How Petco.com lets consumers do the advertising

04/14/2006

Petco.com knows that pet owners have a built-in desire to talk about their furry and feathered friends with other pet owners.

Petco.com knows that pet owners have a built-in desire to talk about their furry and feathered friends with other pet owners. Leveraging that fact by putting consumer product reviews on the site and then including reviews in an e-mail campaign produced e-mails that got a 200% higher click-through rate than those without the reviews, vice president of e-commerce John Lazarchic tells Internet Retailer.

- - - For more Online Marketing insight visit WebMetro Online Marketing - - -

Since October, Petco.com has been posting customer product ratings and reviews on the site using a hosted application from BazaarVoice. The outsourced providers application and service captures customers posts to the site, reviews their content and rejects those with content that falls outside criteria set by Petco, and posts the rest both positive and negative. We always knew that for the program to have any validity, wed have to be willing to put up negative reviews, Lazarchic says. The service also provides analysis of the customer reviews to Petco.

Lazarchic sees the feature first as a way to help differentiate Petco from a branding perspective, but the ratings and review tool has delivered on some hard metrics as well. For the e-mail campaign targeting pet owners by type, Petco chose six top-rated products for each pet type and included snippets of favorable reviews on the products as part of the e-mail message. E-mail recipients could click-through on the message to read the rest of the featured reviews, as well as other reviews of the product. An A/B test showed that the click-through rate on the e-mail messages that contained product reviews was 200% higher than those in the campaign that did not, Lazarchic says.

Source: internetretailer.com
April 14, 2006