Providing lifelong value for pet owners.

The desire for companionship and the mental health benefits that animals provide are just two factors that contribute to half of the world’s population counting themselves as pet owners. With a total of one billion pets worldwide, the global pet care market is expanding by seven percent annually and is expected to reach $550 billion by 2032, according to Global Market Insights Inc.

Pethealth, part of Independence Pet Group® (IPG), is well-positioned to capitalize on this boom. Operating in the U.S. and Canada, Pethealth is a growing collective of brands that provides products and services such as microchips and lost pet recovery services, pet adoption, animal welfare organization management software, and pet supply retailing for shelters, veterinarians, and pet owners.

Creating an ecosystem for pet care

Pethealth’s vision is to combine the strengths of its brands — including 24Pet, 24Petwatch, 24Petconnect, 24Petcare, and PetPlace — to create a single, cohesive health, wellbeing, and safety ecosystem for people to care for their pets. Through this approach, Pethealth can also deliver value across all aspects of pet ownership and fuel continued innovation and growth within the larger IPG organization, which includes well-known pet insurance brands like ASPCA Pet Health Insurance, Figo, AKC Pet Insurance, Pets Plus Us, and PetPartners.

The company’s newly created marketing technology team plays a key role in achieving Pethealth’s goals. Andrew Behrend, Director, Marketing & Sales Technology, leads the team, and Avinash Gopalakrishnan, Senior Manager, Marketing Technology, supports efforts to establish a martech center of excellence across the new entity’s many brands.

“Given the number of businesses we have and the number of different systems they use, we were challenged in bringing everything together from an IT and business perspective,” explains Behrend. “Our job is to unify marketing on a single martech stack, so our brands complement each other and deliver connected experiences that drive growth.”

Building a content foundation that scales

Previously, each Pethealth brand used its own on-premise content management system (CMS), leading to siloed website and brand experiences across the company. Outdated systems resulted in high technical debt and maintenance costs, and restricted the marketing team’s creativity, flexibility, and agility. Lack of visibility across teams resulted in duplicative work and limited the ability to scale content creation. Additionally, the technical complexity meant the systems needed to be managed by IT, which further slowed time to market for new information and services, as every change needed to go through IT.

Following a review of available CMS options, the martech team selected Adobe Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service. The platform met a variety of the team’s requirements, most notably the ability to host all of the company’s digital properties on the cloud. The cloud-native system eliminates risks associated with on-premises hosting and the size considerations required with managed services. Behrend and team also like that it consolidates costs associated with the CMS, hosting, upgrades, and scaling to meet growing demands.

“The cloud has freed our marketers to focus on their marketing expertise instead of getting pulled into system maintenance or troubleshooting,” says Gopalakrishnan.

Moving to a system that supports both marketers and IT was also a key priority for Pethealth, as this enables teams to collaborate and deliver more consistent, connected customer experiences. Integration with the broader Adobe tech stack, including Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target, sets the company up to focus on personalization going forward.

“Experience Manager Sites gives us a lot of flexibility,” adds Behrend. “We can deploy it as a single stack or enable teams to access the tools they need when they need them. If a user wants to go headless, they can. We also have the means to deliver personalization to customers at scale – a capability we never had before.”

Making content work harder and faster

The 24Petwatch website was the first property to launch on the new CMS, followed by 24Pet. By using a conformed design system, the team can quickly stand up new websites with the styling appropriate for the brand without a net-new investment each time.

Rolling out website updates is also faster. Today, rather than waiting for monthly IT deployments, the martech team works in agile two-week sprints to make sure the site is up to date and delivering results. Content tickets that could take up to two months to move through the IT bottleneck can now be implemented in 10 days, more than 80% faster.

“Experience Manager Sites is a win-win,” says Behrend. “Our marketing teams work twice as fast, and our customers benefit with timelier, more cohesive information through our channels.”

The team is also looking at enabling workflows to encourage wider adoption of the Adobe environment, such as allowing non-technical business users to self-serve by uploading assets, authoring content, and creating new customer experiences. “We want to make it simple for people who need a landing page to use an approved template to quickly input text, add images, and publish,” says Behrend.

Turning insights into unforgettable experiences

Another benefit of selecting Experience Manager is that it is part of an overall suite of solutions that enable the team to go beyond simply operating a website to focusing on delivering exceptional experiences along the customer journey. The company’s digital foundation efforts also extend to gaining insights into customer behavior and personalizing interactions with customers.

Rather than the manual data layer setup that analytics solutions typically require, the team took advantage of the built-in integration between Experience Manager and Analytics. In just a week they built out the requirements and SDI and set up the integration, a process that would typically take two to three months. Using Core Components and a push-button process within the Experience Manager interface, the team easily activated Analytics for page-level and component-level insights.

Marketers use an out-of-the-box dashboard to understand customer behavior so they can optimize and deliver better customer experiences. The team has also integrated Analytics with its Microsoft Power BI dashboard, democratizing access to data and insights and enabling teams to quickly review all data in one place, build reports, and share them with stakeholders.

“Once the native integration between Experience Manager and Analytics is enabled, setup of new pages takes less than 15 minutes. You just go into Experience Manager, turn it on, and Analytics starts picking up the data based on the Experience Manager Core Components. It’s easy to get insights from the visual display all the way to the data ingestion,” says Gopalakrishnan.

With guidance from Adobe Ultimate Support, the martech team integrated Target with Analytics and Experience Manager Sites and is actively optimizing parts of the customer journey. Adoption of Target across the organization would further consolidate and streamline the martech stack and potentially replace a third-party testing solution. It also opens opportunities to go beyond optimization to personalizing experiences for different pet owners.

Focus on continuous improvement

After standing up the new environment, launching the first site and migrating several others, and implementing a holistic rebrand, the martech team shows no signs of slowing down. A top priority is to improve content creation, management, and distribution. This includes adopting an enterprise digital asset management system as a single source of truth, and building workflows around creation, approvals, and ultimately putting content to work for the business across channels.

With a solid foundation in place, the team is confident that they are headed in the right direction. To boost momentum, Pethealth is also using Edge Delivery Services in Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service and document-based authoring. These innovations enable the team to deliver lightning-fast experiences, accelerate development, and democratize content creation – ultimately driving business impact.

Reflecting on the implementation journey so far, Behrend says: “Experience Manager helps us use the sum of our parts to tell a clearer and more compelling story. That is fueling our mission to provide solutions that strengthen the lifelong bond between pets and their owners.”

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