It’s been a little while since we’ve made an Insider post on email marketing but as it’s the start of the month and our pet store clients have newsletters and coupons going on, we figured it’d be a great time to dish out some tips to improve your open rates, your click rates, and ultimately your paws in the store. If you aren’t already engaging in some email marketing to increasd your customer visits and their spending, give us a call and let’s see if we can partner up to get your pet store profiting!

First, the data.

Did you know that 90% of consumer say they find email personalization appealing? Or that 80% are more likely to purchase from a business that offers personalized marketing and experiences? (Source: Epsilon)

So here’s three steps to email personalization and improving your pet store marketing.

3 Steps to Improve
Email Personalization

1. Understanding your Pet Parents

You’ve really got to know your customers, and luckily for our pet store clients, we feel like they (and we) have a pretty strong understanding of who their customers are.

Standard email marketing just sends out the same offers to everybody, so even your cat owners are getting dog food offers. Stronger, more personalized email uses more data and segmentation. You can collect this data over time, and here are a few examples of data categories that can help you send more personalized emails:

Location (if you have multiple stores)
Purchase history (needs and preferences)
Type of pet
Day or month they entered the system or became a loyalty member

2. Use Personal Language

When we do email marketing for pet store clients, we use software that allows us to input people’s names and even their pet’s names if we have that info! The more you segment and drill down your audience into niche categories, the more you can speak to their needs, preferences, and wants.

One way to improve your pet store’s marketing is to get higher email open rates and click rates, and using their names and their pet’s names in subject lines is a great way to do that. We can help!

3. Don’t be Against Evolution

Well, that might be a controversial statement for some, but let us explain what we mean. Your customer’s preferences and needs will evolve and change over time, so keeping them in the same categories and buckets as they’ve changed is a disservice to them.

As a pet store owner, you and your pet store marketing strategy owe it to your customers to deliver them the best service and value possible. Keeping a pulse on who they are, what they want, and what’s going on with their pets in real time is a great way to personalize your email marketing.

Some of this data collection happens in the store. If you or your staff are having a conversation with these customers and they are explaining changes, then their file needs to be updated! It takes work and communication, but it’s absolutely effective.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve read this and thought “oh, that’s definitely something my pet store can start doing to improve our email marketing,” then that is AWESOME and we approve. If you’ve read this and thought “wow, this is a rabbit hole that could stretch on for miles,” you are absolutely right. You could spend all day editing individual data in your email marketing CRM, and making tiny niche categories for segmentation. You could do it, but your time is probably better spent elsewhere to be honest.

Stay tuned for tips and ways to get more personal with your best customers, not just through email. In our eyes, that’s customer service and we’ll be digging more deeply into that in the future!

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