Do you sell food and/or accessories for cats, dogs, horses, fish or small animals? Then the Pet Brand setup is the right choice for you. As a pet brand, your customers often have different wants and needs.
A personalised and tailored experience will lead to increased revenue so it’s ideal if you can reflect this throughout your site and marketing. Here at Blend, we’ve seen this first hand by working with leading pet brands such as Aquarium Co-op and Fresh Patch.
A great starting point for Pet Brand’s is by finding out more from your customers. What animal are they shopping for? Do they need specific food? Are they looking for recommendations for a particular breed type? These are just some of the questions you may want to find the answers to. The skill here is on how to ask these questions and how to use the data that can be gathered in this process.
Octane.ai
Octane.ai has the perfect solution to finding out more from your customers. They have a feature that allows you to create a quiz hosted on your website.
Using a series of questions and multiple choice answers, Octane.ai integrates with your Shopify store so you can recommend products from the results page that can be added to cart straight from the page.
You can even go a step further and recommend product collections. For example, if your quiz was recommending a type of foundation, why not upsell primer and concealer as well?
Klaviyo
Gathering this kind of information is very important for Pet Brands as it creates a personalised experience right from the beginning of their interaction with you as a brand and it starts building a rapport with them. But if you don’t use this information throughout your email marketing, then you could be missing out.
Klaviyo is the ideal email solution for Pet Brands. Their advanced segmentation, when used with Shopify and Octane.ai, is going to allow you to create personalised content throughout your email strategy.
For example, being able to recommend the type of dog products suited to the breed owned by your customer, or the correct amount of cleaning products for their fish tank size. You should use custom properties to segment your Flows and the Post Purchase Flow is one of the most important places to do this.
The Post Purchase Flow is designed to both inform Subscribers of what’s happening with their purchase but is also a good opportunity to upsell new products to gain that important repeat purchase. If you can segment your Flow by pet, brand, product type etc, you can use personalised content and create the right data feeds to recommend the best products possible based on what you already know.
Klaviyo SMS
Using Emails alongside SMS is a proven way to improve the performance of your marketing. For Pet Brands, it’s likely website visitors will do a lot of browsing before making a purchase. Automated marketing through email Flows is an easy and effective way to retarget them but Klaviyo also has an SMS service which allows you to send an Email and SMS messages alongside each other in a Flow.
In some cases, you can also use SMS as a follow up to an email. This is often a strategy used by many brands due to the high open rate of SMS.
To start gathering phone numbers and emails, we recommend using Klaviyo’s own signup forms as they capture individual consents for these fields which you can then use in your Flows, Segments and Campaigns.
Reviews.IO
The Post Purchase Flow is also an ideal place to start gathering user-generated content through reviews. For a Pet Brand, there is no better social proof than seeing a dog happily eating its food or playing with its toy and Reviews.io allows you to do this.
Using Reviews.io’s dynamic link, you can place this within your Klaviyo emails and request a written, photo or video review. Once the review has been gathered, Reviews.io has features in its platform that allows you to turn a review straight into a social media post.
Featuring these on your social media or in your email campaigns is a great way to build a fan base. It allows you to connect with your subscribers, followers or customers on a personal level, where your audience will really feel like you’re connecting with them.
Gorgias
Shopping for pet products isn’t usually a spontaneous choice. Your shopper probably knows what they are looking for so if they haven’t purchased whilst visiting your store, it’s likely they have concerns or questions. Not being able to answer these questions quickly and easily could be the deciding factor on if they decide to purchase from you.
Gorgias Chat is a widget that sits on your site and allows website visitors to send a message to your customer service team. Giving your customers the opportunity to ask a question through a Live Chat rather than an Email allows you to reply quickly and efficiently.
Waiting for a reply from an email can often lead to your potential customer going elsewhere so whether you use a Customer Service Rep or Automated Responses, by being readily available, you will already be building trust with your customer.
Integrating your Facebook Messenger with Gorgias, also means you’re integrating Octane.ai with Gorgias. So, if someone completes your quiz and has questions about their recommendations, this can sync to Gorgias and give your customer service reps the information they need to know to respond.
LoyaltyLion
There is a lot of competition for Pet Brands and customer retention can often be a challenging area. Once a customer decides to buy from a Pet Brand, it’s important you give them a reason to stay. Rewarding your customers for their loyalty is a great point of difference in the pet industry. If someone has a dog, they will never buy just one bag of dog food. Their dog needs to eat every day so if you know they have a repeat purchase to make, rewarding them with points, free gifts or free shipping is a great way to maintain loyalty.
Pet Brands who sell food, often have bulk items for sale e.g. a 15kg bag of dog food. These products have a high cost in the short term but have more product and last longer in the long term.
To improve chances of a repeat purchase as well as increase your average order value, you can use LoyaltyLion to award additional points for bulk purchases. For example, you could offer 2 points for a 2kg bag of food (1 point per kg) and you could offer 30 points for a 15kg bag (2 points per kg).
Awarding points for larger items, not only boosts your revenue, but it also shows the customer you want them to get the most for their money and you want to reward them for this. Creating this thinking strategy for your customers is what is going to keep them coming back.
Furthermore, LoyaltyLion integrates with both Klaviyo and Gorgias. With Gorgias, you’ll be able to see what points someone has pending or approved and be able to answer questions on the Loyalty Program quickly and easily. With Klaviyo, you can sync and create custom properties based on pending points, approved points, loyalty tiers and enrolment date.
This means you can always show your subscribers how many points they have in your emails, you can trigger emails to send after a purchase to let them know when their points have been approved and you can send reminders each month to let them know they have rewards ready for them to use.
What you can achieve
By using the tech stack above, you’ll combat one of the main issues many Pet Brands have: “how can I make my content personalised?” Through API’s and inbuilt integrations at the click of a button, you can create a simple and effective tech stack that guides your customer through their own journey.
From acquiring to finding out more about purchasing and customer retention, this tech stack will create a streamline customer experience that is both valued by the customer and your brand.
Blend Commerce is an award winning Shopify Conversion Rate Optimisation Agency. If you need a little help converting your traffic and growing your customer lifetime value, get in touch with us today.
Published: January 16, 2022
Last updated: October 09, 2024
