Paws for Thought
Pets & Friends, part of the Kennelpak group, is a trusted pet food supplier offering products and services to customers across both store and online channels. Despite a loyal customer base, they faced challenges with abandoned baskets and customers failing to return for repeat purchases across multiple lifecycle stages, representing substantial lost revenue. Their digital-only remarketing strategies weren’t effectively recovering these opportunities, and they sought to understand whether physical touchpoints could drive incremental sales, stronger engagement, and higher conversion rates across their existing customer journey.
Tails Wagging
Paperplanes partnered with Pets & Friends to launch programmatic direct mail on 18th October 2023, implementing three targeted campaigns: abandoned basket recovery (24-hour trigger), next best purchase opportunities (38 days post-purchase), and winback campaigns (100 days post-purchase). Each A4 letter in C5 envelope featured engaging, product-led creative with tailored incentive codes (PAWS10, PETNEXT10, WELCOMEBACK15) and branded messaging reflecting Pets & Friends’ trusted positioning. The campaigns employed an 80% test, 20% control split with customers mailed a maximum of once every 30 days, seamlessly integrated via Paperplanes technology directly onto the Pets & Friends website.
Fully Developed
The campaign delivered impressive early results across all three strategies, with mailed customers converting at 8.1% compared to just 5.8% for the control cohort, a 40% uplift in total sales. The Next Best Purchase campaign proved particularly strong with a 14.4% conversion rate, whilst Winback achieved 8.2% conversion. Engagement metrics showed mailed customers viewing 35% more pages, with 4.6% returning for a second purchase and the campaign delivering £2.04 incremental return for every £1 invested (£2.35 to £1 ROI on profit margin).
