We’ve discussed the importance of collecting customer data and what kind of information you should have on hand. Let’s take it one step further and put it all together to build trust, add value and show up for your audience through strategic pet marketing campaigns.
But first, what is a strategic pet marketing campaign? It’s a long-term plan that helps you meet your business goals by understanding your audience’s wants and needs. Postcards, paid advertising and social media posts may be part of your campaign. But every piece works together to provide value to your customers and an experience with your pet business that is satisfying and memorable.
The most effective emails, text messages, direct mailers and thank you notes are relevant to the recipient and timely, after all. But how do you keep track of birthdays, transaction histories, pet ages, and more without giving up all of your free time? One word: segmentation.
Customer data is crucial to your pet marketing campaigns because it allows you to segment your audience to cater to specific niches or needs. Using your customer relationship management software, you can mark your customers with tags or custom fields based on whatever data point you want to track.
Segmenting your audience allows you to tailor the customer experience and provide value to those who need it most. For instance, say you own a pet retail business. Wouldn’t a cat customer be more likely to take action on a cat-related email from your store versus getting emails about dog mom events? If your cat customers get five dog-related emails to every cat one, they will likely start tuning you out (or worse, think you don’t care about them or their feline friends).
Segmenting requires a time investment, but you can easily send timely and relevant messages to your customers once you have a system in place. Some of our favorite tags or fields to segment by are: animal breed, pet birthday, first purchase anniversary and number of family pets. But you can get more ideas for how to segment your list for future pet marketing campaigns here.
Once you have segmented your audience, you can begin sending consistent and relevant messages to increase customer engagement and loyalty to your store. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Monthly newsletter
- Welcome to the family
- New client/onboarding
- Reminders
- Promotions
- Re-engagement for customers you haven’t seen in a while
- Abandoned carts for online stores
- Milestone emails like anniversaries or number of classes taken
- Special offers
- Surveys
- “Thinking of Your Pet” notes
- Holiday-themed tips and tricks
Within those regular messages to your list, you can spotlight store promotions, announcements, breaking news or recall information, events and so much more.
As we mentioned before, sending the right message to the right people can significantly impact your business. Your pet marketing campaigns’ most important goals should be to communicate with purpose–sharing information that adds value and demonstrates how you’re serving your customers and their pets.
Want to know more about segmenting your audience to make the most of your pet marketing campaigns? Join us in the Pet Boss Nation Facebook group. Our members are veterans of the pet industry and regularly share what’s working for them, what’s not working and exciting ways they keep their customers engaged.
Using a Membership Model to Increase Your Pet Business Revenue
