3 Ways to Celebrate Earth Day at your Veterinary Practice

Your pet-loving clients may not realize how important they can be in helping protect the earth on Earth Day, and everyday for that matter. America’s pets have a substantially larger carbon footprint than humans mostly because of the amount of energy, land and water it takes to make their meat-based food. Many people have cut meat out of their diet to help the environment in some way, but that wouldn’t be healthy for our furry friends.

Because of this, we have to find other ways to be environmentally conscious with our pets, and your practice celebrating Earth Day in these three ways can help.

1. Offer a discount on spay/neuter services

According to the ASPCA, 6.5 million companion animals enter U.S. animal shelters nationwide every year. That number is important for pet owners to know because pets require meat-based food, water and shelter, which goes back to how large their carbon footprint is. A helpful solution is encouraging your clients to spay/neuter their pets in an effort to help control the extreme growth of the pet population. Send them a promotional email offering a discount, for example 25% off spay/neuter services if they schedule the appointment by Earth Day. As their pet’s doctor, you can help educate them on why it’s important to stop breeding animals that can’t be taken care of.

2. Give out biodegradable waste bags

America’s pets produce about 5.1 million tons of feces in a year, as much as 90 million Americans. If all that were thrown in the trash, it would rival the total trash production of Massachusetts — from the humans, at least.* Of course this is completely out of our control, but we can help by using biodegradable waste bags to pick up our pet’s waste. The best doodie bags meet the FTC’s strict criteria, ASTM D6400, which is given to products that actually compost.

Give these out to clients who visit your clinic in the month of April in the spirit of Earth Day. You can also help spread the message on why it’s important to pick up pet waste, for example to prevent the transmission of germs.

3. Send more appointment reminders via email and text

Although postcards are a tried and true form of appointment reminders, email and text messages are also very effective. Sometimes they may be more effective because your client is receiving the reminder in a more timely manner, including the day-of their appointment. Also, you can’t forget that both forms of digital communication are helping you save paper and cut costs.

Test out using only email and text in April, not only to save paper, but also to measure how successful it may be to reduce no-shows. Be sure to implement email segmentation to get the most out of your campaign.

Celebrating Earth Day is important because our planet is a complex ecosystem that should be handled with care. Let your clients know it’s important to you, and get them into the spirit of being eco-conscious as well!

*http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/the-truth-about-cats-and-dogs-environmental-impact

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