Petco improved customer experience and email communications with a new CRM //

Petco, a national retailer, hoped for the best when it implemented a customer relationship management (CRM), solution to drive a new customer first strategy. They succeeded. Email opens increased by 30% in the first two years after implementation and click rates rose 50%. Here’s how they did it.

“We implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and while the platform is great, it’s not going do all the work for you,” Andrea Mathews (Petco’s vice-president of CRM) said at The MarTech conference. These things are paying off and the campaigns we’re building are exceeding our engagement goals, click rates, and ultimately revenue.

Hyper-personalized email campaigns

Petco developed a hyper-personalized email program in 2021 and 2022 that sent “health reports” monthly to pet owners through their CRM. Mathews stated that they ran personalized campaigns to win some quick wins during the initial implementation.

She said, “What we hear is that parents want to do good work but half of them don’t know what it means or how it looks like.”

The health reports provide information on areas where pet owners are doing well and areas that need improvement.

Mathews stated that Mathews was able to use the rich data we have to inform the communication and make it relevant to the customer.

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To run campaigns or to improve your experience, you can use data from the CRM.

Jam, a CRM-focused company, was partnered by Petco to maximize its CRM. User interactions, such as making purchases on the app, website or app, are used to aggregate customer data and then used by Salesforce Marketing Cloud to activate email campaigns or digital experiences on Petco’s properties.

Brad Bettinson (Vice President Enterprise Solutions, Jam) stated that data is the key to everything. “It all begins with data. On Petco’s side, there’s rich data from multiple platforms.” We can import that platform data directly to Marketing Cloud, but it’s best to have it go into a central CRM/CDP. Then we get the aggregate data every day into Marketing Cloud.

He said, “On Marketing Cloud’s back end, there is a development language. Anyone on your team that knows any standard language can pick it up quickly. We also make templates and content blocks that can be reused. Andrea’s team or ours, when they are building their next message, can drag and put in the reusable blocks. Then, all of a sudden, their email will have large chunks of personalization already tested and perfected.

Petco is no longer looking at email as one message. Instead, they use the rich data from customer interactions. Petco is now building relationships through a series digital experiences and emails.

AI-powered recommendations

Bettinson said, “We just keep adding on to that library of really intelligent modules that we have.” “Some of these modules include AI.”

He said, “Using Einstein for product recommendations is one our smart modules. This complexity is possible. These messages are great, but there are now hundreds of thousands of them. How do you test them?

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A preview tool is used by Jam and Petco to allow humans to review the recommendations generated by AI.

Bettinson explained that “Our human could look at the data and infer when Einstein is doing it right” and “our humans could see when Einstein needs some help.” “And then, in situations where Einstein needs a little help, we could see it in the data so we would override their recommendations. Our best performing Einstein profile will be used by 80% to 90% of our customers. The remaining 10% will receive a manual override. Einstein may have data issues or a blind spot.

It is vital to have good customer data in order to support the AI.

Bettinson stated that the modules with Einstein in them are extremely efficient because customers can talk to them about their purchases and what makes sense. It’s really helping clients learn that level of personalization. Hey, I should open Petco email because it has something for me.

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How Petco improved customer experience and emails with a new CRM appeared originally on MarTech.