Here in Michigan, the telltale signs of winter have arrived: unending gray days, occasional snowfall, wind that cuts through your clothes, happy dogs, and Christmas right around the corner! It’s not all as bad as it sounds, promise.

Today is Giving Tuesday, so we’ll be providing our free community of pet store owners this December marketing calendar for pet stores to help with your marketing planning during the busy holiday month. You’re well and truly in the thick of things now, so we’re wondering: how is it going for you? What’s been working? How are you managing and getting through it all?

We’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to post in the comments below or on our social media platforms.

December Marketing Calendar
for Pet Stores

12/2 - Cyber Monday

This has come and gone, and if you didn’t get a chance to look at all of our previous posts on planning, strategizing, and help marketing for pet stores during the holidays, you can find everything on our Blog page. Better yet, subscribe to our monthly emails to get the Editor’s Picks of our top content for pet store marketing help.

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12/3 - Giving Tuesday

Standing in contrast to Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday was started as a response to commercialism during the holiday season. Your pet store can celebrate Giving Tuesday by promoting a partnership with a local shelter, throwing an adoption event, or fundraising.

12/9 - Green Monday

Green Monday falls on the second Monday of the month of December; when shoppers realize they only have around 10 shipping days left before Christmas. Green Monday is a little bit less well-known, but it’s an online retail industry term (similar to Cyber Monday) when online retailers expect and intend to make a lot of money, hence the “green” titling.

Pet store marketers can capitalize on this day as well, creating urgency to drive last-minute sales and promoting some of your best selling items or holiday-themed gift ideas for the pet parents in people’s lives. We can help you with that - if you don’t know where to start, how about with a free 30 minute call? Nothing to lose.

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12/22 - Hanukkah Week

Hanukkah, which is Hebrew for “dedication,” is the Festival of Lights and lasts for eight days. When it comes to pet store marketing help, it’s always proper to celebrate holidays of all sorts to show support of diverse peoples. We’re all about that here at Pet Engine Marketing.

If you’d like to really celebrate Hanukkah, consider a mini-promotion for all eight days. A quick giveaway, a customer feature, a local partner shoutout. You make the rules, you make the content! Doesn’t have to be crazy. Make sure you’re using tools like Facebook, Instagram, Stories, FB Live, and email to help you succeed here.

12/24 - Christmas Eve

Knowing that many people are prone to procrastination (yup, looking at you, pet store owner!) and find themselves with shopping left to do on December 24th, you can expect a number of marketing emails to be sent on this day – sometimes more than on. Typically they’ll be promoting options and opportunities for those last-minute shoppers.

Our professional approach is to leave the holidays to family time and more or less “go dark" from a marketing standpoint. We’ll post about it, but unless there’s a specific event or theme or campaign running, we try not to take a capitalistic stance on holidays.

Independent pet stores are bastions of community, not businesses hellbent on profits.

12/25 - Christmas Day

We stand by our strategy from Christmas Eve and typically don’t go crazy for it, despite it growing as a day of eCommerce income year after year (Source: Retail Technology).

Our recommendation? Enjoy the day off!

12/31 - New Year’s Eve

December 31st, New Year’s Eve, Last Day of the Year – whatever you call it, it’s a time for looking back and looking forward. New Year’s Eve is a great day for pet store marketers to recap the previous year, promote sales, or preview the year ahead, and do some personal and professional reflection.

Since we are in the industry of pet store marketing help, we at Pet Engine Marketing remain focused on metrics, goals, tracking, and delivering. We focus on partnership above everything else and using marketing to help our clients hit their goals, so if at the end of the year you and your marketing team, ownership group, or management staff haven’t sat down and reflected, set some new goals, identified the steps and processes to achieve them, and started the chase like a hungry pack of dogs, then we highly recommend doing so with US.

December marketing Calendar
For pet stores Conclusion

As always, we hope this Insider post has inspired you with a few ideas to give your pet store one last push towards the end of the year. Either that, or we hope that it’s helped organize your thoughts and promotional plans with a few “can’t miss” days to post something across your channels!

We’re here to help! Feedback is always appreciated, let us know how we’re doing.