ThePetStoreOnline.com Case Study

How Lever Interactive Grew ThePetStoreOnline.com’s Sales 419% By Turning New Customers Into Repeat Customers

Customer Profile

Based just outside of Atlanta, ThePetStoreOnline.com is an online retailer of dog and cat supplies. As a leader in the industry, ThePetStoreOnline.com offers top-quality name brand products such as PetSafe, Innotek and Petmate at affordable prices. Started in 2006, PSO has grown greatly.

Lever Interactive currently runs ThePetStoreOnline.com’s paid search marketing, affiliate marketing, shopping comparison, email marketing, conversion optimization and has also done search engine optimization consulting.

Business Situation

In February 2008, ThePetStoreOnline.com was steadily growing their business but they had no system in place for contacting their database to grow repeat sales. Over the years, they collected over 90,000 email addresses from customers who chose to opt-in to receive updates, news and other communications from the store. However, they did not send one message throughout that entire period.

Lever Interactive recognized an entire revenue stream that had not yet been tapped and proposed to run an email marketing campaign for ThePetStoreOnline.com.

Technical Issues

Since a significant length of time had elapsed since ThePetStoreOnline.com had collected the email addresses of their customers, Lever Interactive decided to send a confirmation email to the entire database asking users to sign-up again. This helped Lever clean-up the database and it resulted in over 70,000 subscribers who decided to stay opted-in to the list.

The next issue to be addressed was deliverability. Through past experience, Lever found that the best deliverability rate results from segmented lists. Therefore, the entire database of 70,000 subscribers was segmented into lists by Internet Service Provider. i.e. Comcast.net, AOL.com, Verizon.Net. Then, those lists were broken down into sub-lists because many ISP’s will block your email if they feel an address is sending too many at once and it is viewed as Spam.

Solution

Rather than sending out multiple emails at first which could overwhelm subscribers and therefore lead to an unsubscribe, Lever adapted a less aggressive strategy. During the first two months (February and March 2008), only one email per month was sent. Starting with the third month (April 2008), email distribution increased to every two weeks.

Each email features a specific theme and highlights top-selling accessories, in-season items, new products, etc. The discounts change every send but they vary between 10% or $10 off orders of $100 or more, and 5% or $5 off orders of $50 or more.

In addition to the bi-weekly promotional emails, Lever also administers Thank You for Your Order emails which are sent to customers two weeks after their purchase and it offers them 5% off their next order.

To expand ThePetStoreOnline.com’s database in addition to capturing current customers contact information, Lever implemented a double opt-in process for users. Users can join ThePetStoreOnline.com’s email database from the homepage that advertises special discounts on products. This double opt-in process adheres to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

Benefits

By the April 2008, the third month of the campaign, email revenue increased 189%. Revenue has continued to grow incrementally for ThePetStoreOnline.com and by June 2009, revenue increased 419% since the start of the campaign. Lever was able to achieve these results through enhanced design based on user behavior, and growing and managing ThePetStoreOnline.com’s database to over 131,000 contacts.

Third Party Vendors

Lever Interactive currently uses SteamSend as their email marketing service provider.

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