CASE STUDY: PETS AT HOME

Client Story: PETS AT HOME

Case Study: Pets At Home

The Challenge

Pets at Home is one of the great UK retail success stories of recent years. With their outstanding proposition, the shift into services as well as products and a successful e-commerce platform they have been driven by a constant desire to improve in order to achieve their strategic vision to be ‘The Best Pet Care Business in the World’.

We were thrilled therefore when they selected Good Growth to help develop and refine their approach to digital subscriptions. They wanted to take a customer-centric approach to shaping their proposition and establish a top-class online customer experience.

We chose Good Growth to support us in developing a brand new ‘Pet-Led’ customer journey for our flea subscription service based on their proven track record of digital transformation and expertise in optimisation through AB/MVT testing.

Our brief was to create a super-simple, easy to use, convenient customer experience, to compete in an increasingly competitive segment of the pet care market.

The starting point of gaining customer insights from both the digital analytics tools and customer online surveys provided us with key insights into the current user journey struggles. Using qualitative and quantitative data provided certainty on why customers were struggling to sign up to the service and this was the starting point in the development of the new customer journey.

Since launching the new ‘Pet-Led customer journey, we have continued to work collaboratively with Good Growth, drawing on their expertise to define a robust roadmap of test and learn to refine the experience, with data driven focus from detailed metric analytics, user experience data and focused customer surveys. Good Growth have been an amazing team to work with and they continue to work collaboratively with us, and our external partners, as our joined-up pet care customer experience evolves into the proposition of the future.”

Chris Holyland Group Digital Director

The Approach

The objective was to increase substantially the number of flea treatment subscriptions sold in this year’s peak flea treatment season (April – September) in what has become a highly competitive market, whilst providing a clear and concise user experience for pet owners.

Starting with a detailed customer insight project that evaluated current performance and highlighted key points of customer failure, Good Growth worked closely with the Pets at Home team to create a digital strategy and prioritised a roadmap of key activity. Our approach was to respond to the findings in the customer insight and create a more effective user journey that was ‘pet-led’ rather than the current ‘product-led’ flea, tick and worm journey. Additionally, key pages outside of the core journey were optimised to improve the overall user experience.

The Findings

The reasoning behind creating an entirely new journey was that the customer insight work highlighted that users found the existing subscription journey long and difficult to navigate, with consistently high exit rates throughout. A review of the customer journey revealed that in order to make a subscription purchase from the point of arriving on the page, users had to complete a staggering number of individual actions. Given the subscription service was about saving time and delivering convenient and appropriate treatments, this was the opposite of the experience being sold.

The other insight was the building of team understanding that in this area pet owners were encountering a product-led rather than a pet-led experience. What was done brilliantly in-store – ensuring that the pet defined the product sold – was being missed online. So for many pet owners, the product they were seeing was unlikely to be the right one for their pet, and unsurprisingly, these customers converted at a much lower rate than those who scrolled further down the page to read the benefits of Pets at Home’s Subscribe & Save service.

The Results

Our work resulted in an innovation programme that focused on the development of a new, pet-led flea, tick and worm subscription journey that showcased the benefits for the pet and the convenience and peace of mind, for the pet owner.

Good Growth worked with Pets at Home to execute this new journey including the creation of the wireframes, full journey designs, digital marketing assets and launch strategy support.

The result has been a 5x increase in the number of flea, tick and worm subscription treatments sold compared to 2019, further growing the customer base through this recurring revenue model.

The pet-led journey will continue to be optimised as new customer insight develops, to ensure its success continues into the off-season and into next year’s peak trading period. All with the objective of supplying pet owners with the information they need in a clear and effective manner that enables them to treat their pet regularly and with the right product every time.

CASE STUDY: PETS AT HOME