Auditing the Memorial Weekend send from Collars Dog Resort.
Collars Dog Resort is a two-location Kansas City dog boarding, daycare, training, and grooming business with houses in Olathe and Waldo. On May 6 they sent two structurally similar Memorial Weekend emails, one per location, both routed through Gingr's marketing infrastructure. This is a short, specific look at what's working and what's broken across both sends, paired with a reimagined version of the Olathe email at the bottom.
Brand: Collars Dog Resort (Olathe + Waldo)Olathe send: May 6, 12:38 PM CDT · from collarclubolathe@marketing.gingrapp.comWaldo send: May 6, 12:26 PM CDT · from contact@collarsdogresort.com (routed via marketing.gingrapp.com)Inbox tab: Promotions (Gmail label CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS, both sends)
At a glance
Seven issues. Severity stacks heavy in the middle.
2
High — broken footer links and a vote-campaign CTA pointed at the wrong page
Low — two-location segmentation is half-implemented
By location
Same campaign. Two different sets of bugs.
Olathe
May 6 · 12:38 PM
✗Vote CTA points to Gingr login, not vote.thepitchkc.com
✗About Us misroutes to a puppy-training page
✗Testimonials goes to a Google Search
✗Instagram icon points to @collarclubolathe (deleted) — the live account is @collarsdogresortolathe
✗LinkedIn icon missing from footer
Waldo
May 6 · 12:26 PM
✗Best of KC badge image links to /bestofkc20/ (2020 archive)
✗5 of 7 footer links return 404 (apex-domain URLs)
✗Instagram icon points to @collarclubkc (deleted) — the live account is @collarsdogresortwaldo
✗Facebook still on legacy "Collar Club KC" handle
Findings
Seven things, in order of impact.
01
Footer links — broken on Waldo, sloppy on Olathe
High
I followed every footer link in both sends. Same Gingr template, two completely different execution states.
Waldo — Dayplay, Board, Groom, Testimonials, About Us all 404 on the apex domain. Directions points to a Google Search, not a map. Instagram icon links to @collarclubkc, which Instagram returns "page not available" for. The real Waldo IG account, @collarsdogresortwaldo, is live and active — the email is just pointing at a dead handle.
Olathe — service subdomain links work, but About Us drops customers on a puppy-training page, Testimonials goes to Google Search, and the Instagram icon links to @collarclubolathe, also deleted. The real Olathe IG account, @collarsdogresortolathe, is live too.
Five of seven Waldo links dead. About Us misrouted on Olathe. Both Instagram icons point to dead handles even though both locations have live IG accounts under the new brand. Neither send has a real testimonials destination.
The fix
This is operational hygiene work, a one-time repair pass plus an ongoing pre-send link-integrity check. The kind of thing an email manager owns.
02
Pitch vote campaign broken on both sends, different bugs each
High
Same Best of KC promo. Both sends broke it differently:
Olathe "Cast Your Vote!" button → Gingr account login screen. Customers can't vote at all from this link.
Waldo "Cast Your Vote!" text link works, but the Best of KC badge image next to it links to thepitchkc.com/bestofkc20/ — the 2020 archive, not the 2026 round.
The Pitch round ran April 22 through May 13, 2026. The send already went out. Lost clicks aren't recoverable through a template fix.
The fix
If voting is still open when this is read, a quick recovery send earns more trust than hoping nobody noticed. The deeper fix is a pre-send link-integrity process so this category of bug stops shipping. Both sit inside an email manager's program.
03
Social handles drift across locations
Medium
Two naming systems live in the email footers at once: the consumer brand Collars Dog Resort and the legacy "Collar Club KC" handles still wired into the icon links. The legal entity (The Collar Club, LLC) is the source of the legacy naming.
Channel
Olathe email links to
Waldo email links to
Facebook
CollarsDogResortOlathe (new)
CollarClubKC (legacy)
Instagram
@collarclubolathe — deleted
@collarclubkc — deleted
LinkedIn
missing from footer
collarsdogresort (new)
Both Instagram icons in the email footers point to handles Instagram returns "page not available" for. The active IG accounts under the new brand exist and are working — @collarsdogresortolathe and @collarsdogresortwaldo — they just aren't what the emails link to. Every IG click in either email goes to a dead page instead of the live account that's already there.
The fix
A one-time social repoint and a naming standard going forward. Brand hygiene an email manager owns.
04
Subject and preheader leave open rate on the table
Medium
Subject works (emoji is good). Preheader was never set — both sends auto-pull the H1 (Memorial Weekend Boarding!) as preview text, repeating the subject line.
Industry Benchmark
An emoji in the subject line can lift open rate ~20% directionally. Collars keeps the emoji. The preheader, the second-most-read line of copy after the subject, is wasted.
The fix
Surface fix is preheader discipline on every send. The bigger move is a preheader strategy by send-type, which sits inside an email manager's program.
05
Lands in Promotions, with no signals to climb out
Medium
Gmail sorted both sends into Promotions (label CATEGORY_PROMOTIONS, verified directly via the Gmail API on both message IDs), where they compete with Target and Best Buy for attention instead of landing in Primary.
Industry Trend
Inbox AI (Gmail "most-relevant" sort, Apple Intelligence summaries, Yahoo Catch Up) is now actively re-sorting the Promotions tab. Templated, broadcast-tone sends are the kind that stay parked there. Personalized, single-human-voice sends are the kind that get surfaced.
The fix
This is a deliverability program, not a template change. From-line voice, segmentation, and personalization tokens all live there.
06
Two-location segmentation half-implemented
Low
Two separate Memorial Weekend sends went out same day, one per location. Right move. But neither cross-references the other ("Waldo full? Olathe still has spots"), and the body copy is near-identical apart from the address. Customers who overflow between locations get no signal that the flexibility exists.
The fix
A footer cross-reference is the surface fix. The bigger lift is real cross-location automation tied to availability data. That's program work.
07
The newsletter cadence has thinned
Medium
Collars sends from two visible senders, and the format split between them looks intentional:
contact@collarsdogresort.com — multi-section newsletter format. Where the brand voice lives.
collarclubolathe@marketing.gingrapp.com — single-topic operational promos. Likely scoped to the Gingr customer database (existing customers).
The split is the right call if the lists are genuinely different audiences. The issue isn't the architecture, it's that the newsletter sender has slowed down. Through 2025 the brand-domain sender ran multi-section newsletters consistently — at least one per month, often two:
Sep 19, 2025 — "Training Classes Next Week | Dog of the Month | Staff Spotlight: Lily"
Aug 14, 2025 — "Training Class | Hope 4 La Paws Rescue | Labor Day Boarding"
Jun 11, 2025 — "New Grooming Updates | A Few Life Lessons from Your Dog"
May 13, 2025 — "Petiquette | Construction Update | Dog of the Month"
In 2026 it dropped to three multi-section newsletters across five months (Jan 9, Mar 11, Apr 28). Roughly half the 2025 cadence. The customer-facing operational sender kept its volume up, so subscribers haven't gone quiet — but the newsletter-flavored brand voice now reaches the broader list every six to ten weeks instead of monthly.
Industry Benchmark
Across the industry, newsletters are 90% more likely to be the top-performing email type at pure-B2C brands and newsletter priority is up 12% from 2025. Whether that pattern holds for Collars is an open question — without your open-rate, click-rate, and revenue-per-send numbers from the Gingr/email tool, this audit can't say. What it can say is that the multi-section format used to ship monthly here, and now it doesn't.
Data I don't have: Collars-specific email performance — open rate, click-through, conversion, revenue per send, list growth, unsubscribe rate, by sender. This audit is built from what's visible in the inbox. A defensible cadence call needs the metrics. That's part of what an email manager would own.
The fix
This is program-layer work that follows from the metrics gap noted above, not a one-line tactical fix.
Before and after.
Drag the handle to wipe between the original Olathe send and the reimagined version.
Why the reimagine runs longer (and why that's the point)
The reimagined email is taller because it does more. The original is one block of text, one CTA, and a broken vote line. The reimagine differentiates the two suite types with pricing, runs a transparency block with real Olathe photos, deep-links the four Pitch nominations directly to their categories so customers skip the scroll-hunt through Pitch's full ballot, and lands the holiday CTA inside a save-the-dates band. The format shift, from promo to letter, is the move Litmus is calling out as the highest-ROI change in B2C email right now.
The length isn't filler. Each section earns its scroll: suite pricing answers the most common pre-booking question, transparency photos turn "no crates" from a tagline into proof, the four deep-linked vote buttons recover the broken CTA from the original AND skip the scroll-hunt — Pitch's ballot covers many categories across multiple pages, and one tap on each button lands the customer on the exact Collars page without browsing — and the save-the-dates band gives the holiday push its own real estate instead of being a single line at the top. Cut any of it and the email drops back toward the broadcast format Inbox AI is already deprioritizing.
What this audit doesn't cover.
This is a surface-level look at what's visible from the inbox. The deeper work an email manager would own is not in here. A short list of what's still on the table:
Performance analytics setup
Per-send instrumentation, per-segment reporting, conversion tracking through to booking, holdout testing.
Content calendar
Editorial planning across holidays, training cohorts, location milestones, and brand storytelling. Not in this audit.