well, not exactly.

however, companies like petco understand that owners only want the best food, clothes, toys, treats, even snuggies for their animal friends – and since our pets can’t tell us (not in a spoken language, anyway), they turned to the owners for answers.

petco needed to learn valuable information for its products without having to spend thousands on surveys or focus groups. instead, they implemented an online customer ratings system and hosted “digital conversations”.  quickly, the pet goods retailer noticed that they were losing money on product returns that continued to increases as a result of very low ratings.

the solution? the company decided to use the information they obtained to improve their product and get even more feedback using digital strategies. the results? according to a wammo case study, “petco integrated ratings and reviews into email campaigns and realized a 5x increase in email click-through rates. petco [also] integrated Bazaarvoice with its site search and navigation solution to create top-rated products paths that highlighted four- and five-start products in each category. these ‘top-rated product’ paths delivered 40% higher conversion and 60% higher average order value than their traditional shopping paths”.

petco effectively turned decreasing returns for their low rated products into increasing returns for high rated products while simultaneously giving pets a ‘voice’. so maybe cats and dogs aren’t running petco.com (some very smart people are), but this is an important way for pet owners to exchange advice without investing in poor quality products and losing faith in the store brand

petco also took a more social approach to creating an online community. one example of this is their howl-o-ween pet costume contest, where owners uploaded pictures with stories (and recommended products) of their pets dressed up on the website. it’s a facebook for pets/pet owners, if you will. and who doesn’t love to share pictures of their pet and have others marvel at the cuties?  here is an example of one account:

source: bazaarvoice.com

and we’re guessing that the more time people spent on their website, the more they explored products, the more petco.com benefitted from howl-o-ween. gotta run, the pints are busy perusing petco.com to purchase holiday gifts for their four-legged best friends!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 1:24 pm and is filed under blog.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.