5 Tips to Improve Pet Store Email Marketing
As more and more pet stores have shifted towards eCommerce solutions due to COVID-19, email marketing has become more important than ever. The biggest issue is that many pet store owners that are just beginning their pet store’s email marketing campaigns face an uphill battle:
The big players have been at it for years.
The learning curve can be steep.
The debate on whether it’s a good use of your time to do it or start email marketing.
The consumer’s inbox has become more and more competitive as every brand shifts to heavy digital marketing campaigns.
If your pet store has begun to include eCommerce offerings for your customers, but your revenue hasn’t exceeded or equaled your pre-COVID levels, think about scheduling a free consultation with the Pet Engine Marketing team. Email marketing is one of our bread-and-butter service offerings that come with our pet store marketing starter package.
With this Insider post, we’re going to dig into 5 tips to improve pet store email marketing campaigns and ROI, helping you supercharge it to gain some immediate returns on your time/financial investment. If you want to learn more from our pet store email marketing resources, hit that link.
5 Tips to Improve Pet Store Email Marketing
Before we begin, some data to convince you that email marketing, far from being dead in 2020, remains one of the best ways to reach customers and make money, from marketing giants Hubspot:
Active email accounts are expected to hit 5.6 billion by 2019.
83 percent of B2B companies use e-newsletters as part of their content marketing program.
73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email.
Let’s dig in to help you start learning ways to improve your pet store email marketing strategy.
1. Behavioral Emails Increase Relevancy
So, what’s a behavioral email? These emails are triggered by a consumer’s behavior., as opposed to a mass-marketing email such as a newsletter. Here are a few examples of behavioral email that you can apply to your pet store marketing strategy:
Send a welcome email - but don’t just send a welcome email! Make it uniquely YOURS. Tell your subscriber what you want them to do next. Use any data you’ve collected on a signup form to nurture them into making a positive next step.
Abandoned cart emails can be highly effective and should be an important piece of your eCommerce platform’s capabilities.
Birthday club automation - bring your customers to your site with a personalized birthday coupon code that gets sent a week before their or their pet’s birthday.
2. Segment Your Subscribers
Nobody wants to receive an email that is useless to them. That’s clutter. Good marketing is the antithesis of clutter. For example, if you have a dog, you don’t want to receive a marketing email from my pet store that’s championing their discounts on cat litter. That’s useless!
Here are some quick and easy ways you can segment your subscribers:
Type of pet
Pet breed
Pet age
Pet size
Or, you can go further with data collected from your eCommerce or POS or marketing data:
Products purchased
Brands purchased
Email activity (opens or clicks)
Some of this data is automatically being collected by your POS system or eCommerce platform. Others, such as the information on your customer’s pets, might need to be asked for. And that’s all it really takes - asking for it, provided that you are able to offer a valid reason for collecting it (like a Birthday Club).
3. An Unsubscriber is an Opportunity to Learn
Most email platforms can provide you with statistics and reasons why subscribers decide to leave your list. At Pet Engine Marketing, we use a Freesource email marketing provider called MailChimp, and when someone unsubscribers, it provides a nice bulleted list of options for the unsubscriber to choose from.
Whether your pet store’s emails “don’t feel relevant” or your subscribers “didn’t sign up for this list” or they “are getting too many emails,” every answer is an opportunity to learn and improve your pet store’s email marketing. If relevancy is the issue, then segmentation is the solution. If non-signups are the issue, then there’s a breakdown in communication wherever they signed up - possibly the register? If they are getting too many emails…you get the idea.
If you want assistance on pet store marketing or some of your campaigns, check out our free group on Facebook: THE group for marketing help for pet businesses to get feedback, ideas and inspiration, and help from other pet store owners across the country.
4. Personalized Signup Forms Work!
Can you envision a scenario where a customer wants to get deals from just one specific type of product? For instance, maybe they only want information or coupons on dog toys or catnip. That makes perfect sense, right? So, why not place a personalized signup form on your Dog Toys or Cat Treats product pages? The list might be small (they all start that way), but it will be hyper-targeted and anybody that signs up has a high chance of opening, clicking, and purchasing from a pet store marketing email they specifically opted into.
5. Try, Try, and Try Again!
Don’t give up! When you consider how inexpensive (or free) most pet store email marketing platforms are, there’s nothing to lose when you begin sending out campaigns. Try new things:
Emojis
Shorter or longer subject lines
Text-based or image-heavy emails
Buttons vs. links
Personalize with the subscriber’s name
Short vs. long emails
Various preview texts
Different “from” information
5 Tips to Improve Pet Store Email Marketing
Conclusion
Improving your pet store email marketing campaigns can be a convenient, inexpensive, and effective way to increase revenues. Standing out is becoming more and more difficult in inboxes, but if your pet store is doing the right things from a customer service perspective and building die-hard loyal customers, they will welcome and look forward to your email communications. Take advantage of these 5 tips to improve pet store email marketing from Pet Engine Marketing, or get on board with us to have it managed for you! It starts with a call.
