Email Marketing for Pet Brands: The Klaviyo Playbook

Pet parents don't buy products. They buy things for a family member who happens to have four legs.

That one fact makes pet eCommerce one of the most email-friendly verticals in existence, and one of the most consistently underbuilt. We've run email and SMS programs for pet brands on both ends of the spectrum: a premium dog bed brand where Klaviyo now drives close to $900K a year, over 40% of total store revenue, and a handmade collar brand where a rebuilt email program returned 24x ROI and tripled email revenue in two months.

Different products. Different price points. Same playbook underneath.

Here it is.

Why pet brands are built for email

Three structural advantages, and most pet brands use none of them.

The purchase is emotional. Nobody needs a $300 orthopedic dog bed or a hand-stitched Biothane collar the way they need toothpaste. They buy because they love their dog. Emotional purchases respond to storytelling, social proof, and brand connection, which is exactly what email does better than any paid channel.

The purchase repeats. Beds wear out. Collars get chewed. Covers need replacing. Treats and supplements run out on a schedule you can predict from order data. Replenishment and cross-sell mechanics that feel forced in other verticals are genuinely useful here.

The proof writes itself. Pet brands accumulate customer photos and reviews at a rate most categories would kill for. Our collar client had thousands of five-star reviews, real dogs wearing real collars, sitting outside the email program entirely. We pulled that social proof into every flow and campaign, and it stopped being decoration. A golden retriever wearing the collar, five stars underneath from his owner: that's a purchase decision already made. The email just delivers it.

Flows are the revenue engine. Treat them like it.

The clearest lesson from the dog bed account: flows generated roughly $500K from under 600K recipients while campaigns generated roughly $400K from over 10 million recipients.

Read that gap again. Campaigns created reach. Flows captured intent, at around 25 times the per-recipient efficiency.

The flow-versus-campaign question isn't philosophical in pet eCommerce. The data keeps giving the same answer: build the automation layer first, then let campaigns amplify a system that already converts. Here's what that layer looks like.

The welcome flow: story first, discount second

Most pet brands send one welcome email with 10% off and call it done. That's not a welcome flow. That's a coupon dispenser.

The welcome sequence we built for the collar brand led with the product story instead:

1. Why handmade matters. What separates these collars from mass-produced Amazon stock.
2. How to measure your dog for the perfect fit. Genuinely useful, and it builds trust before selling anything.
3. The materials and the people. Craftsmanship as a differentiator.
4. Social proof. Real dogs, real photos, real reviews.

By the time the first promotional email landed, subscribers already trusted the brand. In the bed account, the welcome flow alone produced six figures at under $2 per recipient, the single largest flow in an account full of strong flows.

If your bed or collar brand justifies a premium price with craftsmanship, warranties, or materials, the welcome flow is where that argument gets made. A discount code skips the argument and trains customers to wait for sales.

Abandoned checkout: the most efficient asset you own

The bed brand's abandoned checkout flow earns about $4.50 per recipient, the highest efficiency in the account. Nothing exotic behind it: the right timing, the product front and center, reviews from buyers of that exact product, and an SMS touch for speed.

High-AOV pet products make this flow disproportionately valuable. Someone abandoning a $279 bed isn't window shopping. They're deciding. The flow's job is to finish that conversation, not to shout "YOU FORGOT SOMETHING" with a discount attached.

Browse abandonment and back-in-stock: built for considered purchases

Premium pet purchases involve research. Orthopedic bed buyers compare foam density and warranty terms. Made-to-order collar buyers pick materials and engraving across multiple visits. That long consideration window is exactly what browse abandonment exists for: re-engaging interest before it cools, with the specific product plus a review from someone who bought it.

And if your best SKUs sell out (a chronic, almost enviable problem for chew-proof bed brands running preorders), a back-in-stock flow is the easiest revenue you can name. The notification list is a queue of people who already decided to buy. Pair it with SMS and the sale happens minutes after restock, not whenever the customer remembers to check.

Now the uncomfortable part. In the bed account, three flows in this family generated over $160K while sitting in Draft status for part of the year. The single most common thing we find in pet-brand Klaviyo audits isn't broken strategy. It's revenue sitting in flows that were built and never fully switched on.

Post-purchase: where repeat buyers are made

A first order is an audition. The post-purchase flow decides whether there's a second one. For products with break-in periods or care requirements (memory foam beds, leather collars), education also directly reduces returns. A buyer who knows the foam takes a few days to fully expand, or how to condition the leather, doesn't file a return on day three. Then come the review request, the photo request, and the cross-sell that actually fits: a spare cover for the bed they bought, a matching leash in their dog's size.

Replenishment and winback: the compounding layer

Covers, consumables, accessories, and eventual replacements all run on cycles you can read straight from order history. A replenishment flow timed to those cycles feels like service, not selling. Behind it, a winback flow catches lapsed customers with what's new in their dog's size. Those are two different jobs, and one email can't do both.

The segmentation gold pet brands sit on

Generic advice says segment by engagement. Fine. But pet brands hold predictive data most verticals would pay for, and almost none of them use it:

• Dog size and breed. From orders, quiz answers, or engraving details. An XL chew-proof bed buyer and a small senior-dog orthopedic buyer need entirely different stories.
• Product registrations and warranty claims. A registration program is a segmentation engine wearing a customer-service costume. A warranty claim is a perfectly timed replacement conversation.
• Selector-quiz results. If you run a "find the right bed" quiz and the results don't trigger a tailored email journey, you built the hard part and skipped the payoff. This is the most common six-figure gap we see in the category.
• Repair and service requests. Customers who repair instead of replace are your most loyal segment. Talk to them like it.
• Wholesale vs. DTC. Kennels, groomers, and working-dog buyers behave nothing like retail pet parents. If both live in one list receiving the same campaigns, both are being underserved.

When we rebuilt the collar brand's segmentation around pet-parent behavior (size preference, purchase history, browse category, engagement), per-recipient flow revenue rose 50% on the same list. No new subscribers. Just relevance.

SMS: the second channel, done with restraint

We launched SMS for the bed brand in the spring, and it generated about $75K within the year, with a 26% click rate on campaigns and per-recipient flow revenue comfortably ahead of email campaigns in the same account.

It worked because it wasn't bolted on as a "we should do SMS" checkbox. It launched where speed and immediacy earn the interruption: cart abandonment, back-in-stock, delivery updates, low-inventory alerts. The full SMS playbook is its own topic, but the pet-specific rule is simple. This audience is warm and loyal, which makes SMS unusually effective and unusually easy to burn. Low frequency. High intent. Nothing you wouldn't want from a brand you like.

Campaigns: read what your audience tells you

Campaigns still contributed roughly $400K for the bed brand, but the more useful output was the pattern. The top-performing sends were dominated by open-box and clearance campaigns: value-and-urgency framing, not blanket discounting.

That's a recurring theme in premium pet. The audience will happily buy a returned-and-inspected bed at a fair price. What erodes them is the endless "15% OFF EVERYTHING" cadence that quietly reprices the brand. We've watched the same dynamic play out in other premium, high-AOV categories, where pulling a client out of the discount cycle entirely grew email revenue by nearly 60%.

What good looks like: honest numbers from real accounts

Benchmarks in this vertical get invented a lot. These come from our own client accounts:

Metric	Result
Email share of store revenue	40%+
Attributed annual email revenue	Close to $900K, up more than 65% YoY
Flow vs. campaign share	Over half of attributed revenue from flows
Welcome flow	Six figures at under $2 per recipient
Abandoned checkout	About $4.50 per recipient
SMS campaigns	26% click rate
ROI on engagement	24x
Email revenue growth	3x in 2 months
Segmentation rebuild	50% lift in per-recipient flow revenue

For context on how flow revenue distributes across a wider set of accounts, see our Klaviyo flow revenue benchmarks.

Where to start (in this order)

1. Audit what exists. Check flow status first: live, draft, or missing. Draft flows with revenue history are found money.
2. Rebuild the welcome flow around the story, not the discount.
3. Fix abandoned checkout and browse abandonment. Timing, product focus, social proof, SMS touch.
4. Wire up back-in-stock if anything ever sells out.
5. Segment on the data you already hold. Size, breed, quiz results, registrations, wholesale split.
6. Add SMS where speed matters. Not everywhere.
7. Reframe campaigns around value and urgency, then watch what your top sends tell you.

None of this requires new tools. It's Klaviyo, used like a revenue system instead of a newsletter app.

Related Reads

• Klaviyo Flow Revenue Benchmarks: What Flows Should Earn
• Email Marketing for Fashion Brands
• Email Marketing for Jewelry Brands: High AOV, High Emotion
• How Much Does a Klaviyo Agency Cost? Real Pricing Breakdown

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Run a pet brand? We'll pull your Klaviyo account apart and show you exactly where the revenue is hiding: draft flows, missing segments, the works. Written audit in 48 hours, from the team behind the numbers above. Free, and you keep the findings either way.

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Mark Cijo is the founder of GOSH Digital, a Klaviyo Gold Partner agency. He's built email programs for 150+ DTC brands, including the pet brands in this post, through email & SMS, paid media, and SEO.