From customer to pack: how Butternut Box creates lifelong fans

How does a healthy dog food brand win the hearts of dog owners? By doing the very best for four-legged friends with love and care. Discover in this case how Butternut Box turns every customer into an enthusiastic fan with surprising cards and a unique, personal approach that makes them feel part of their pack.

Dennis Koster

Marketer

Read on

Fans
for life
Happy dog
happy owner
0 min.
work a week

About Butternut Box

Butternut Box produces fresh dog food. High-quality ingredients, slowly cooked and quickly frozen to preserve all vitamins and minerals. Customized to your dog's needs and delivered to your home in perfect portions. Originally a British company, it has long since passed the puppy phase. The fresh dog food brand is active under different labels in the Netherlands and several countries in Europe. Their personalized and data-driven approach not only leads to spectacular growth of the pack but also a large group of loyal customers.

Industry

Online sales of fresh, personalized dog food.

Number of employees

830

Software & integrations

Snowflake

API integration with Print.one

Campaign overview

Butternut Box sends new customers a physical card with a photo of their dog to welcome them to the Butternut pack.

The process is fully automated. When a customer uploads a photo of their dog, it is transferred from Snowflake via an API to Print.one, and the card is automatically sent to the new customer in the countries where Butternut Box operates.

Customer retention is crucial for subscription models

How do you make your service more personal as an e-commerce business when you don’t meet your customers in person? And what tools do you have to ensure those customers stay with you for as long as possible? This is the challenge faced by Butternut Box with their flexible subscription model for dog food.

“We see dogs as an integral part of the family. People place a lot of value on that,” begins Frits Frederiks, Operations Manager at Butternut Box Benelux. With purchases happening online and deliveries outsourced to an external partner, customer touchpoints with Butternut Box are limited. Creating strong customer loyalty requires a personal approach. By adding a physical welcome card to the customer journey, we create an additional touchpoint, emphasizing that everything revolves around the customer’s wagging friend. In fact, it doesn’t get more personal than that.”

A scalable system for international expansion

The success of the welcome card concept was initially tested and proven in the UK. Frits was responsible for setting up the project in the Netherlands. “Foppe (CEO of Print.one) tackled the implementation together with me. Not only does he have a dog himself and is a customer, but he also genuinely wanted to make this work,” Frits explains.

“When there were some issues with the API connection during implementation, it was resolved by having a developer from our team collaborate with one from your team for just 15 minutes. We fixed everything quickly, and it worked seamlessly. That kind of cooperation is just great and feels very personal.”

The initiative didn’t stop with the UK and the Netherlands. “What I find incredibly exciting is that cards are now also being sent to other European countries via Print.one,” Frits shares enthusiastically. What’s next? Frits responds with a mysterious smile, but it’s clear that Butternut Box’s international expansion is far from over.

What I really love are the enthusiastic responses we get from our customers.