About the Customer

Pet Friendly is a Hilton, New York-based family-owned business with more than 40 years of combined experience in the pet industry. Founded in September 2007, Pet Friendly has grown from offering approximately 4,500 items on day one to now offering more than 10,000 items to serve their customer’s full range of needs. At Pet Friendly, they continue to add new products and services every day in their quest to make the store a one-stop pet shop. As part of this dedication to excellent customer service, Pet Friendly has added a home delivery service.

Business Challenges

From the first day of operation, Pet Friendly founder Hamed Ebrahimi had a very clear vision for staying competitive with their bigger competitors such as Chewy and Amazon. They would develop and maintain a customer base by consistently sending out a weekly newsletter campaign to reach local customers. This strategy had been successful in delivering regular promotions, offering expert articles, and store updates directly to the customer.

As is the case with most new businesses, it is easy to become a victim of your own success. The better the business does, the more ways the owners/managers are pulled in various directions just trying to stay on top of the growth.

“In the early days were doing very well with the email marketing,” Ebrahimi said. “Eventually it just seemed like there was always something coming up that got in our way of staying consistent.”

The Pet Friendly team realized they needed to turn an idle email list that was essentially collecting dust into an active and consistent means of communication with customers. The only issue was how they would do it given how busy the ownership/management team was with everything that was currently on their plate.

Solution

To rejuvenate the stalled email campaign, Hamed Ebrahimi turned to New Media Retailer (NMR) who presented a platform that would not only get the email campaign back on track but would also allow them to better access online shopping platforms such as Shopify. Enhancing the capabilities for online shopping and home delivery would be key to staying competitive in a business landscape where more and more customers prefer online options.

NMR constructed a solution that would see four emails per month (one per week) sent to their customer mailing list. Within two weeks, NMR had Pet Friendly’s regular communication with customers back on track. The NMR solution was designed to bolster Pet Friendly’s business by providing:

• Regular communication with customers offering promotions and special tips and advice.
• A convenient platform for online orders and browsing products.
• Easier access to the Shopify online platform.

Outcome

Within weeks of implementing the new solution, Hamed Ebrahimi and his Pet Friendly team immediately saw a noticeable increase in both in-store sales and traffic as well as online traffic. Now more than three years after the solution launch, Ebrahimi sees the difference as stark as night and day.

“The whole NMR team has been a great help in ensuring we stay consistent which is really the key,” he said. “From my perspective, I’ve seen a very healthy ROI on the email marketing program since we first launched it.”

Ebrahimi has been pleased to see that with the continued deployment of the email blast program, sales figures remain well above what they were prior to the deployment. The experience has led him to believe that any business that has a customer contact list that is not being put to use is sitting on an untapped gold mine.

“I would recommend this service for any small business that does not have the time to design and distribute emails to their customers on a consistent basis. If you have emails from customers that have visited your store then I highly recommend for you to put them to good use with the email blast program,” he said.

An ancillary benefit to having NMR run the email campaign is it frees up Ebrahimi to spend more time dedicated to the other aspects of the business which all help to improve the bottom line.

Conclusion

Hilton, New York’s Pet Friendly pet shop knew it needed to revamp its once-thriving email campaign. The strategy that once successfully kept them competitive with larger competitors had been pushed to the side to deal with more pressing issues surrounding running the business. Looking for a way to bolster their customer outreach efforts, Pet Friendly turned to New Media Retailer to implement a comprehensive solution. NMR implemented their email blast solution which restored the consistent communication with Pet Friendly’s customer base. The result was an increase in sales and online traffic, which has remained steady three years after the implementation.