For PetLab, cutting-edge technology is a priority. To differentiate themselves from other direct-to-consumer brands, PetLab focuses on providing the fastest, most optimized user experience for their site visitors and customers. Fast load times, smooth collaboration between various teams, and technology that can stand up to their standards of innovation are all crucial to achieving these goals.
Challenge
Increase content experimentation velocity without decreasing performance or developer experience
“Moving non-technical work away from engineers saves costs and gives autonomy to our growth, advertising, and marketing teams.”
The PetLab team initially went headless to gain full control over the user experience and experiment more with the web experience. But, as they grew, they found that their headless CMS was limiting their pace of experimentation because business teams still needed to frequently rely on engineers for major and minor changes to the site.
PetLab needed a content management solution that was flexible, easy to use, and highly configurable to increase control over the customer experience, expand the capabilities of non-technical team members, and reduce developer backlog.
Solution
Give business teams autonomy to ship content and experiments with Builder.io's visual headless CMS
“The most important thing is that it allows [our experimenters] to iterate faster. I think that's the key that injected extra fuel into our experimentation team.”
After investigating the headless CMS market and scoping an in-house solution, they found that Builder addressed their specific needs and could grow with them as they scaled. After implementation PetLab:
- Increased conversion rates and reduced churn. Using a combination of Builder's visual headless CMS and static site generation technologies, PetLab reduced page load times and empowered their growth, advertising, and marketing team to personalize the web experience and experiment more quickly. For example, the growth and marketing teams were able to visually design several A/B tests to optimize the customer experience for churning users. Despite having a dedicated split-testing platform, PetLab now uses Builder's A/B testing functionality because it doesn't affect their site's performance.
- Gave growth, advertising, and marketing teams autonomy to experiment. With Builder, growth, advertising, and marketing teams can visually create, edit, test, iterate, and optimize site content and conversion opportunities without having to log a developer ticket. "We are excessive experimenters," says Dommett. "We're running multiple split tests a day. The only way to do that at scale is to use an effective CMS where non-technical people can try things and experiment without increasing our engineering costs." Builder also gives PetLab control over access and customizations to lock down critical technical components, so non-technical teams can experiment without hassle to quickly build complex, rich experiences they could not create with their prior headless CMS.
- Saved engineers hundreds of hours. With Builder's visual headless CMS, PetLab moved hundreds of hours of non-technical work from engineering so the growth and marketing teams could execute autonomously. If there is a problem, the team isn't blocked for long, according to Dommett, "Now, when there is a problem, it isn't, 'oh, submit a ticket to the platform and hope they'll get to it in the next 6 months'. We can solve the problem ourselves." To further increase efficiencies, PetLab engineers have extended the platform to meet their specific needs by building a custom Builder plugin.
