Does Petshop’s CRM Strategy Make Pet Owners Happy?

We take a 360 look at Petshop’s CRM strategy. Check how they rank against pet brands we graded so far!

February 24, 2022

Petshop is a subscription service for pets. Let’s see how well the brand treats its customers.

Be Transparent 0/10

Customers love brands that scream “TRANSPARENCY”! Let’s take a look at how Petshop performs here.

Digging through the Petshop website and around the internet, we found no recent news or announcement from the brand regarding its operations or the people behind it. Customers nowadays, especially subscription ones, tend to spend more time than ever researching brands before they commit to buying from them on a regular basis. That’s why transparency is key to building trust and lasting relationships with customers. Petshop loses lots of points for keeping customers in the dark about its activities.

Petshop can increase its transparency score by sharing information about its internal operations such as its corporate social responsibility efforts, sustainability efforts, or by simply showing the faces behind its brand on social media. This will show customers that Petshop values openness and has nothing to hide.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

Let’s see how Petshop helps pet parents save money when shopping for their furry family members. On the HP of the website, we were welcomed with loads of perks.

15% off on Sensory products

51% savings on Dental products

5% – 20% off for customers who subscribe & save to Petshop’s Bottomless Bowl service

Free delivery for orders over £19 and lots more.

Overall, Petshop does a great job communicating its perks and incentives to customers. For example, by placing a range of discounts and offers on its HP, customers are nudged to make a purchase before leaving the website. For helping different customers shop a variety of products on a budget, Petshop gets a 10.

Be Relevant 10/10

Petshop’s website reminds us that February is Dental Health Month with its website copy, content, and promotions.

The brand offers flexible delivery options with its click and collect and next-day delivery service. Going the extra mile for customers, Petshop offers pet insurance and a Subscribe & Save service called Bottomless Bowl. Bottomless Bowl helps customers automatically reorder a product. So they never have to worry about running out of pet supplies.

Petshop does make a noteworthy effort towards being relevant to its customer base’s lifestyle. Enough for a perfect score here.

Be Helpful 0/10

Today’s customers expect charitable initiatives from the brands they buy from. For this commandment, we check to see whether a brand has been giving back to its community. Sadly, we didn’t see any information on how Petshop gives back. If Petshop has some philanthropic initiatives, we suggest that they talk about it on their website and social media. This will also help with their 0/10 score in the Transparency category.

Realtime personalization 3/10

Here at PostFunnel, we live realtime personalization! So we’re eager to see how Petshop does here.

To test Petshop’s realtime personalization strategy, we placed a pack of Felix cat food in our cart. Sadly, we got a one size fits all experience. The images, messaging, and content on the home page, the product page, and the cart page were not personalized to give us a custom experience.

While we got some upselling and cross-selling on the product page, the products we were shown weren’t personalized. At check-out, we weren’t offered any products to match our purchase or a reminder not to abandon our full cart.

Petshop could have delivered a better shopping experience by offering us realtime personalization. For instance, we spent a lot of time browsing the cat food category. Petshop could have used our site behavior to provide us with relevant personalized product recommendations at check-out.

After leaving the site, we were tailed with ads on social media but the ads weren’t relevant.

We take off a lot of points here due to Petshop’s inability to deliver realtime personalization.

Master UX 6/10

Navigating the Petshop website was a smooth experience. The homepage user interface experience is decent. The brand has a Popular Searches section at the bottom of the HP, which is great for customers that want to quickly find a product on the website.

The filtering options were specific and made finding products easy. The product page had customer reviews and ratings, which gave us enough information about the products we viewed. However, when we added a product to our cart, we noticed our order quantity was preset to 10.

It was an unnecessary hassle having to deselect it to the number we needed. Also, some customers might not notice the preselection until they get to check-out, which could ruin their shopping experience.

Petshop has a FAQ page that covers a broad range of issues. But overall, Petshop’s UX experience is not the best we’ve seen. There was nothing about it that made the visit especially easy or memorable, and the entire experience felt a little outdated.

Leverage Social Media 5/10

Petshop has an active presence on social media with almost 4k followers on Instagram, almost 150k likes on Facebook, and more than 6k followers on Twitter.

Petshop posts regularly on Instagram. And the brand’s Instagram feed comprises promotional posts, witty posts, giveaways, and some user-generated content.

Petshop posts regularly on Facebook, but the content is the same as what we found on Instagram. Petshop’s Twitter account isn’t active. The last post was in 2019 🙁

In all, we love how Petshop uses witty content to engage its followers. However, we suggest the brand uses Instagram features such as stories, IGTV videos, and more user-generated content to increase engagement.

Additionally, cross-posting is a huge ‘NO’ in social media marketing. Each social media platform has a different audience. We advise Petshop to adopt a different social media strategy for each platform to drive more engagement. Having an inactive Twitter account is another social media ‘NO’. Petshop needs to think about if it wants to keep its Twitter profile or not. If Petshop plans on keeping its Twitter profile, a post a day will help drive engagement. Otherwise, it’s a bad look.

Time for the results!

Petshop is getting 34/70 (48%) on our scoreboard, sharing the unfortunate last place out of the 66 brands we analyzed so far, with two other brands.

The brand can do a lot more to make pet owners happy. Petshop fell short on transparency, being helpful, and on realtime personalization. It has to embrace real-time on-site personalization to deliver tailor-made customer experiences to improve its CRM Marketing metrics. One way to do this is by capturing customer data and using it to optimize its site and content. Find out more about website realtime personalization here.

Fingers crossed, Petshop implements our CRM improvement tips and gives pet owners the 1:1 shopping experience they deserve.

Here’s the full rankings so far: