Is Paws Getting Its Customer Relationship Right?

We take a close look at Paws’s CRM strategy. Check how they rank against other pet brands we’ve graded so far!

February 10, 2022

Paws is a pet brand committed to health and wellbeing. Can you guess how the brand scores when it comes to CRM?

1. Be Transparent 0/10

Going through Paws’s Linkedin and other social media pages we couldn’t find any post about the people behind the brand or its internal activities. On the world wide web, we couldn’t find any news stories, press releases or reports about Paws. In a world where customers actively look for insights into a company before buying from them, brands must be open about their internal operations to build trust. For its “quiet nature”, Paws lose points on our transparency meter.

2. Incentives and Perks 10/10

Paws is quite generous with treats (perks and incentives). On the top of the brand’s HP, we saw a site-wide banner with the caption “free shipping from £35”.

Scrolling down the HP, we saw a selection of discounted products-so there’s something for bargain shoppers.

Customers also get 20% off treats for Valentine’s Day.

We like how Paws informs us about its incentives and perks immediately when we land on its website. This is great for nudging customers to quickly make a purchase. For offering us many ways to save some money, Paws gets a perfect 10/10.

3. Be Relevant 10/10

Paws gives off Valentine’s Day vibes with the copy and content on its website.

Paws offers expert advice and help to pet parents on how to care for their pets.

Paws makes shopping convenient for customers by providing next-day and nominated-day delivery options. The brand also offers a repeat order service. Using this service, customers don’t have to worry about running out of food for their pets.

The brand offers pet insurance for customers that require this service.

In all, Paws does a great job delivering relevant shopping experiences to its customers.

4. Be Helpful 10/10

When making purchases, today’s customers shop with brands that support their communities. Let’s see how Paws has been giving back.

Paws is doing quite a bit to help its community. On Facebook, the brand shared some posts about making food donations to Staffordshire Bull Terrier Rescue and Forest Dog Rescue.

It’s great to see Paws walking their talk when it comes to supporting causes. But we would have loved to see Paws talk about its philanthropic efforts on its website.

5. Realtime personalization 4/10

Logging into the Paws website, we choose to shop in the cat category. We placed a pack of cat food in our cart to test Paws’s realtime capabilities. Sadly, we got a one size fits all shopping experience. The images, messaging, and content on the home page and site didn’t change to reflect what was in our cart, our onsite search, or our browsing behavior.

While Paws’s upselling and cross-selling tactics made it easy to find an assortment of products, it didn’t direct us to relevant items.

Finally, after leaving the Paws website, we were targeted with sponsored ads on social media, but the ads weren’t personalized.

Overall, Paws missed opportunities to give us realtime personalization. For instance, we spent a lot of time browsing the cat category. The top picks section on the HP could have changed match our browsing behaviour. Paws loses points for failing to treat us as individuals. The brand needs to up its realtime personalization game ASAP to help build an enduring relationship with its customers.

6. Master UX 8/10

Time to check out Paws’s UX performance!

The brand’s Homepage & Category navigation experience is decent. We browsed the site’s categories and range of products without feeling confused. Our product browsing experience was great as we could narrow down products by different categories and filters such as Diet Requirement, Breed size, and life stage.

When deciding on what product to choose, the product page was helpful. Product features were clearly communicated through images and text. Paws’s rating and user review section had enough information to help us evaluate the products we were interested in.

Paws has a visually appealing FAQ page that covered a broad range of issues.

In all, Paws’s UX performance is good but not breathtaking. We take off a couple of points for not seeing any website innovation, the kind that makes you want to come back.

7. Leverage Social Media 6/10

Paws has an active presence on social media with over 33k followers on Instagram and almost 57k likes on Facebook. The brand isn’t on Twitter.

Paws posts regularly on Instagram and uses some of the platform’s features to engage its audience. The brand’s Instagram feed is made up of promotional posts, witty posts, and image quotes. we love how they use social media not only to push products. It may sound basic, but soooo manyyyy brands get it wrong.

The brand decently uses Instagram features such as stories and IGTV videos. But we would have liked to see more user-generated content and some Instagram reels. Paws can improve engagement on Instagram by adopting a branded hashtag and encouraging customers to tag them in their Instagram photos.

Paws posts frequently on Facebook. But a lot of the content is similar to what we found on Instagram. Paws can diversify its Facebook content by asking fun questions and using Facebook polls to provide its audience with an interactive experience. Different social media channels deserve different content, to further engage the different audiences. In all, Paws’s social media strategy isn’t platform-specific. The brand needs to have a platform-specific social media strategy to engage its audience.

So, how does Paws fare on our customer relationship meter?

Paws is getting 48/70 (68%) – enough for joint 48th spot on our scoreboard with Buy Buy Baby – out of 65 brands we analyzed to date.

We noticed the brand drops the ball when it comes to transparency and realtime personalization – critical tentpoles of basic customer relationship building. To improve its CRM, Paws has to embrace realtime on-site personalization by capturing and acting on data for known and anonymous web visitors and using it to optimize its site and content. Find out more about website realtime personalization here.

We recommend Paws adopts realtime personalization by leveraging actionable customer data to perform-driven customer segmentation. This will improve its ability to offer personalized recommendations and relevant customer communications. Read more about how to unlock realtime personalization at scale here.

Fingers crossed, Paws takes our CRM improvement tips and gives customers the 1:1 experience they deserve.

Here’s the full rankings so far: