Ciudad de Mascotas Increased Sales with an Integrated Marketing Solution  

The Business

The name of the cCommerce pet supplies store, Ciudad de Mascotas, means City of Pets. It first opened as a virtual store in 2012 and has grown to sell over 5000 products for dogs, cats, and their owners in Columbia, South America.

The business is not just about the food, toys, and hygiene products but about the passionate people who want to improve the lives of animals and those who care for them. That includes designers, engineers, publicists, sales people, as well as experts on animal health on its team of 30.

Its CEO and co-founder is Juan Carlos Martínez, a Board Member of Colombian E-commerce Chamber with over 20 years eCommerce experience in both B2B and B2C. He carried that expertise into developing an eCommerce for the pet industry to meet the needs of pet owners in his native Columbia.

Martzinez describes his company as “not the kind of startup that grows exponentially and burns up cash.” He said that they opted instead to grow at a more gradual pace to maintain “a very healthy financial situation.”

They are “very heavily invested in phone calls,” he explained, because pet owners like the immediacy and human connection involved in talking on the phone to get advice about caring for their pets and making the right selection to meet their health and nutritional needs.

The Challenge

Martinez explained that  he aspired to get up to date with the launch of an eCommerce business that is the South American equivalent of Chewy.com. South America is still some years behind the US and Europe in terms of innovative advances, he admitted, though they are working hard to catch up.

To that end, Martinez sought out the technology that would help the business increase its customer base and its sales. He said that he tried out a lot of marketing tools, including solutions from Oracle, Hubspot, Mailchimp, and others. They even tried building their own  tool with open source software.

While the tools were good, they just didn’t deliver the kind of assessment of customer behavior and automation that they wanted. They also did not seamlessly integrate with Magento.

He realized that even a very good tool wasn’t meeting all his needs as a growing eCommerce store. He set out to find what would.

While searching, his biggest concern was that the business would end up overpaying for the solution. They ran the risk of  selecting something that packed in irrelevant features they would not even be able to use so that they would be paying for something they don’t fully utilize.

The Solution

In 2019, Martinez  found all he was looking for in a single solution from Remarkety. One of the reasons he chose it was for its integration with the Magento extension that they use that helps them convert more new customers.

Remarkety analyzes the business’s Magento historical eCommerce data to segment customer lists and prospects based on real-time shopping behavior and purchase history, and send out the right message to the right person. Remarkety’s dashboard is synchronized with their Magento back-end so that performance measures are always updated and accurate.

Remarkety’s integration advantage is not limited to Magento. It also integrates with Facebook, which allowed Ciudad de Mascotas to have all its Facebook leads upload quickly and easily to the Remarkety database to advance its automation.

Martinez particularly appreciates Remarkety’s capability to automatically send out messages based on triggers like abandoned carts. The Remarkety plugin for Magento will automatically rebuild the cart and add all product items to it on mobile, tablet or desktop, thanks to its cross-device recovery capability.

Adapting the steady pace that directs the Ciudad de Mascotas’s growth in general, Martinez avoided the temptation to integrate everything from the beginning, since that would be running before crawling and walking.

Instead  he set up a plan to start “simple and then complex it.” That way he avoids making mistakes from to trying to do too much at once until he is thoroughly familiar.

“It’s better to know the thing 100% from the little use and build from there,” he explained.

The Results

After using Remarkety for a year, the business has noticeably increased conversions and new customers. They also see signs of strengthened customer loyalty coming through an uptick  redemption of points and referrals.

More segmented and triggered emails also increased their open rates. When they include dynamic coupons, they bring in redemption at the very impressive rate of 25%.

One of the benefits of Remarkety’s seamless integration with Magento is the ability to set out personalized dynamic coupons. They have used that feature to win back customers, recover carts, and get those who only browsed to buy.

They are not just pleased with what they see from their customers but what they see as customers themselves. Like their own business, Remarkety is not just about selling products but about communicating with people to address their concerns with outstanding customer service.

“Working with Omer Amir, Remarkey’s Support & Success manager has been great for us,” Martinez declares. “In the past we have changed tools because of the service.”

With Remarkety, he found that the high level of service makes a great difference. All their questions get answered so that they are able to make the most of Remarkety’s features to improve their business.