How Hill’s Pet Nutrition Uses Online Experiences To Personalize Email Campaigns

Pet food brand uses outputs from new product selector tool inform relevant offers to customers

As more brands lean into zero-party data collection to learn more about their customers, the opportunity to create targeted and personalized email marketing campaigns increases. But collecting actionable data requires a strategy designed to not only engage customers, but provide value as well.

A powerful way to accomplish this is through online experiences. For instance, Hill’s Pet Nutrition launched a product selector tool on their site powered by Cheetah Digital by Marigold.

The tool gives visitors the ability to filter their product options by type of pet, food preference, unique needs, and much more.

The company also asked customers to share the name of their pets. This gave Hill’s Pet Nutrition the ability to not only personalize the product recommendations and email reminders, but to further personalize the communications by incorporating the pet’s name into the outreach.

In addition to personalizing pet names, Hill’s Pet Nutrition branched its online survey in multiple paths based on how consumers answered certain questions. Current customers received one path, while non-customers were sent down another. This creates a customized experience for the user, but also helps the brand collect useful zero-party data used to further personalize any subsequent communication with relevant content.

The product recommendation survey solved several key objectives. The passive, always-on tool converts organic web traffic directly into the brand’s database. Second, it introduced a new web-based engagement opportunity for the site. Third, it worked to move potential customers along the pathway for the right product at the exact point in time, and convert to a sale.

By building out a customized data collection strategy with their product recommendation tool, Hill’s Pet Nutrition made sure they weren’t sending cat food promotions to dog owners, or puppy product offers to older dog owners — all personalized with pet names.

According to Marigold’s Consumer Trends Index, 51% of US consumers are frustrated by irrelevant content, promotions or offers from brands. With their strategic efforts, Hill’s Pet Nutrition used their selection tool to provide their customers the offers and content they want to see.