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PetFlow Online Redesign Focuses On Relationship-Building With ‘Pet Parents’

PetFlow, a retailer of specialty pet food and supplies, has revamped its e-Commerce store as part of an overall push to build a loyal consumer base. The retailer’s tough challenge involves creating an online destination that is not only equal to, but better than, the face-to-face relationships that customers can have when they shop at their local pet store or chain.

To that end, the newly designed PetFlow site includes:

  • A live chat option with personalized advice for pet owners;
  • A Quick Food Finder that enables dog and cat owners to search for their preferred brand of food on the spot; and
  • An introduction to the retailer’s Good Deeds charitable initiative, which makes food donations to pets in need tied to customers’ purchases.

“Loyalty is the most important thing as a retailer you have to earn, because there’s plainly not enough profit in any one order to compensate the retailer for the cost of advertising,” said Michael Lackman, CEO of PetFlow. “If you were very successful in finding people who wanted to buy pet food from you, and all of them bought it from you once, you would lose a tremendous amount of money. One of the lessons we learned the hard way over the years was how difficult it is for us to find those customers that are most likely to build a relationship over time.”

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In building a new e-Commerce site experience, PetFlow aimed to create relationships that go well beyond that initial transaction. The retailer even opened a consultative live chat contact center in Las Vegas in 2015, specifically to help facilitate conversations with customers when they browse the company’s site.

“If you open chat with us, you’ll be able to ask to chat with a pet parent, but if you stay on the site long enough, a live window may pop up where one starts talking to you,” Lackman said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We were able to invest in technology that allowed us to present ourselves as pet parents and create that level of commonality between the person behind the counter at the store and the person that’s shopping. We’ve also created those colloquial conversations based on where we saw so much value being added when we watched physical stores and thought about how we could create a better experience.”

‘Good Deeds’ Drive PetFlow’s Mission

As part of the web site revamp, PetFlow introduced the Good Deeds initiative, which highlights a different pet every day. The Good Deeds program donates one bowl of food to a pet in need for every box the company ships to customers. PetFlow began the program in October 2015 and has already provided thousands of meals to animals waiting to be adopted into new families. On the site, consumers can click the Good Deeds button to view a short story of a pet assisted by the donations, including an update of the pet’s present whereabouts.

“The conversation really comes down to stories,” Lackman said. “We wanted to incorporate the customer in that storytelling experience, where they have a chance to meet real pets being helped by our Good Deeds program in any given month, and then go deeper into that content to understand a little background on what kind of pets are being helped, where they come from, who are the organizations that we’re working with. We think that micro-storytelling level is going to be really engaging for people, and it’s a way for us to talk to our customers about something that both they and we feel passionate about.”

By partnering with pet food brands and rescue organizations, PetFlow aims to nourish pets who are in their most vulnerable state, while also educating consumers about rescuing pets — with the ultimate goal of helping to place more animals in loving homes.

“We realized that we did not want to make this our marketing strategy,” Lackman stated. “We did not want to be: ‘PetFlow, please buy from us because of Good Deeds.’ We wanted to let consumers know that while we were the best place to buy your food, as we get to know you, one of the things we get to talk to you about are these Good Deeds that we’re helping the customer accomplish. For us, it’s a way to create a more meaningful conversation at a deeper level.”

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