Side By Side Pet: Winning Customers with CRM

Side By Side Pet is one of the United States’ fastest growing holistic pet food companies. Their brand caters to pet owners who are seeking healthier alternatives to conventional pet foods. Using CRM the right way, they were able to leverage data better for customer-centric marketing.

The company’s marketing automation program had grown organically. Campaigns were initiated for customer onboarding, seasonal promotions, user experience, and customer service. While each campaign was aligned with customer needs, the automation program as a whole lacked a defining structure that would make it scalable as Side By Side grows. Thus, “we weren’t really getting the maximum value from our investment in our technology,” noted CEO Carol Bramson. “We needed to create a platform that would help us reach our customers through marketing automation in ways that were sustainable, simplified, and organized for the long haul.”

The organization faced another challenge: data about marketing performance was housed across multiple platforms, creating silos that made it difficult to see the big picture of marketing ROI. Indeed, thanks to the different ways in which each platform reported on data, “it was a constant game of comparing apples to oranges, without any clear directional data, let alone those critical insights you need to drive successful digital marketing campaigns, product strategy, and customer experience excellence.” Breaking down these silos was another step in being able to grow through smart marketing investments.

Side By Side Pet reached out to Thoughtlight to help them get a handle on their digital marketing infrastructure, with an emphasis on building a robust marketing automation implementation as well as mining their marketing data while providing strategic data insights.

Getting Started: The Tech Stack Audit

The first step was a tech stack audit. This is when the Thoughtlight team looks at every digital marketing technology that an organization uses, to understand where they are right now. “You need to know where you are with technology, so that you can map out the path to getting where you want to be,” says Thoughtlight CEO Christina J. Inge. “We sat down with the team to know each technology they owned: why they had it, what they wanted to accomplish with it, what was working well with it, and where they felt they needed help.” With this information, Thoughtlight was able to provide Side By Side with an assessment of their technology needs that “cuts out the waste, the stress, the hassle to give them just the technology they need, without having to learn a ton of platforms or juggle too many vendors,” notes Christina.

Marketing Automation: Building for Personalization at Scale

Next up was a complete overhaul of the HubSpot marketing automation system. The Thoughtlight team first looked at the workflows, which are sequences of marketing automation actions, such as sending emails to customers or targeting website visitors with relevant ad messages. They found a 40% redundancy in automations, which is fairly typical for a firm of this size. This was leading to significant inefficiencies. Team members had to search for relevant workflows among dozens of different ones. The risk was present that, as the system grew more complex, customers would receive too many marketing messages. Sending the wrong ones was also a possibility. Organizing the automations such that they were easy to navigate and focused on customer needs was primary. The team was able to reduce the automations by 70%, taking the workflows from a complex, headache-inducing system that required hours to navigate to one that could be deployed with a few mouse clicks. “Cleaning up the workflows makes it easy now to give customers the right personalized messages, keep them engaged, and drive traffic to the site, without having to spend all day on it,” says Allen Gonzalez, who heads up Side By Side Pet customer service operations. “It means that we can focus on keeping our customers happy, not wrangling the technology.”

The Thoughtlight team also brought focus to customer onboarding, creating a smoother workflow for internal teams to know where customers are in their journeys, while providing customers with a more focused experience. They also created new workflows to target customers with special promotions, retargeting ads, and relevant content. 

Marketing Analytics: Moving from Raw Data to Actionable Insights

Breaking down data silos was the biggest challenge of the engagement. Data from the company’s WooCommerce ecommerce store, Google Analytics, HubSpot, social media channels, advertising initiatives, Amazon store, and their custom Pet Health Assessment application were all living in different applications, with no central venue to see what products were selling, how customers were being acquired, what marketing channels were delivering the highest ROI, and how programs were performing. Thoughtlight’s data specialist Jacqueline DiStefano set to work pulling data from these disparate data sources into a single dashboard, built using Google Data Studio. The dashboard provided Carol and her team with a comprehensive view of product performance, campaign results, and channel ROI. “Bringing all of Side By Side’s data into a single dashboard gave us insights we just couldn’t easily get any other way,” recalls Carol. 

“Simply presenting raw data, though, isn’t what adds value,” says Christina. “We are all about turning data into business insights. Our goal turns raw data into real insights that the Side By Side team can use to understand their opportunities in the market.”

To that end, Jacqueline and Christina focused on Thoughtlight’s Three Pillars of Marketing Analytics:

• Visualizations need to be intuitive, so you can understand the data at a glance, any time

• Data needs to be curated, so that you’re seeing the data that matters most

• Analysis needs to be part of all projects, so it’s connected back to business goals

Jacqueline connected the siloed data sources to the dashboard, bringing them into a single portal, breaking down those historical silos. Then, she created intuitive visualizations within the Data Studio dashboard to make it easy for the executive team to see business trends, from product demand to revenue growth. Visualizations presented clear, directional data on:

• Ecommerce statistics, including product sales, top product categories, and seasonal product demand

• Social media performance, including reach, engagement, and post performance

• SEO impact, including content performance and ROI from organic search programs

• Customer demographics, including sales by customer segments

• Web analytics, including site visits and top pages

Thoughtlight also worked to ensure data quality, cleaning data outputs to the highest standards. The dashboard presented a comprehensive view into all of Side By Side’s marketing. Users could quickly move through screens' detailed big-picture data, dig deeper into the specific performance of different channels, content, ads, posts, and products. Much of the data was real-time, allowing an immediate snapshot of what was happening in the moment. The dashboard also allowed users a full lookback at historical data for trendlining. 

With data silos broken down, a comprehensive dashboard delivering real-time information, and historical data at users’ fingertips, it was time to make that data go to work. Christina leveraged the data to present strategic recommendations to the team on marketing campaigns, branding, and customer growth. The result was a complete transformation of Side By Side’s analytics from raw data to company-wide strategic insights. The new insights empowered the team to make informed decisions about ad spending, product assortment, target demographics, and marketing campaign planning. 

“It was so frustrating in the beginning to have a variety of sources of data with no integration and limited ability to build connections for decision making purposes. The efforts to link the information was challenging and we’re still learning, but we know we’re on the right track." says Carol. “Once full integration is complete, we are confident that we’ll be better able to scale our marketing efforts, knowing that the data is there to measure the impact.  Thoughtlight really helped us visualize where we could go with this dashboard and the ability to get to the next level with our marketing technology.”