How Petco Keeps Pet Lovers Coming Back for All Their Pet-Care Needs

Petco is a category-defining health and wellness company focused on improving the lives of pets, pet parents and Petco partners. Since its founding in 1965, it’s been trailblazing new standards in pet care, delivering comprehensive wellness solutions through its products and services, and creating communities that deepen the pet/pet parent bond. Petco began operations in México under a joint venture with Grupo Gigante, bringing its innovative concept of pet stores, pet food, and accessories to this large North American market. Since it opened its first store Petco López Mateos in Zapopan, Jalisco in October 2013, Petco México has grown to offer more than 7,000 items. It also provides specialized services, such as grooming salon, training, and a veterinary hospital. It offers online pet health and wellness resources at petco.com.mx and on the Petco México app.

Before partnering with SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, Petco Mexico had ambitions of delivering a seamless, omnichannel customer experience for their shoppers but needed a platform that could handle a high volume of customers, connect online and offline data, and deliver highly personalized engagements across multiple channels. They had previously used Mailchimp, but that platform simply couldn’t keep up with their growing business. With a small team tasked with the big responsibility of delivering more meaningful moments with their shoppers, they needed a strategic advisor to support them along the way. 

Petco Mexico was aiming to maximize the impact of their marketing technology investment. To achieve this, they took a multi-step approach. Upon partnering with SAP Emarsys in 2017, they were given not only technology that has proven to grow with the needs of their business, but also trusted advisors in the form of a Technical Adoption Specialist and Customer Success Partner to help them execute their Customer Experience strategy. With this support, they have  reimagined their email program and connected their channels for an omnichannel customer experience both online and offline which spans across email, web, digital ads, and their mobile app. They also have connected their loyalty program, which accounts for 92% of purchases. This proved to be a crucial piece of the puzzle for them.

Expanding email to omnichannel customer engagement

When Petco first came to SAP Emarsys, they were under-utilizing their email program. Their emails generally saw a significant open rate but a low click rate. This told us that their customers were eager to engage, but were not necessarily seeing messages they found compelling, relevant, or actionable. It was a matter of connecting with customers with the right content on the right channel at the right time. 

With an Adoption Specialist on hand to support as a strategic advisor to the team, along with the best-in-class omnichannel customer engagement platform that is SAP Emarsys, Petco was able to increase revenue from active customers by 20% within 90 days compared to the same period in the previous year. This connected approach also helped them create multi-channel programs that delivered personalized experiences based on unique touchpoints throughout the customer journey. With progressive profiling across email, web and the mobile app, Petco was able to develop a better understanding of their customers and provide them with personalized, relevant experiences.

Personalizing customer engagement at scale

With 40+ automations created so far, Petco’s small but mighty team was able to streamline manual tasks. They created targeted win-back campaigns, mobile app engagement strategies, and more. With customer acquisition being one of the most expensive stages in the marketing journey, they wanted to focus on retention of existing customers. Setting up these automations helped Petco engage with both active and churned customers and led to a 15% increase in the number of churning customers that were won back. 

For Petco, it’s not only about connecting with pet owners but it’s also about creating experiences that delight both the pet and, by extension, their pet companions. As one example of how Petco is pet-centric in their crafting of experiences for customers, when a pet has a birthday, the content served up to the shopper is personalised with the pet’s name and an exclusive gift. 

Petco doesn’t stop there. They focus less on promoting products and more on promoting experiences that are most relevant to pet-lovers. These recommendations are powered from not only their product catalog and past purchases but also by their “pillars of integral wellness” campaigns. The team feels this focus on experiences is what sets them apart from competitors and contributes to revenue growth and loyalty.

Connecting online and in-store data

With much of their business historically being in-store, Petco was looking for a way to continue the engagement once customers left the physical store location. They wanted to focus on lifetime spend and lifetime customer value. Petco was able to connect each shopper’s profile by asking at checkout for their phone number, which was attached to Petco’s loyalty program. For purchases and intent signals made online, SAP Commerce Cloud easily fed these data points into SAP Emarsys Smart Insights. Together, these insights helped the Petco marketing team better understand where each shopper is in the customer lifecycle. SAP CX gave the team the opportunity to connect data from sources like their eCommerce site, store sales, marketing engagement, service, consent etc. Plus with a direct ERP integration, Petco was better able to understand high value customers both through spend and through their returns. This connection helps them create more meaningful and revenue-driving customer engagement across their site and channels like email, social ads, web channel, web push and mobile app engagement.

By utilizing SAP Emarsys to create a more connected, omnichannel strategy across email, social ads, web channel, web push and mobile app engagement, Petco is maximizing its technology investment with a 31% increase in revenue year over year. Its automation efforts to win back customers who had churned and investment in nurturing hot leads led to a +20% increase in revenue from active customers within 90 days and a 15% increase in won-back customers. Using customer insights to power digital ads, they’ve seen a nearly 300x return on ad spend.