Bringing Personalization to the Pet, Drug and Liquor Industries

Birdzi was founded with the vision to make the customer experience “Smart, Personal and Seamless” for the shopper, while equipping retailers and brands to connect with shoppers seamlessly and intelligently at the right time and place.

With this ethos, Birdzi has been fortunate to form many long-lasting relationships and partnerships within the grocery industry. Our valued partners rely on us to deliver the tools and technology necessary to provide true 1:1 levels of personalization to their loyal shoppers.

The grocery industry has always been a perfect fit for this level of customer engagement. For grocers at both the local and regional level, generating unique, individual savings on the food items customers most frequently buy has been a winning formula for building loyalty and remaining competitive with the largest retailers.

But this approach doesn’t have to be grocery’s secret. 

Crafting unique customer experiences is a winning formula beyond grocery as well. Let’s discuss ways that personalization can also make a big difference across pet, drug store and liquor markets.

Pet Personalization Matters for Pet Stores

The U.S. pet retail market is dominated by PetSmart and PETCO, which combined accounted for nearly 40% of the total market revenue last year. Additionally, online pet retail is largely concentrated among retail giants like Amazon, Walmart and Chewy.

Despite this, regional and local pet stores are still hanging on, with many surviving due to the strong ties they’ve formed with local communities. Using personalization, pet retailers can maintain and strengthen customer loyalty within this concentrated market.

In many households, pets are viewed as extensions of the family. It’s only right that pets are afforded the same personal approach and care as humans. Luckily, pet stores can learn from their shoppers purchasing habits to best serve them impactful savings and exceptional customer experiences.

Say one canine-loving family has three dogs. While the two youngest dogs are healthy and rapidly go through bags of dog food, the oldest dog has a medical condition, requiring her to eat a specific brand of food on a reduced schedule. Let’s see how personalization can improve the customer and retail experience:

• First, a retailer can learn from this family’s shopping behavior to deliver tailored coupons and offers on the two different brands of dog food they buy.
• Second, a retailer can identify the frequency at which the family buys each type of dog food. Then, they can send personalized offers right when it’s time to restock.

By effectively benefiting from personalization technology, pet owners will feel like the retailer is fine-tuned to both their needs and their pets’ needs. This fosters the long-term loyalty that is necessary to compete with the largest players in the pet industry.

Capturing Customer Segments in the Drug Store Market

In the same way that people have individual tastes and preferences for the food they buy, people also have their favorite brands of skincare products, household items and over-the-counter medicines.

Drug stores have long made use of loyalty programs, but many of the benefits are static and restricted to discounts on set items in the store. Instead, drug stores can learn from their customer data and build individual shopper profiles that incorporate people’s brand preferences across all items of the store.

If one shopper, Mia, prefers to buy cheaper, generic brand over-the-counter medication, the drug store can offer her savings on their generic-branded products. But if another shopper, Chris, only buys name-brand medicine, the retailer can send him different offers for the name-brand medicines he commonly buys. Importantly, this allows drug stores to foster loyalty with both customer segments.

Crafting Liquor Store Experiences as Unique as a Genuine Mixologist

When discussing personalization in the liquor market, we don’t mean engraved bottles or custom labels. True shopper personalization can revolutionize the industry.

To create this level of personalization, liquor stores can find inspiration from the best grocery loyalty apps and build branded in-app experiences that really inspire shoppers. 

For example, shoppers can utilize apps as a go-to sources of product information, shelf location, serving suggestions and even food pairings. 

Add personalized offers and savings on top, and customers will be blown away by the amount of use they can get out of a liquor store’s loyalty app. Experiences like these can only be made possible with advanced customer insights and intelligence.

Catapulting to New Heights With Birdzi

Birdzi’s grocery clients, including Tops Friendly Markets, Coborn’s and Strack & Van Til have been able to revolutionize their customer engagement leveraging the strategies we discussed today. 

It’s long past time for retailers in other industries to catch on to the secret. Birdzi is ready and able to equip brands to realize the benefits of a fresh, bold approach to customer loyalty.

To learn more about how Birdzi empowers pet, drug and liquor stores to succeed in the digital age and thrive in today’s competitive markets, review our platform or reach out to us today.