Poppy’s Picnic cares most about making it simple for customers to feed their pets raw, healthy food, every package stamped with the face of an adorable schnauzer, their Chief Executive Dog, Poppy.
She and co-founder Dylan Watkins, were featured on the hit BBC show Dragons’ Den in 2018 (think Shark Tank in the US), two years after they founded their dog food company, and walked with offers from four investors.
Since then, Poppy’s Picnic has packaged and delivered dog and cat food across the UK from their Melksham, England, homebase, and doing their most successful marketing campaigns with the help of Intuit Mailchimp.
After growing frustrated with Klaviyo’s user interface and searching for a platform that could provide better automation features and operate as a CRM, founder Dylan Watkins made the decision to switch to Mailchimp.
Instead of needing additional third-party software to manage his campaign needs, Poppy’s Picnic was up and running on Mailchimp within a matter of hours.
“I thought, God, this can't—is it really simplifying it this much?” Dylan says. “It made it seamless. It made it all work very, very well.
“For Klaviyo, we had to get somebody in to help us do the import, do all the forms, the different emails, the different trails and everything. We spent…probably a couple of thousand dollars in total,” Dylan says. “But Mailchimp was easy…I thought we'd made a mistake, because the forms all worked, the email templates worked, the flows worked, the abandoned carts.”
The challenge: Making business decisions with confidence using reliable data
Before using Mailchimp, Poppy’s Picnic struggled to understand where many of their sales originated from. Dylan says when using Klaviyo, his campaigns performed well on the surface, but when he dug deeper into the data he realized some sales attributions were being claimed by campaigns based on older cookies. This made it impossible to make confident business decisions when he was unclear what messaging or touchpoint drove the customer to convert.
Dylan recognized that it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the exact place a customer journey begins, but he didn’t believe he was getting reliable data from his former email service provider. That changed when Poppy’s Picnic started using Mailchimp.
“On some of these things, it's quite hard to distinguish where the journey started, but on Mailchimp, I do find it much, much clearer and more honest in its outlook,” Dylan says. “We're not getting these silly figures of thousands of dollars for a certain campaign, because we just know it's not possible. So, it's much more honest reporting.”