Posts Tagged ‘PETCO’

Bazaarvoice Stories, Marketing Strategy, Multichannel, User-Generated Content

Heather Brunner PETCO “Tails” Save Lives

February 5th, 2009 by Heather Brunner Chief Operations Officer

This blog was guest-written by Jen Renola, Bazaarvoice Community Manager.

PETCO “Tails” save lives…and the next life may be my own!  PETCO recently launched Bazaarvoice Stories by inviting its customers to share “The Moment Your Pet Changed Your Life.” Now I’ve been tossing around the idea of getting a pet for quite some time, and reading PETCO’s “Sentimental Tails” may be just the motivation I need.  These stories are incredible!

Stories about how people’s pets saved their lives…figuratively:

“I would like to tell you a story about a wonderful dog who saved my life in so many ways…So here is the introduction.”

Stories about how people’s pets saved their lives…literally:

“He helped me to get back into my home and then proceeded to walk me very slowly and carefully inside to a bed. I sat down and used the phone. I believe he saved my life, as I was otherwise alone and I would have been stuck there in the freezing, zero degree weather without anything to keep me warm.”

Stories about the tremendous role that PETCO has played in their lives:

“We buy all of Mercury’s food, treats, (his Charlee Bears, yum!) toys, and supplies from PETCO, and although he comes with me everywhere and is welcome in every store, PETCO is, by far, his favorite place to go! He even gets to make new doggie friends sometimes. Thanks, PETCO for supporting Mercury and all service animals, and for opening your doors to animals to become a dog’s social ‘hot spot!’”

These Stories have to make all of us non pet owners wonder if there is indeed something missing in our lives. And if the Stories themselves aren’t enough to make us think twice, all the photos of these adorable pets certainly are.

Once again, PETCO has proven to be a leader in leveraging user-generated content to meet the needs of its customers at every level. And as we’ve come to expect, PETCO launched Stories by incorporating Bazaarvoice’s recommended best practices: a contest promoted through a homepage banner, category page banners, and email marketing, resulting in over 80 stories submitted in the first four days of the campaign.

I can’t wait to see what’s next.  If I read many more of these, I may find myself at PETCO soon, shopping for supplies for my new pet.  Maybe by then they’ll have Stories with helpful tips for new pet owners…or suggestions for fun toys!

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Ask & Answer, Awards, New at Bazaarvoice

Brett Hurt Bazaarvoice’s view in this uncertain economy

October 18th, 2008 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Things certainly change quickly – in the economy, in technology, and online – and I want to take a moment to fill you in on our outlook.

Bazaarvoice's logoI’m extremely bullish on Bazaarvoice, as I have been all along. We have always spent judiciously and balanced between high growth and cashflow neutrality, and our current investments have enabled us to rapidly grow our Client Services team to best serve our more than 280 clients globally. We are 375 people strong and will continue to hire engineers to continue our development of ROI-driving products, features, and programs. You won’t find another company that has consistently developed as many new offerings – we have consistently delivered new features every seven weeks across 6 (soon to be 7) products in 20 international languages, and this will not slow down. Our culture is stronger than ever. It is truly humbling (and exciting, every day) to work at such a special place.

In the midst of the global economic uncertainty, I want you to know that we will continue to thrive as a financially viable, rapidly growing organization by staying focused on our most important job: effectively and passionately servicing our clients to deliver measurable results. You will see many companies with unproven business models fold over the next year, as I witnessed happening around us at Coremetrics during 2001-2002. But our business, and our business model, are very solid:

  • In our most recent quarter, we saw a 148% increase in signed clients and a 229% increase in revenue, compared to the same quarter a year ago.
  • We now serve more than 280 clients globally.
  • Currently, 90% of the Internet Retailer Top 50 and 80% of the National Retail Federation’s Top 100 who outsource reviews choose Bazaarvoice.
  • We have served over 17 billion product reviews to date, across 20 international languages.
  • We were voted one of Austin’s Best Places to Work this year for the second year running.
  • This week, we won the 2008 Marketing Excellence Award from ClickZ for our Ask & Answer solution.

To us, user-generated content must deliver a real impact to our clients. Here are some recent benefits they have seen:

Now, more than ever, social commerce can have the greatest impact on the bottom line, including reducing support costs and product returns, and increasing site traffic, conversion, advertising ROI, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. In this economy, consumers will scrutinize their purchases more than ever, driving an increased need for user-generated content. They will reward businesses that help them make more informed and satisfying purchase decisions. Businesses that step up their pace of customer centricity will emerge as even stronger leaders after these challenging times turn.

We will continue to be the leader in social commerce. Our entire company is focused on our clients, and it excites us to see so much innovation and success from the smart people that choose to partner with us. Please let us know how we can help your business.

As always, keep an eye on this blog for more real-world ideas from our clients about how user-generated content works for them.  Here are a few of my favorites from just this month:

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Ask & Answer, Awards, Community, Marketing Strategy, Multichannel, Social Commerce Summit, User-Generated Content

Sam Decker Bazaarvoice Summit Cliffnotes #12: PETCO: UGC Goes Multichannel

September 22nd, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This is the twelfth in our series of key takeaways from some of the presentations and panel discussions offered at the Social Commerce Summit in May 2008.

John Lazarchic, VP of eCommerce at PETCO (a Social Commerce Achievement Award winner), has always been a pioneer in making the most of user-generated content. As one of Bazaarvoice’s first clients, PETCO has continued to innovate with new ways of amplifying their customer voice.

John recommends incorporating customer feedback and opinions into every facet of the business, from the website and email campaigns to in-store signage and printed weekly circulars.

Below is a list of PETCO’s newest UGC initiatives:

  1. Brand Shops – these mini-sites on PETCO.com feature brand-specific customer reviews to build loyalty and engagement (see the KONG shop).
  2. Top Rated Banner Ads – the inclusion of UGC on these ads resulted in 10% better performance
  3. Fully-integrated customer review contest – using Bazaarvoice’s ReStyle technology, PETCO was able to launch a multichannel Valentine’s Day campaign that spurred participation and engaged customers at every touch point in the PETCO experience
  4. The Answer Den – using our Ask & Answer product, PETCO developed a Q&A section on their site that resulted in 100% more orders per session
  5. Top Contributor Loyalty Program – giving incentives and rewards for your most active community members
  6. Mobile Reviews in the future – give customers access to PETCO.com review content in the store or on the road

And of course, watch this space to learn about PETCO’s latest innovations!

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Ask & Answer, Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Sam Decker Metcalfe’s Law of Social Commerce holds true, once again!

September 9th, 2008 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

This post was guest-written by Matt Hawkins, Senior Marketing Analyst at Bazaarvoice.

When it comes to leveraging customer content in innovative and revenue generative ways, no one out-performs PETCO.com.  With the sleek branding of the Answer Den thoroughly engaging their pet-loving online community, PETCO has received over 5,000 answers after being live with Ask & Answer for only a few months.

To fuel community participation, PETCO recently launched the “Answer This!” contest to gather even more answer volume and further increase the sales benefits they were already seeing from The Answer Den.

On top of the existing results from The Answer Den, after their “Answer This!” contest ended, PETCO saw an additional…

  • 69% increase in its conversion rate
  • 172% more views per visit (on top of already-elevated page views due to The Answer Den)
  • 150% more orders per session

…as a result of the additional content.

Ask & Answer has proven to be yet another great addition to the suite of social commerce products PETCO currently has deployed. PETCO adopted Ratings & Reviews in 2006 which has produced lower return rates and higher conversion rates. By adding Ask & Answer, PETCO has further made customer centricity a #1 priority with Bazaarvoice’s social commerce technologies. PETCO has truly demonstrated Metcalfe’s Law of Social Commerce which says: the more (in number) and more varied the uses of your customer-generated content, the greater the return for your business.

Even prior to launching The Answer Den it was no surprise to PETCO that more questions and answers would result in an increase in sales (see: Shoes.com case study). PETCO was already seeing phenomenal results from the Answer Den and the contest only magnified its effect on boosting sales.

Before PETCO ran the contest aimed at driving volume and boosting sales, they saw that those who visited the Answer Den had…

  • 100% more orders per session
  • 90% more page views per session
  • 72% higher conversion rate
  • 28% more items/order
  • 9% higher average order value
  • -6% item abandonment rate
  • -6% shopping cart abandonment rate

…compared to shoppers who visited a category page (which is where the Answer Den is implemented).

You can read all the details in our latest Ask & Answer case study. Excellent work, PETCO!

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Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content

Sam Decker 80% of Online Customers Trust Brands More with Reviews

August 11th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

We recently published a joint study with Vizu Research on reviews. 

The key finding is that US and UK shoppers have more trust and respect for Brands that enable product reviews. In fact, 8 out of 10 shoppers trust and respect brands more if they have authentic, user generated reviews on their site. So, not only do reviews help improve conversion, average order value, returns, satisfaction, natural search traffic, RSS feed click through, email revenue, and offline impact (ask us for any of these case studies)…they also improve brand perception! 

Another finding: US shoppers consider ratings and reviews to be the most useful eCommerce site feature (44 percent). Product comparison (15 percent), product navigation (12 percent), and privacy information (11 percent) followed in the distance. We knew this already from site surveys with PETCO and CompUSA, but it's always helpful to get another data point! We're sort of maniacal about data :-)

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt The Challenge of Firing ‘Bad’ Customers

July 10th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

A very angry customerYou have probably heard the recent story about Sprint Nextel firing 1,000 of their highest maintenance customers. CNET’s News.com covers the story, and the reader discussion is very active with 125 comments so far. You can also easily find this article by searching for “Sprint customer service” on Google, where it is currently the sixth match on the first page of Google’s search results. Actually, two of the top ten matches are this story, and three of the ten (two individual blogs and one article at MSN Money) are very negative commentary about Sprint customer service.

Now, I have nothing against Sprint. But I find it fascinating that in this day and age the way we consume information is so dependent upon Web search results. We spend more time consuming media online than in any other medium. If you are considering Sprint as a customer and searching for “Sprint customer service” on Google to learn about the experience you may have with them, 30% of the first ten matches are negative and 20% are about them firing high maintenance customers.

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Sam Decker Summary of Answers for “What about Negative Reviews?”

July 7th, 2007 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

As you might imagine one of the top questions we get from prospects, especially branded manufacturers is, “What about negative reviews?”.

We’ve covered the topic on this blog and elsewhere. Over a year ago we discovered the Ratings J-Curve across our clients which still holds true today: 80% of reviews are positive. One of our first branded manufacturers, Burpee, commented that negative reviews actually help conversion. And I’ve written an article explaining other benefits of negative reviews in iMedia.

The topic came up again in a great article from Joan Voight in adweek, titled “Negative Reviews are Really Positive“. The article reports several of our branded clients carrying reviews:

The surveys come as many brands are joining Amazon.com and review sites such as yelp.com, tripadvisor.com and consumersearch.com in offering reviews on their web sites. In May, Toshiba joined Dell and Hewlett Packard in offering online reviews “to enhance the buying experience.” Levi’s will join Fair Indigo and EMS in the apparel space, offering customer reviews by the close of 2007.

Bill Blass, formerly of Sears and Lands’ End wisely explains:

“If all reviews are good, customers question if the ratings are legitimate,” Bill Bass, CEO of Fair Indigo, told Adweek. “Not only will people ignore the reviews, but it will hurt their trust in the brand. It would be better to have no reviews at all.”

And John Lazarchik of PETCO has predicted:

“In two years customer reviews on branded sites will be more common,” said John Lazarchic, Petco’s vice president of e-commerce. “A few years after that if shoppers don’t find reviews on a site, they’ll just go shop somewhere else.”

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Community, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce

Wayne Stribling Make Your Customer Your Copilot

April 29th, 2007 by Wayne Stribling Former VP of Client Services

Occasionally the Bazaarblog will feature guest bloggers. Today's blog was written and contributed by Matt Hawkins, one of our Marketing Data Analysts dedicated to identifying key trends and actionable insights for clients by analyzing their ratings and reviews data.

As a Marketing Data Analyst, I research and analyze our customer’s data in a way that helps to guide them in the right direction with their products based on what their customers are saying. This concept is not new: listen to the customer and let them help drive the direction of your business. The challenge is how to do so effectively and accurately. According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), collecting and analyzing marketing data should “link the consumer, identify opportunities, highlight problems, monitor performance, and improve understanding.” That's exactly what my job is all about and what I do with every case study, community assessment, ROI metric, SEO analysis or data insight I develop for our clients.

For example, I developed a case study recently for one of our early customers, PETCO, who now has a wealth of ratings and reviews data collected. Their data clearly demonstrated that they have been able to reduce the return rate for their products by 20% since implementing Bazaarvoice even as sales increased. My research also showed that as their review volumes grew for many products, the return rate decreased dramatically. This type of actionable insight will undoubtedly play a huge role in PETCO’s future product strategies.
 
Listening to the customer and aligning your company strategy with your customer's desires can be driven with the right metrics and methodology for collecting data. I see time and time again new opportunities for our customers to take the initiative and listen to what their customers are saying to determine how to improve their marketing strategies,  improve their products, reduce their returns and increase their profits. With ratings and reviews data, companies now have much better insight into areas like product improvement opportunities, declining sales, suffering brand image, return rates, and even customer service issues to understand why customers are satisfied or dissatisfied. With sales data alone, a company can easily identify underperforming products, but it’s difficult to identify the root causes.

Listening to the customer is about more than just “listening,” it’s about engaging and involving them. Customers want more control and we should give it to them. Proctor & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley said at a recent Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference, “Consumers are beginning, in a very real sense, to own our brands and participate in their creation.” He pointed to not only consumer generated ads, but also Proctor & Gamble’s online community Beinggirl, “a site grounded in user contributions.” Lafley went on to suggest that it’s time for marketers to “let go.”

 I say let’s put the consumer in the copilot’s seat and really leverage from their valuable feedback and opinions. Many of our customers are already doing so and it’s fundamentally changing the way they do business. I’m excited to be in the ideal position to help them understand the voice of their customer.

 

 

 

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Books, Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt My Interview in “The Open Brand” by Kelly Mooney

April 25th, 2007 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

One of my favorite blogs is Kelly Mooney's "MooneyThinks".  It is a very insightful and honest critique of many website and marketing campaign initiatives by the President of one of the best interactive agencies in the country, Resource Interactive.  I have had the pleasure of working with Kelly for years, both on the Shop.org Board of Directors as well as a business partner (both at Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice).  I even had the pleasure of speaking at her client summit last year, iCitizen.

Now Kelly is coming out with her second book, "The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World", in September.  Here is an excerpt from ATG's newsletter today.  Kelly will be keynoting their client summit in Charleston, SC next week.  We will also be attending and presenting, as ATG is a partner of ours too (recently announced).  "The Open Brand" is like "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (one of my favorite business books) except it is less of a rant and more prescriptive.  We needed the rant and it was prescient in 1999, but now it is time to take action.  "The Open Brand" is about taking action.  I endorsed it as follows:

“My favorite business books are written by practitioners of the field.  Through Resource Interactive, Kelly Mooney works with the world’s leading online brands.  So when she provides a prescriptive guide, it pays to read it.  ‘The Open Brand’ will revolutionize business as we know it.  The Internet has put the networked consumer in control, but your business can actually skyrocket if you play by Kelly’s rules of an ‘open brand’.”

Kelly interviewed me for a special section in her book, and here is what I had to say:

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Community, Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Word of Mouth

Wayne Stribling How jetBlue is Turning Negative Word of Mouth into Positive

March 14th, 2007 by Wayne Stribling Former VP of Client Services

A few weeks ago on Valentine’s Day, a major winter ice storm caused jetBlue Airways to experience an unprecedented operational breakdown that caused over a thousand flight cancellations, hundreds of flight delays, and left customers stranded on runways for over 10 hours. As a Client Services VP and a jetBlue customer, I was shocked to hear about this huge customer service disaster, but was very glad I wasn’t flying with them that week! :-)

You probably heard about it too because it generated so much negative word of mouth that it spread like wildfire across the Internet and news media as angry customers rightfully vented their frustrations toward the company. It was clear that this PR nightmare would have a devastating impact on jetBlue’s previously high-flying reputation. Something had to be done fast to save it!

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