How Pets at Home grew its VIP Club by 1.5 million members

How do you grow a business in immense headwinds? How do you build upon a successful product and engender more loyalty among already committed brand fans?

Pets at Home did just that – building its VIP Club by 1.5 million members over one year, driving a 60% email response rate and winning the 2019 Marketing Week Masters award for data-driven marketing.

By the end of 2017 the pet care group’s VIP Club already had 6 million members and over 60% of pet owners in the UK had signed up. However, Pets at Home wanted to go bigger, providing its members with mass personalisation in order to help it achieve is four main goals.

These were to grow member spend and loyalty; grow membership and motivate members to provide more data about their pets; grow multi-channel and service participation; and drive greater differentiation through expertise and empathy.

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Firstly, Pets at Home overhauled its CRM content across email and its app, adding personalised imagery that reflected not only the owner’s pet type, but also the breed and name. Useful information was then provided to reflect the type of pet in question.

Pets at Home’s focus on CRM drove just less than £50m in incremental revenue, which represents 5.6% of group revenue, and increased retention by 8% year on year.

The team also built upon Pets at Home’s highly successful VIP points programme Lifelines. Customers accrue points based upon their spend and the benefits go to pet charities of their choice. Pets at Home created spend targets to incentivise customers, raising a total of £2.2m to fund pet charities in 2018 alone.

The retailer also created Find my VIP, which used the power of members and localised social media to help to reunite lost pets with their owners, helping build empathy between members and highlight Pets at Home’s expertise.

Purchases of products and services have also increased by 23% year on year and service sales rose by 8.5%. Multi-channel shopping across Pets at Home’s website, app and physical stores increased by 54% year on year, driving web sales up 75%.