When HealthyPet decided to segment its email database, it didn’t fool around. Today the publisher, which produces email and direct mail appointment reminders and educational content on behalf of more than 4,000 veterinarians nationwide, sends more than 130 versions of its enewsletter. Since launching the targeted emails in January 2010, HealthyPet has seen its unique click rate triple, and its click-to-open rate is now 2.7 times higher than a year ago.
A primary purpose of the enewsletters is to reinforce the relationship between the veterinarians and pet owners, in part by providing the pet owners with educational content. “But while it’s great to get an article on senior wellness, if you have a six-month-old puppy, it doesn’t mean anything to you,” says vice president of digital media Brendan Lynch.
So working with Experian CheetahMail, HealthyPet decided to segment its database by age of pet and tailor the content of its newsletters accordingly. The company sends six emails during the pet’s first year of life, Lynch says, and quarterly messages thereafter. Each message is triggered by the pet’s age rather than by the calendar, which helps to smooth out the flow of outbound messages and avoid high-volume bottlenecks.
In addition to creating specific messages depending on the age of the pet, HealthyPet also segmented its list by pet breed , since a German shepherd, for example, is likely to suffer from different health and wellness issues than a Chihuahua. What’s more, each vet and veterinary hospital that is a HealthyPet client has the option of including promotional content within each newsletter. “For puppies, you can promote spaying and neutering,” Lynch says. “For senior dogs, you can promote senior wellness exams.”
There's another level of personalization as well: The “from” field features each veterinarian client’s name, and the logo, phone number, and postal address of the specific vet sender is inserted into the newsletter. What’s more, customer-specific registration codes are embedded into all links to personalize the Website experience.
HealthyPet began developing the segmentation program in autumn 2009. “We started out just getting the platform down: building templates, determining where does stuff live, how does stuff get transferred, what should be personalized,” Lynch recalls. The data regarding the pets and their owners come directly from the vet clients, “who transfer files over a regular basis.” If a vet doesn’t provide information about a pet’s age or breed, HealthyPet will send a default generic enewsletter.
For some marketers, creating the content might have been a challenge. HealthyPet, however, benefited from owning a library of “consumer-driven, veterinarian-approved content,” Lynch says, from the 34-page print magazine it produces to mail with appointment providers to the customers of its vet clients.
Now that the enewsletter program is up and running, maintaining it requires minimal effort. “We get the information from our veterinarian customers,” Lynch says, “and it’s automated from there.”
Including newsletter content targeted more specifically to the recipients “strengthens the relationship between the veterinarians and their clients while providing extremely timely and relevant information,” Lynch says. And because the veterinarians can offer clients valuable content in exchange for their email address, the newsletters make it easier for the vets to grow their email subscriber files.
“It was a very time-intensive project to get off the ground,” Lynch concludes, “but we felt it was worth every effort, and the results have proved themselves.”
