As times change, it’s becoming harder to avoid the use of email marketing in the pet industry—and that’s not an industry specific trend. With fewer people subscribing to cable and instead relying on video websites like Hulu, Youtube, and Netflix, and the individual use of adblock, there are fewer opportunities to market directly to consumers. With that said, email marketing is a great way to cross the threshold and make yourself known to your target clientele. In order to make email marketing more effective in the pet industry, try applying these tips:

1. Collect Email Addresses Everywhere, All the Time

In the pet industry, there are a few different ways you can collect email addresses. With Splash and Dash for Dog’s premium membership program, collecting emails is as easy as making a sale on one of our memberships. Other opportunities include during checkout by offering to save paper by emailing the receipt, at special events, and in offering coupons or a mailing list for special information and articles.

2.     Give Incentives for Forwarded Content

This is much easier than you think with the help of Facebook. You don’t have to simply stick with emails for giving incentives in the pet industry. Offer a special coupon, discount, or other reward to individuals who ‘SHARE’ your Facebook business page or forward and advertisement email. You can even offer better incentives for every person who walks through the door with a referral from someone else.

3.    Send Emails from Real Accounts

Customers can become quickly annoyed when they’re receiving emails from accounts with no names or whose names belong to users who are clearly company robots. In order to create a more personable experience with email marketing for your pet industry franchise, you should have real accounts from real people that send emails out to your consumers. You may want to use your franchisees business email for this or if each franchisee has a marketing direction of some kind, use that. As long as it has the name of someone who seems like a real person, you will reap better benefits. Anything that is clearly fake or a robot is more likely to end up unread in the trash.

4.     Make Your Email Signature a Call to Action

Create moving momentum for the receiver of your email marketing by putting pet industry call to actions in the signature of the email. These call to actions could be about buying a certain item, visiting the website, or making an appointment at dog grooming immediately. By making actions easier for the email reader, you increase the likelihood that an individual will go onto do more than just read your email.

5.    Create a Multidimensional Email

Instead of simply sending a wall of text email to your customers, consider using pictures, buttons, links, and text in a colorful combination that is appealing to the eye. Multi-dimensional emails in the pet industry are easy as you include animals, pet food, and toys in the surrounding images of the email. You can show new products in your business and create a multi-dimensional advertisement through the accompanying images in the email that make it much nicer to read in general.

6. Intertwine Email Promotions and Social Media

There are so many different ways to create combination promotions in the pet industry through the use of social media and emails including a secret code word passed out in email and asking for it over on the social media page. Of course this would have to be done skillfully or as a limited time event as Facebook statuses would reveal the code word. Work with your marketing director to create a stronger two-part promotion that will provide you with email addresses and more opportunities for promotion in the pet industry.