for their pets at your store instead of getting last minute Amazon deals?

At Pet Engine we’re all about helping our community and our clients one way or another. We’ve got 5 holiday marketing tips for pet stores to help pet store owners make a splash in their customer’s minds this November and December. If you haven’t subscribed to get these tips to your email inbox monthly, you can do that with the button below.

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5 Holiday Marketing Tips
for Pet Stores

Get Personal

Our first holiday marketing tip for pet store owners is to get outside your comfort zone and go personal with your marketing. Here’s a few quick ideas on how you can do that:

Go Live on Facebook or Instagram, or post a pre-recorded video thanking your followers and customers for shopping with you this year. It’s the time to be grateful for what you’ve got in life, right?
Send out a personal email from you, rather than a sales message or a newsletter. Again, focus on thanking the customer but make sure that your subject line is formatted appropriately (“a personal message from X”) to get maximum exposure and opens. If you’re working with Pet Engine Marketing, we can help you craft this AND help ensure that it is personally addressed to your recipient (“Dear [customer’s first name], Thank you so much….”).

If you’re NOT working with Pet Engine, it’s a great time to jump on a free no-pressure discovery call to see where the growth path goes when there’s so much opportunity on the line this holiday season!

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This holiday markeing tip for pet store owners follows along with our Marketing Trends of 2019 by using video as well as creating personalized messaging for customers.

Hit Send….Again.

Your customers are going to be inundated with holiday messaging. They know it, and are experiencing it. Don’t worry about overloading your customers with one extra email per month, or a few more posts per month. Due to the sheer amount of emails they’ll already be receiving for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and in December in general, you’ve got to stay front of mind somehow. They aren’t going to unsubscribe or stop shopping at your pet store based on one more marketing communication, and chances are high that even if you sent two emails per month, only one of them might be really opened and read through. Better to send one of those personal emails and increase your chances of it being read with a personal message.

We provide you this holiday marketing tip for your pet store because, unsurprisingly, email is consistently a top performer for holiday marketing. In 2018, email was the third highest Cyber Monday revenue driver, contributing for 24.2% of sales (Source: Adobe).

Our philosophy at Pet Engine Marketing isn’t to redesign the wheel or try anything too crazy. We are using proven strategies and tactics that make a difference in retail businesses and bringing them to pet stores, providing value, partnership, and tracking to ensure pet stores are marketing properly.

Dress Up

You can dress up as Santa or a reindeer or a turkey, we’re not going to stop you or advise against it! That sounds really fun, to be honest.

But we really meant to dress up your pet store a bit. This is especially important if your pet store is in a strip mall or isn’t a stand-alone store.

During the holidays, more consumers will be “window shopping” than at any other point during the year. Having an attractive, holiday-themed window display will help bring in new customers, and is also a great piece of content for your pet store’s marketing efforts online. Go above and beyond by offering hot apple cider/coffee, a cookie tray/snacks, or something similar on a stand just outside your door!

Throw a Holiday Event

We really can’t stress enough how important it is to throw a holiday-themed event. People want to spend money on their pets this season, and they want to experience things with their pets always.

Combine the two and throw a holiday pawty, a Santa Paws photoshoot, or a fundraiser for your favorite local shelters or pet organizations. The ideas are endless and the benefits are as well. Check out our piece on holiday marketing ideas for pet stores for some more inspiration on holiday events.

Want to make it personal? Consider creating VIP gifts (and cards) available for your top shoppers or brand advocates of the year, or even make the event exclusive and just for them (after hours?). But if you do that, you still have to post about it after the event online to create some envy/FOMO for your other customers that want to be in on that!

Make Sure you Sell Out

One of the toughest things about inventory management for retail businesses is ordering enough products to ensure that supply doesn’t run out, but not so many that you can’t sell everything and lose money.

It’s a balancing act, but knowing that holiday- and winter-themed items will be purchased regardless of whether they’re on sale or not, our advice is to not throw them on sale unless it’s for a special occassion (an event) or until the last few days before “holiday season” truly ends. You’ve got to mind your margins and trust in your marketing (if you’ve been paying attention) to watch these items fly off the shelves!

5 Holiday Marketing Tips
for Pet Stores
Conclusion

Hopefully these 5 holiday marketing tips for pet stores has given our pet store owners some ideas and inspiration to capitalize on the busy holiday season. With the proper delegation (*cough cough*) these shouldn’t be too much extra work on your end, but they can bring big dividends to your pet store this holiday season.

What is your pet store or business doing to bring in extra profits this holiday season? What marketing strategies have you executed this year or in the past that make your business stand out from the competition? We’d love to hear! Comment below or on our social media feeds!