PetSmart powers personalization for 65M+ loyalty members and drives double-digit growth

PetSmart’s Results

These results were measured from January - December of 2023

Drove Business Growth

• Personalized marketing efforts have been a critical part of growth, having delivered double-digit growth year over year.
• Email engagement has grown by triple digits
• Loyalty engagement from Treats Rewards members has consistently grown by triple digits

Improved operational efficiency at scale

• More than 4 billion emails sent annually
• Over 15M records synced to SFMC daily
• 1000+ unique audiences
• Reduced audience creation time by 20%
• First use case implemented in less than one week

The Challenge

More than 90 percent of all PetSmart sales are attached to loyalty members in the Treats rewards program. These members get access to special pricing, rewards, and additional offers as their loyalty grows over time. The program is uniquely positioned to personalize communications and offers to individual consumers based on their purchasing patterns and tailored to the multiple combinations of pets and species in a pet parent’s family.

With multiple years of transactional history and petabytes of data, orchestrating unique customer journeys and segmenting audiences across multiple touchpoints proved challenging, leading to inconsistent member experiences.

The marketing team faced three core challenges:

• Enabling self-serve audience segmentation for campaign personalization at scale and with reliable performance
• Automating data syncs from Snowflake and Databricks to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)
• Measuring campaign performance

To solve this problem, the marketing team turned to Hightouch to use their existing data assets to supercharge their loyalty program, elevate the Treats rewards program, advance the member journey, and deliver more relevant value to pet parents.

We saw the opportunity to increase the quality and scale of how we use data so we can better serve pet parents, leading us to leverage Hightouch. Our goal was to connect our customer data and marketing automation platform and drive advancements in our personalized marketing.

Bradley Breuer

VP, Loyalty and Personalized Marketing

•

PetSmart

The Solution

PetSmart evaluated various segmentation tools and CDPs, but the company ended up choosing Hightouch because it gave the marketing team self-serve access to the data models and attributes living inside their existing data infrastructure. PetSmart has thousands of custom objects and entities (pets, species, food, etc.), and trying to conform this data to a strict schema of a traditional CDP was challenging.

In Hightouch, we invested in a capability that was easy to implement on our existing big data environments (Snowflake and Databricks) so we could avoid the extensive engineering work required to move data to a new environment or platform.

Bradley Breuer

VP, Loyalty and Personalized Marketing

•

PetSmart

Unlocking Self-Serve Audiences

One of the major opportunities for PetSmart has always been leveraging robust customer data to better personalize marketing. PetSmart has large amounts of data science models, attributes, and events that live across Snowflake and Databricks. This includes basic data at the member level, related models for pets and products, species, etc., first-party attributes, and custom data science models to predict behavior and serve relevant product recommendations. Using this vast amount of data to serve pet parents with personalized journeys and offers is a significant competitive advantage to PetSmart.

Since adopting Hightouch Customer Studio, the marketing team has not only drastically improved audience targeting but also unlocked more complex use cases like serving relevant deals and product recommendations for different pets and households. The marketing team can easily access any data point, attribute, or model living in Snowflake or Databricks immediately.

Orchestrating Journeys for 65M+ Members

Building audiences for marketing campaigns is one thing, but actually using those segments to drive personalization is another challenge entirely. On a weekly basis, PetSmart has dozens of different marketing campaigns running simultaneously. These campaigns are intricately interlinked across email, web/app, in-store, SMS, and push notifications. Using Customer Studio, the marketing team can power multiple different audiences for campaigns.

Once the audiences for these campaigns have been built in Hightouch, they’re automatically synced to Salesforce Marketing Cloud on a daily basis. Audience sizes can range anywhere between 50,000 to 15 million–and with Hightouch, all of this data is synced to SFMC daily and made available within minutes. The marketing team uses Hightouch to power over four billion personalized emails every year.

We’re syncing millions of records directly to SFMC every single day to orchestrate personalized journeys for the 65+ million members in our loyalty program. We’re powering thousands of audiences and over four billion emails every year, and that’s not even factoring in what we do across other channels.

Tino Tomasone

Sr. Manager, Database & Audience Management

•

PetSmart

Measuring Campaign Performance

Marketing campaigns are only as good as their performance. PetSmart used Hightouch’s Splits feature to test the incremental impact of their campaigns, running tests between their campaigns and a global holdout group. These tests showed that PetSmart’s new marketing campaigns drove an additional 15-25% in incremental sales for advertised products and services. Campaigns powered by Hightouch audiences have also seen huge engagement improvements, with week-over-week trends between 150% and 200%. This led to a 150% increase in member activations compared to the previous year.

What’s Next?

The company is continuing to improve the Treats Rewards loyalty program, curate communications, and advance the member journey. Using Hightouch to power customer journeys through SFMC is only the beginning for PetSmart.