The Business
Zoomalia is a leading e-commerce pet shop in France and eight other European countries. The website has the largest product catalog in France with more than 30,000 references and 10 owned brands. The company has delivered impressive growth over the last 10 years and has been sustaining its success with a +60% net sales in 2018 while maintaining high customer satisfaction — 96% of Zoomalia’s clients recommend the brand.
The Challenge
- IT dependencies hindered marketing goals
- Lack of data or insights
- Scaling 1:1 engagements
Zoomalia had a history of building every e-commerce and logistic component internally. Despite growing their team and investing resources into building campaigns for their marketing team, the development team couldn’t keep up with marketing’s requests for new programs, and marketers were dependent on the development team for changes needed for every campaign. The metrics provided were minimal and didn’t shed much light on what had performed well, what appealed to clients, and what led the customer to convert.
The company decided to trust an industry specialist to free their IT resources and empower their marketing team by choosing to onboard Emarsys. After one year on the platform, Zoomalia had already automated and personalized their entire customer journey achieving great results. The team wanted to push personalization further to prevent clients from running out of dog food by reminding them on a 1-to-1 level when they would need to place their re-order. They quickly realized that they could not make these calculations at scale for each customer, and needed to find an alternative.
Laurent Primaux
CTO, Zoomalia
“We had to turn to artificial intelligence, and when we explored our options, we were lucky to see that our chosen CRM and automation vendor, Emarsys, also had this type of solution in their platform. Instead of spending months developing this tool internally, we were able to launch a program of this type within two months. We have more programs launching soon, but this was our primary use case. There was nothing our development team had to do. Our marketing was completely autonomous.”
The Solution
Repeat purchases represent 50% of Zoomalia’s business which is why focusing on replenishment was crucial to sustaining the company’s growth. Timing for replenishment was essential because the marketing team knew that if a customer completely ran out of pet food, they would go in-store to make their purchase rather than order online. The replenishment needed to prevent customers from running out of pet food.
However, getting the right timing for the communication and estimating when the customer would need to replenish their pet food on a 1-to-1 level for millions of customers was almost impossible. Thanks to Emarsys’ AI-based replenishment algorithms, the replenishment timing and the number of products and ancillaries are automatically calculated.
AI Intelligence
Emarsys’ Artificial Intelligence was essential to scaling each replenishment use case to each customer’s unique purchase frequency and product affinities. With the calculation made in Emarsys, Zoomalia needed to automate campaigns and drive rapid results.
Cross-sell for replenishment
The team started with the Replenishment Tactic out-of-the-box focusing, initially, on two email reminders to drive re-ordering. Each reminder included complementary products based on the customer’s previous purchases and browsing behaviors to drive cross-sell opportunities.
Complete user profile
Cindy Torrinha, Digital Marketing Manager at Zoomalia said, “What’s nice about Emarsys is that you can enter into the user profile. So you know who she is, her frequency of purchases, and her preferences. For example, I displayed one customer’s history over the past 3 months. You can see in yellow that she received a replenishment campaign, and within 4 to 10 days, we can see an order being placed. So we believe this is helping Marie to have this sort of reminder. We are in an emotional sector that involves pets so the fact that clients can feel that we are looking after their pets is something our clients appreciate.”
Abandoned cart automation
“The abandoned cart campaign has been live for 3threemonths, and it is our best campaign,” Cindy shares. “I think we all see the abandoned cart campaign as an example of a great campaign. It is 10 points above our other campaigns. So we have seen positive results.”
The Impact
Comparing year-over-year performance, from adopting Artificial Intelligence and launching the Emarsys out-of-the-box replenishment program, Zoomalia has seen a 75% increase in active customers, a 94% increase in revenue from active customers, and a 68% increase in revenue from churning customers.
“It’s only positive! Above all — especially for me — I am completely autonomous. These campaigns are automated, so we do the job once, we verify it, and we check the analytics. But time has been saved, so I can focus on other things, other campaigns, other use cases. It is truly time-saving.”
