Pets at Home: Caring for CRM as They Do for Pets

Welcome back to PostFunnel’s weekly brand analysis. Today we’ll grade the pet supplies retailer Pets at Home, who sells pet products including food, toys, bedding, medication, accessories, and actual pets, too.

We don’t usually give away the score here, and kinda want to make you scroll all the way down (or even, heaven forbid, read it all through) – but we can’t help ourselves. So here it comes: after analyzing 18 brands, Pets at Home is the new leader!

Oh, and just in case you’re new here, let us quickly tell you that each week, we rate a significant brand’s basic CRM practices according to our 7 CRM commandments  – rules that every brand must obey these days.

Find all previous analyses and scores here and below.

And now, for our new #1’s:

1. Be Transparent 10/10

Right off the bat – a perfect score.

Pets at home recently unveiled its plans to move into a huge new £48 million storage and distribution center in Staffordshire. The deal could see it occupy 670,000 sq ft at the Redhill business park.

The move will create about 1000 jobs, and we like that they have publicly announced the exact number – which will help the press and public hold them to it.

Pets at Home bosses said, “the current site at Stoke, which employs 450 people, would close, but all colleagues will be offered the opportunity to transfer.” Further proving the brand’s transparency. The fact you can find these announcements on the internet shouldn’t be taken for granted.

As for the brand’s website, Pets at Home has an entire webpage dedicated to top trending questions, some of which have to do with COVID-19:

Overall, it’s a lot of information to put out there.

2. Incentives and Perks 10/10

Oh, what’s that? Another 10? Yup. Soo manyy discounts!

The slide gallery at the top of the company’s HP clearly displays discounted offers to shop for via the “price drop” banner:

And the brand offers a 10% discount for newbies joining the puppy and kitten club.

Additionally, we noticed that Pets at Home offers other incentives and perks (free gifts, 50% discounts, frequent buyer clubs, and more.)

On top of that – we were invited to join a VIP club (as shown in the banner below), all of which are excellent CRM practices for nurturing clients and retaining the valuables ones.

3. Be Relevant 10/10

Okay, you know the drill.

The contact-free home delivery option and free store collection from over 450 stores are relevant for these times:

Also, since the outbreak of COVID-19, animal rehoming centers have been unable to raise enough funds to properly care for elderly rescue pets. The National Animal Welfare Trust’s (NAWT) Trindledown Farm base has been particularly facing hardship and even possible extinction.

Therefore, as their charity of the year – Pets at Home’s Newbury store colleagues voted to support Trindledown Farm.

“It’s been really tough without the charities in store, but we’ve worked with Trindledown Farm before and the team loves the set-up there and the work they do is so vital,” Pets At Home store fundraiser Steff Beglin said.

“It was extremely hard at the beginning when we reduced our hours and were run off our feet. Then we extended our working hours, and customers were still queuing out the door.”

4. Be Helpful 10/10

Is this Pets at Home or Nadia Comaneci?

The brand definitely knows how to care for the customer’s pet by showing empathy towards emotional and sensitive issues.

For instance, the banner below provides customers with tips on guiding your puppy to live their best life, stopping early signs of illness, training tips, and even providing info on controversial topics as to whether to get your pet neutered.

Additionally, Pets at Home offers a Complete Care health plan to cover pets’ healthcare essentials.

The page reads:

“With our Complete Care Health Plan, you’ll receive all the healthcare essentials, expert veterinary care, and cost savings on routine treatments.Plus, receive special offers and discounts on additional treatments. We’ll also send you handy reminders of when your pet’s annual vaccinations are due and when to administer their flea and worm treatment, to help you keep on top of your pet’s healthcare.”

On twitter, we noticed the brand retweeted the post below in a mission to help find a missing dog:

All in all, seems as if the brand genuinely cares for the well-being of both the owner and the pet, especially during hectic times as such:

5. Realtime Personalization 6/10

First deducted points!

Here, we are looking at two things. One, how on-site suggestions, recommendations, cross-selling options, etc. And two, off-site immediate retargeting.

When it comes to the first part – Pets at Home did pretty well. When we added items to our cart, we received similar item suggestions:

Plus, we saw the same product type when going back to the HP:

You might think it’s a basic practice. And you’ll be right. But not all sites are doing it, even though it’s 2020 already… And not everyone is doing it smoothly (though this is part of the next segment below).

When we went off-site, we did not see any immediate retargeting.

6. Master UX 10/10

And… we’re right back at double-digit scores, as to cap the visit off, we must give them kudos for a brilliant on-site experience.

First, it seems as if the brand is trying very hard to provide customers with personalized and tailored customer experience (even if not realtime), guiding customers through the site in order to provide them with the most relevant experience.

When choosing the “puppy” option and going back to their HP, the banner immediately changed to feature a dog – well done on getting this part of the personalization right:

From now on our entire experience on the site was completely altered to promote us doggy items:

But that’s not all. From the moment that our entire user experience was altered to suit our specific needs – which is shopping for and tending to our dog – we had a remarkable experience with the brand.

Everything was tailored to help us find absolutely everything we may be looking for. And though Pets at Home offers an abundance of services and information, it was still easy, as well as enjoyable to access the products we came to shop/look into.

The brands filtering options were also useful to narrow down the options according to breed, diet, flavor, and so many other requirements.

In addition, the price range feature below was indeed useful:

7. Leverage Social Media 8/10

Two more points deducted here, because we did not see anything too innovative.

But, besides that – they are checking all the boxes of good, solid social media work.

The brand posts the same type of “cute” content, in high frequency, on all three social media accounts that we checked (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).

On Facebook, they post fantastic giveaways and partnerships, as such:

And of course, cute pictures for “someone who needs them” RN.

On Instagram, the brand has 155k followers, and posts the same type of cute content, also in videos:

At the time of the analysis, we didn’t see the brand using the “Instastory” feature though, which is a shame as many Instagrammers solely go on the platform to view this feature.

On Twitter, the brand Tweets some useful tips for getting through these tough times together. Another goal the brand seems to be aiming for on this platform is raising awareness around animal welfare, as shown here:

**

As you know by now – Pets at Home is taking first place! With a whopping 64/70 score (91%), they dethrone Lowe’s and Petco, which help the #1 spot together.

Now just nail that realtime personalization part of the experience, sprinkle some innovative initiatives on social media – and we might be looking at 100%.

Here are the full rankings of all the brands we analyzed to date:

1. Pets at Home 91%
2. Lowe’s 90%
3. Petco 90%
4. Target 87%
5. Uniqlo 86%
6. West Elm 81%
7. Best Buy 78%
8. Etsy 76%
9. The Body Shop 74%
10. Gymshark 73%
11. Tommy Hilfiger 70%
12. Walgreens 70%
13. Fiverr 67%
14. Next 63%
15. Patagonia 61%
16. Burberry 60%
17. COS 57%
18. Dream11 53%

We publish a new analysis every week, so watch this space for more brand analyses coming your way!