Animals Matter launches omnichannel sales and sees 45% year-over-year sales growth

Scott and Nancy Avera have turned their love of dogs into a successful business that not only provides their canine companions with luxury pet products such as high-quality dog ​​beds, blankets and car seats, as well as accessibility features for less mobile pets such as ramps and steps but also donates to charities that help save dogs from shelters and find them forever homes. “We couldn’t find quality products. So we decided to make our own. We wanted it to be non-toxic, high quality, made in America,” Scott says.

Over the years, the company has made good money selling products directly to retailers through catalogs. However, the couple began to notice a decline in catalog sales as more consumers began to buy directly online from online retailers such as Amazon. They started selling omnichannel directly to their consumers using Shopify Plus to help them make the switch. Since fundamentally overhauling its business model, Animals Matter has seen:

• Sales increase by 45% y/y
• The number of returning customers increases by 46%
• Conversion increase by 36%.
• 75% return on ad spend (ROAS)

Challenge

For over a decade, Animals Matter has relied entirely on selling its products to retailers wholesale through catalogs, without worrying about anything other than production and shipping. But in 2014, Scott began to pay attention to how Amazon was changing the market. He also became concerned that sales of traditional catalogs were starting to decline and some products were leaving the pet category altogether. He started thinking about offering products directly to consumers.

The Animals Matter website was built with e-commerce in mind using ProductCart, but didn’t actually offer any products for sale. Apart from the website, the company had no online presence: it had no e-commerce, no social media channels, no SEO strategy or Google Ads. Scott began experimenting with free trials of e-commerce solutions, eventually settling on Shopify.

“I loved the platform and had great experiences with the people I talked to,” Scott says. “Shopify had an established app store and I could achieve anything I wanted on the platform. I could be a non-web developer and still develop my own website.

For the first time, Animals Matter thought about Google Ads, search and social media, and sales started to grow. After just over half a year on the platform, Scott was contacted about moving to Shopify Plus, which would allow the company to take advantage of the higher level of expert consulting offered to Shopify Plus merchants.

Scott was intrigued and signed the contract. “I received personalized prompts,” Scott says. “They helped us go from thinking we should sell direct to consumers to having social media channels, Google integration, Shopping integration, email integration — they helped us implement all those things and trained us.”

With Scott and Nancy starting from scratch in almost every area, Animals Matter set ambitious goals to help increase sales, improve marketing, and simply understand all the things that are possible in e-commerce sales.

Solutions

Since Animals Matter was new to e-commerce, Shopify Plus ran it through each channel, one by one. “We currently have a following on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube and post daily,” says Scott. “Google Ads, Search and Shopping, display advertising – that’s all we do. It was huge.”

Shopify Plus also showed Animals Matter how important it is to stay connected with customers and keep them engaged. This helped the company set up abandoned cart emails, newsletters, and promotions.

Scott and Nancy soon accidentally discovered that they had been working on a valuable piece of marketing for years. “I was telling our representative about all the wonderful photos customers sent us every day of their dogs using our products,” says Nancy. He said, “This is gold.” They’re hard to get. And we were looking at these photos left and right. We had no idea. Catalogs used to do everything for us.

Results

Leaving the catalog industry was difficult, but Animals Matter knew it had to make a change to survive.

“We used to not do any marketing at all,” Scott says. “Suddenly the phone starts ringing so often that we have to hire a customer service representative. It has completely turned into a completely different business.”

While Animals Matter couldn’t compare e-commerce sales before Shopify, its numbers are still impressive. Sales are up 45% year over year, conversions are up 36% and the number of returning customers is up 46%. The company also saw a 75% return on ad spend (ROAS) for branded Google Ads.

Animals Matter has not only survived in the face of a changing market, but has used this challenge to its advantage and is now thriving more than ever.