"The alphawhale team have been great at providing an end to end solution for our business.  From developing the strategy to rolling it out and assisting with execution. Alphawhale have assisted with upskilling our team which is allowing them to concentrate more on the strategy for us."

- John Reus, Pet.co.nz

The brief

PetCo is NZ’s largest online retailer for pet food, supplies and services. Their mission is to make life easier for every pet lover in NZ by offering a complete range of pet products, exceptional customer service and speedy delivery. 

When PetCo first engaged alphawhale, there was a gap between their business goals and the marketing communication that their audience was seeing. PetCo also wanted to deliver more relevant, targeted messages to the right people and reduce the inefficiencies around manually creating and sending emails to customers.

Through in-depth research, analysis and implementation, alphawhale helped PetCo to strengthen and modernise their marketing strategy as well as realign it back to their customer’s needs.

Our approach

The alphawhale team conducted a Deep Dive into PetCo’s analytics, processes and customers. From this, we created research-backed Buyer Personas to restore focus on who PetCo’s most ideal customers would be.

The research was used to shape an overall Marketing Strategy that was implemented across multiple channels:

• We helped PetCo transition their processes to Hubspot, giving them consolidated access to a suite of marketing tools and increase the efficiency of their processes.

• PPC targeting and messaging was narrowed down to improve relevance and target higher value customers. 

• Relevant marketing automation workflows with behavioural-based targeting were introduced to replace manual emailing. 

• Social media channels were optimised to focus on building community engagement and brand loyalty with appealing, relevant and shareable content.

• PetCo’s blog was redesigned to improve SEO, and new monetisation channels were added to increase revenue of the blog. 

alphawhale also provided ongoing support, training and guidance to ensure the success of PetCo’s marketing strategy implementation.

The result

After the changes were implemented, PetCo channels showed significant improvements across the board:

• Increased PPC click through rate by 67% and ROI by 43% over the duration of the campaign

• Increased average email open rate by over 20% from marketing automation campaigns

• Increased engagement on social channels by over 300% within a month

• Increased traffic and revenue from blog content

• Influencing their highest month of website revenue in 6 years

We also worked with PetCo to eliminate the inefficiencies stemming from their manual emails and further streamline their marketing processes.

alphawhale is proud to continue supporting the PetCo team as they further cement their status as the leaders of the online pet products space.