How Does PetSmart Treat Animal Lovers?

We take a look at PetSmart’s customer relationship strategy. Check how they rank against other pet brands we graded so far

Adebisi Adewusi

March 24, 2022

PetSmart is a specialty pet retailer of services and solutions for the lifetime needs of pets. Let’s see how well the brand treats its customers when it comes to CRM Marketing’s best practices.

Be Transparent 10/10

PetSmart shows the faces behind the brand on LinkedIn. For instance, we found a post congratulating Stacia Andersen, PetSmart’s Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer, for being recognized by Retail Today as one of this year’s Outstanding Women in Retail. We also saw an employee appreciation post.

Showing the faces behind a brand is a great way to give customers a peek at a company’s internal operations and is key to humanizing a brand – incredibly helpful when trying to build meaningful customer relationships.

Incentives and Perks 10/10

Let’s see how PetSmart helps its customers save money when shopping. On the website, we were welcomed with the following  perks and incentives:

St Paddy’s day savings of 17% off orders worth $69

Free shipping on orders over $49

35% saving on our first autoship order

“Treats” loyalty program where members earn points for shopping, receive member-only offers, plus advance notice of sales and in-store events.

A sale page for discounted products and lots more!

For helping pet parents care for their pets on a budget and with a myriad of different offers, PetSmart gets a 10.

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Be Relevant 10/10

PetSmart’s website lets us know that it’s spring with its website copy, content, and promotions.

Additionally, PetSmart provides the following services to pet parents:

A broad range of grooming services

Petshotel offers accommodation  for dogs and cats to stay while their parents are away
Doggie Day Camp is a full-day and half-day playtime sessions of scheduled activities. This service is offered 7 days a week:

Training classes to help dogs learn how to behave appropriately at home and on-the-go.

The brand offers flexible delivery options with its same-day and curbside pick delivery service.

That’s a well rounded set of content and offers that adds vital context to the experience on PetSmart’s site. Such relevancy from a brand makes it easier for customers to feel “at home.”

Be Helpful 10/10

Customers demand brands to contribute to making real and sustained change in the communities they operate in.  So how PetSmart’s doing when it comes to philanthropy?

PetSmart charities fund animal welfare. The brand also invests in community partners that advocate and care for the well-being of pets and all who love them.

PetSmart provides grants to organizations that support pets and supports students. The brand recently announced its Steve Marton Veterinary Student Scholarship for veterinary students in the United States who embody the mission and vision of Petsmart Charities. We score PetSmart 10/10 for giving back to its community.

Realtime personalization 0/10

At PostFunnel we live behavior-based personalization! So we’re eager to see how PetSmart does here.

To test PetSmart’s realtime personalization strategy, we placed a Blue Tastefuls Spoonless Singles Wet Cat Food Twin Pack in our cart. Sadly, we got a generic experience. PetSmart didn’t personalize the images, messaging, and content on the home page or anywhere around its site to give us a customized shopping experience.

For upselling and cross-selling, we were shown a couple of best sellers on the homepage but we didn’t find them relevant. We didn’t get any upselling or cross-selling on the product page. And at check-out, we weren’t offered any products to match our purchase.

After leaving the site, we weren’t tailed with ads on social media or on the internet.

In all, PetSmart didn’t offer us any realtime personalized experience whatsoever. For instance, we spent a lot of time browsing the cat food category. PetSmart could have used our site behavior to provide us with relevant personalized product recommendations throughout our customer journey. Not to mention communications about items we left in the cart.

PetSmart loses points here for not delivering a realtime personalized shopping experience to customers.

Master UX 6/10

Navigating PetSmart’s website was a smooth experience. The homepage user interface experience was decent and categories were divided into manageable chunks.

The filtering options were specific and made finding products easy. The product page had descriptions, customer reviews, and ratings, which gave us enough information about the products we viewed. PetSmart has a FAQ page that covers a broad range of issues, but it wasn’t visually compelling.

In all, PetSmart’s UX experience is decent. We take off some points for not seeing any innovation or creativity – a fantastic UX can by itself bring customers back. That’s not the case here.

Leverage Social Media 8/10

PetSmart has over 770k followers on Instagram, 221k on Twitter, and almost 2.9 million likes on Facebook.

PetSmart posts frequently on Instagram and uses the platform’s different features to deliver engaging experiences to its audience. The brand’s Instagram feed is made up of promotional posts, witty posts, and user-generated content. Fantastic balance.

PetSmart posts mostly promotional content regularly on Facebook – that’s a bit too much. We love how the brand uses visual content to drive engagement, though.

PetSmart frequently posts on Twitter and makes use of polls to drive engagement.

Beyond product promotion, the brand uses its Twitter handle to engage with its audience via retweets and comments.

In all, PetSmart leverages social media decently, and the little cross posting photo content we saw was also in good taste. We’ll just say that cross-posting, sharing different  photos and content fitted for each social media platform’s different features and style will help improve PetSmart’s social media strategy.

PetSmart is getting 54/70 (77%) on our scoreboard – enough for a shared 23rd position on our list of 67 analyzed brands.

It’s evident that making a technological leap in how the brand provides a personalized digital experience is the missing piece – getting a solid 8/10 on that commandment would have meant a final score of 88% – enough for standing alone at 4th.

Ironically, still after Pets a Home (1st with 91%) and Petco (joint 2nd with 90%).

We highly recommend that PetSmart uses real-time on-site personalization to deliver tailor-made customer experiences to improve its CRM. One way to do this is by capturing customer data and using it to optimize its site and offer relevant recommendations. Find out more about website realtime personalization here.

Fingers crossed, PetSmart implements our CRM improvement tips and gives pet owners the perfect shopping experience they deserve!