All businesses and business owners have worries. One of the most common ones regarding marketing are ensuring that the business is getting enough return on investment (ROI) to make the spend on marketing “worth it.”

Sometimes that ROI can take different forms. It might be monetary and reflective on the bottom line, other times it might be the freedom of time that outsourcing the marketing effort can create, and even other times it your return on investment can be an experience, a feeling, or a subjective measurement.

Regardless of what is is, business owners in all industries can agree that the ROI has to be something. In our experience working with pet store owners, we’ve found that many have either worked with marketing partners in the past and had a poor experience (bad ROI) or they’re working hard at marketing on their own and aren’t sure if it’s working (knowledge on how to track ROI).

Our team here at Pet Engine Marketing is obsessed with ROI. We hate the idea of being the weak link the room. When you work with us, every step, task, metric, and deliverable is tracked and shown to you on a weekly and monthly basis. For more information about what it’s like working with us, schedule a 30 minute call with one of our reps to start getting the most out of your marketing.

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And now to the point of this Insider post: how pet stores can optimize email marketing for their best ROI. For more information on email marketing strategies, tactics, and creative ideas, use our directory or our search function on the Insider page and start learning!

This post will focus on using the same service that we use for email marketing: MailChimp (free for the first 2500 contacts!). If you don’t use MailChimp, no big deal as most of these principles can be applied on with other services as well. Use these hacks to increase your ROI on email marketing for your pet store,

How Pet Stores Can Optimize
Email for Best ROI

Make Sure You’re Recognizable

The “from name” is the field that appears first in most email programs and is almost guaranteed to be the first thing your subscribers look at in their inboxes. Most of the time it is a primary deciding factor on whether your email gets opened, deleted, or ignored.

The formula for a successful “from name” is pretty straightforward: it should be recognizable, professional, and simple. If it comes from your pet store, or the pet store owner as the face of the business, that will be just fine.

Put Real Thought into Subject Lines and Preview Text

Beyond having a recognizable from name, the subject line and preview text are the two most important aspects of optimizing email for best ROI for your pet store.

Your subject line needs to grab attention, and it can do that in a variety of ways. It can be witty, funny, serious, informative, relevant….see what your audience responds to best.

Your preview text should be a better idea of what your subscribers will be getting when they open the email. It should be alluring in the sense that it gives a little, but retains an air of mystery.

Optimize for All Screens

Somehow, in 2019, there are email marketing platforms that don’t account for opening emails on different screen sizes, causing jumbling, hard to read emails, obliterated inboxes, terrible open rates, and high unsubscribe numbers.

Your subscribers have dozens of email apps to choose from. They can read your email on the Yahoo Mail app on their iPhone while on the subway, Outlook 2007 on their desktop computer at work, and Gmail on their tablet at home. More important than sizing, perhaps, is the reading experience.

To make a better reading experience, consider streamlining your content, simplifying your design, increasing font sizes, and making your buttons stand out and touch friendly. With buttons and other calls-to-action specifically, it's important to ensure there's enough white space around the button so that it's easy to see, focus on, and click/touch.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel

As stated earlier, maybe your ROI when it comes to email marketing for your pet store is simply based on the amount of time it saves you. If your email marketing takes a few hours every month, we can understand how that might be a battery drainer.

Here are a few ways to improve your efficiency when it comes to email marketing:

Used saved templates
Replicate campaigns
Ensure subscribers can signup easily and without your involvement
Set up automation emails

How Pet Stores Can Optimize
Email for Best ROI
Conclusion

We’ve just given you a few easy, quick hacks that will help your open rates go up and your sales come in. Pet stores can optimize email for best ROI by either outsourcing it to us (see what we did there?) or improving it on their own. We recommend signing up for Pet Engine’s own email marketing and joining our growing community of pet store owners to keep making strides on improving your pet store’s marketing strategy. Click the button below to handle that!

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