We’re excited to launch a new miniseries of content brought to you by Jet (such a good boy)! Every piece will be featuring a service, company, or platform that can help you market your pet store for FREE, or nearly free 😉 At Pet Engine Marketing, we understand that you as a pet store owner are looking for media and marketing means that are effective, easy to use, quick, and also cost-efficient. But how do you market your pet store and not break the bank? We’ve gathered a list of freesources that pet store owners are going to absolutely love when it comes to marketing their business. How do we know? It’s simple – these are the exact same tools, strategies, and platforms that we use here at Pet Engine for marketing our pet store clients! So we hope you learn something new, and if you feel like learning a bit more about how we help pet stores grow, feel free to schedule a quick call with us!

The first service we want feature is MailChimp. As a pet store owner, email can be one of, if not your most, effective marketing services. There is a huge list of benefits to MailChimp as you get more experienced and dive deeper into all that they offer. However, we’d like to point out that MailChimp is 100% FREE until your email list gets higher than 2000 subscribers! After that, it’s a nominal monthly fee that won’t destroy your wallet. Another way to look at it is that if your subscriber list grows to several thousand and continues to increase, you can market your pet store via email the same way you might put coupons into a newspaper, magazine, or retail mailer, so for a fraction of the cost MailChimp can replace some of your other marketing means with better tracking abilities.

Benefits of using MailChimp

It’s free to start. Seriously. $0 to begin email marketing for pet stores! Pretty awesome.

Send hundreds of emails at once. This is, obviously, a huge timesaver. In addition to this, you can set up automated emails - small systems that once engaged you rarely have to check again. Here are some good ideas for automated emails that are powerful without much input:

Send an anniversary email: “Thanks for being a loyal customer for two years! Enjoy this coupon for a free sample of dog treats.”
Send a birthday email: “Happy birthday! We’re a pet store so we don’t bake cakes, but we can give you this $10 e-reward as a thanks for shopping here!”
Send a birthday email for their pet: “It’s a pawty! Happy birthday to Fido! Come by the store with this coupon to get Fido a free rawhide.”

These automated emails only need data input such as their pet’s name, their birthdays, etc. MailChimp allows you to painlessly import this data for your subscribers, which can be imported or integrated with your POS system.

MailChimp has powerful, insightful tracking tools built into its emails. Get real-time data and information on how your campaigns are performing, what your subscribe and unsubscribe rates are, your open rate, and your in-email clicks! These are all beneficial stats when dissecting your marketing funnel.

Segmentation! MailChimp allows you to tag, divide, and segment your mailing list into different segments. You can create separate lists to subscribers that haven’t responded to your emails and build a re-engagement campaign. You can create separate lists to subscribers that respond to all of your emails and build a campaign to reward them. You can create separate lists for your top 50 or 100 pet store customers and build a campaign to entice them to further sales, or a thank you campaign. The possibilities are endless and ideas are only limited by your imagination!

The interface is simple and extremely user-friendly. They have pre-built templates that you can customize, making campaign creation easy enough to finish in ten minutes or less. The MailChimp platform can walk you through campaign creation, and even alerts you to areas that need attention.

You can send a test email to yourself, allowing for you to get a look at it before launching on either desktop or mobile. This worry-free backup is a big advantage over standard emailing.

Easy integration into nearly every website platform. At Pet Engine Marketing, we build websites for pet stores using Squarespace. On these websites, we can create subscribe forms and even popups that allow site visitors to opt in to your email marketing. It’s always nice to grow your customer base passively!

Summary

Hopefully you learned something today about email marketing for your pet stores and how you can start with and use MailChimp to grow your pet store! For more pet store marketing tips, ideas, plans, and tools, stay tuned, follow us on our social platforms, and subscribe to our Insider!

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