Combining site analytics and e-mail campaigns, Petco targets quick ROI

Already getting good results from targeted e-mails based on customer shopping behavior, Petco Animal Supplies Inc. is launching a more sophisticated web site analytics tool to build more highly segmented e-mail marketing messages to targeted groups of shoppers. It expects an ROI within 6 months, Heather Blank, director of e-commerce marketing and business development, tells Internet Retailer.

For the past two years, Petco has been using Coremetrics site analytics to analyze shopping patterns on Petco.com, then integrating the data with its Responsys e-mail campaign management system to build targeted messages to groups of consumers based on their online shopping histories. For example, shoppers who abandoned shopping carts might receive an automatically triggered e-mail offer for free-shipping on any purchase. The tact has led to increased browser-to-sales conversion rates, Blank says. "In that two-year period, we earned an ROI within the first few months," she says.

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Now Petco, No. 106 in Internet Retailer’sTop 300 Guide to online retailers, is ready to improve on the strategy by implementing Coremetrics’s LiveMail application, which is designed to analyze a larger number of shopping patterns and integrate the data with an e-mail campaign management system.

Blank says she expects the LiveMail application to produce an extensive amount of customer data that Petco will use in A/B tests of multiple e-mail campaigns. Petco will test, for example, whether e-mails sent a day after a cart was abandoned for a particular product are more or less effective at driving up sales and margins than e-mails sent a week after cart abandonment.

"It won’t make my job easier, but it’ll make it more fun," she says. "I love targeting people at the exact moment they’re most likely to buy." Petco expects to have its new LiveMail system in place next month, then realize an ROI within three to six months, Blank says.