King Kanine: Building an Emotional Connection with SMSBump

An Organic Pet Care Solution

King Kanine is a manufacturer of CBD products and grooming supplies for pets. They’ve been around for about 5 years, and were one of the first companies to provide pet only CBD on the market. Their mission is to bring joy to families by providing the highest quality CBD products.

CBD oil helps reduce the painful effects of pets suffering from various illnesses including PTSD, sleep apnea, torn ligaments and broken bones. It restores a pet’s energy back to its natural healthy state, so your best friend is wagging its tail and jumping with glee in no time. Some customers have given their dog King Kanine’s CBD oil following complex surgeries like cartilage removal, and find that it immediately calms them down and relieves discomfort. 

King Kalm CBD oil is combined with Copaiba to produce King Kanine’s most potent formula. The oil is easily absorbed into the pet’s system and starts taking effect straight away when compared to powder alternatives. Apart from selling great products, King Kanine keeps their community of pet owners informed on social media, sharing tips and advice on how to keep pets healthy and happy.

Jon Neveloff is a partner at King Kanine. He shares his experience using SMSBump and SMS marketing for the past few months, as a channel to keep the emotional connection with his customers alive.

Discovering SMSBump

In the CBD business, it’s very difficult for store owners to get enough site traffic. You are forced to the edge of your creative limits, and have to rethink how you communicate with your already established customer base. You need to be able to provide a product and highlight its strengths even when your customers fail to realize their need for it. Jon adds:

“It’s challenging to get to the customer initially, but once we do, we really want to make sure to take care of them and communicate with them as much as we can— like checking in on their pet and seeing how we can help them. SMSBump really helps us achieve that.”

When asked what he thinks SMSBump does best, Jon answered:

 “Providing great customer service.”

King Kanine also uses SMSBump to stimulate quick purchases. Whenever they run a major email campaign, they also add SMS marketing into the game to get exposure on all levels.

It’s essential to realize that building a genuine relationship with customers takes a lot of patience and effort. In terms of offering promotions worth a purchase, you need to go beyond the sales talk and connect with them emotionally. Be aware that especially in SMS marketing, your subscribers have given up one of their most personal bits of information — their phone number, so what you offer must not only be a great deal but fill a specific need of theirs. 

Segmenting customers based on past purchases and launching product upsell flows shows you care enough to recommend a relevant product of value.  So, once they open up the text message, they go: “Ah, that’s exactly what I needed!” And, after time they become excited and anticipate your next marketing message. 

Moving forward, King Kanine is focusing on delivering customized content including the pet’s name and their birthday. Taking this approach not only demonstrates the company’s passion for pet care, but creates a higher chance of a purchase.

Overcoming Challenges

King Kanine had some merchant processing issues during the summer, and their site was down for a few weeks which proved to be a great challenge. But once they recovered, the company wanted to do a major push to everybody saying they were back, and going to make sure everyone had enough products for their pets, so they sent an email and SMS campaign with great results. Spending less than $500, the campaign generated over $37,000 in sales.

“We don’t go overboard with SMS campaigns because that’s too pushy; but we also don’t want to be forgotten and stay top of mind — so it’s a real delicate balance, but for this particular campaign we achieved a several thousand percent ROI. It was pretty amazing.” 

In the first few months, King Kanine started out by sending only one SMS campaign per month. Currently, they have increased that amount to 2-3 per month. They are still figuring out the perfect balance of messages to send out, but what rests as most important is sticking to the pillar of effective communication with their customers. In the end, its about whether there is something of value to say that customers will be interested in.

Learning and Growing

Jon admits he’s not a technical wizard, which is why he appreciates having a great team to support him. Still, he was able to learn his way around SMSBump all on his own. According to Jon, anyone would be able to set up a campaign in 5 minutes. Sure, there might be a ton of bells and whistles he’s not using, but for simple text marketing he acknowledges that the results have been incredible. According to Jon, SMSBump is a science. What makes King Kanine stand out, is their ability to connect with customers through text marketing on a personal level and show their passion for pet care.

“Technology is great, but if you don’t add the human element to it you end up shorthanded. SMSBump is a science — it gives us an avenue to reach our customers, though there’s an art to maximize its potential.”

Building campaigns through SMSBump’s text marketing feature is currently the most effective strategy for King Kanine. Jon shares that they don’t launch a lot of automations yet, but are planning to try out the feature, as well as test out building flows to recover sales through the abandoned cart flow.

“Straight up text marketing based on per drop basis, it’s phenomenal. The app is really simple to use. Also the customer service is insane. Any time an issue popped up, SMSBump figured it out very quickly.”

Especially in the pet care industry, paying attention to customer needs is vital. Everyone who works at King Kanine, is a pet owner so this helps to understand and connect with their customers on a much deeper level. It really comes down to letting that feeling of caring come through — whether it’s providing customer service on the phone when somebody has a question, or sending any type of advertisement. Jon adds:

“We made many mistakes along the way: didn’t talk to customers enough, talked to them too much, didn’t have much to say, just sent stuff to send stuff. So, if you have something to say, you can say it to your customers. If you don’t have anything to say, people will look right through it. If I was selling widgets, it just wouldn’t be the same. But I can talk about my dogs all day. That’s the difference. The same love wouldn’t come through.”

Some Helpful Advice

For King Kanine, the most important factor to leaving customers happy is having the best product possible. This means not cutting corners on anything that’s manufactured. Jon explains: 

“If I’m not comfortable giving this to my dog, I’m certainly not going to sell it to anybody else. So that’s first. Be straight, be upfront with your customers. Let them know you really care about what they’re going through. And hopefully that comes through on your site and how you communicate — that ends up building loyalty.”

With Black Friday around the corner, King Kanine has been working on setting up a schedule so email and SMS marketing are in balance. Jon shares his marketing strategy:

“We normally send out an SMS on the same day as our email campaigns. I like to spread the SMS and email out about an hour or two with email going first. Just seems to work best for us in that scenario. Our emails have much more information as compared to SMS but SMS gives us a much more immediate response as compared to email.”

King Kanine is planning to send 4-6 text marketing campaigns spread out weekly, from pre-Black Friday leading up to post-Cyber Monday.