How Peet's Improved its Mobile Strategy

Peet's Coffee & Tea is a specialty coffee and tea company in the United States. The company was founded in 1966 in Berkeley, Calif., and today it offers superior quality coffees and teas in multiple forms by sourcing the best-quality coffee beans and tea leaves in the world.

Peet’s has experienced tremendous growth and a lot of change as it expands beyond the West Coast to Washington, D.C., Boston, and Chicago. Peet’s viewed growing its store footprint as a big endeavor and a great opportunity to tell its story.

As Peet's focused on brand extension, it wanted to connect all of the channels under its brand: retail (250 stores), grocery (13,000 stores) and e-commerce (peets.com). As Peet’s entered new markets where the premium brand wasn’t well known, the company viewed mobile as a great tool to meet new "Peetniks," what the company affectionately calls its customers. The “Find Peet’s” store locator is an important entry point for consumers, and the company wanted a seamless way for shoppers to use this online tool when they opened an email on their phones.

Peet’s was not only excited about optimizing its e-commerce flow for mobile, but it also wanted to make it easy for Peetniks to manage their account information and subscriptions on mobile devices.

“It quickly became clear how important mobile is for us when we looked at our data: 40 percent of our customers were visiting peets.com on mobile devices," says Paul Johnson, Peet's director of product management. "We had nothing at that time on mobile and needed to create our brand experience.”

What’s unique about Peet’s online model, which extends to mobile, is its focus on freshness and quality of beans. The company prides itself on 24-hour roast-to-order, so if a customer places an order at 11:59 p.m. for Major Dickason’s Blend, it will ship four hours later. It was important to extend that guarantee to mobile users and provide a streamlined experience, because over 50 percent of Peet’s e-commerce business is subscriber-based. Furthermore, Peet's loyal Peetnik subscribers wanted a rich mobile experience to manage their subscriptions, including changing shipping frequency, changing an order to a different bean, and holding a subscription while on vacation.

Peet’s looked at several mobile options, including a combination of responsive and adaptive design, native app, and responsive. The company considered building in-house with mobilized templates, as well as working with an external vendor. The goal was to find a solution that would scale and be flexible as the company continued expanding.

As Peet’s completed its due diligence, the company decided it wanted a partner that would complement its growing mobile team and increase its bandwidth, while providing additional insights and expertise on mobile user experience. Peet's chose Moovweb because of its mobile industry experts, who could break down the platform space and demonstrate the importance of having more than just a standalone technical offering. Understanding the context when communicating with mobile customers is key. Moovweb's platform enables Peet’s to target loyal subscribers and offer geo-specific promos to give Peetniks the customized mobile experience they expect. Moovweb works closely with its customers to understand their goals and help drive overall mobile business success.

Peet’s mobile team has found it very easy to work with Moovweb's platform. The process is streamlined and flexible, allowing Peet’s to make changes to its mobile and tablet sites quickly so they can test offers. Peet’s can work in tandem with Moovweb or independently, depending on the size of the change. Once the changes are in place, Moovweb helps Peet’s to track analytics and present results that are used to make decisions on the next iterations.

“Speed to launch is the biggest selling point of using the Moovweb platform," says Johnson. "We can make changes to our mobile experience quickly, efficiently and cost effectively without burning development and QA cycles. That’s critical when we want to attract new Peetniks with a coffee subscription offer to drive sales during a major holiday period.”

Moovweb helped Peet’s focus on its mobile experience and make it as simple and easy to use as possible. The Moovweb team made recommendations for optimizing the user experience (UX), including improvements to checkout and subscription experiences by implementing proven UX practices. Peet’s mobile team has taken advantage of Moovweb's industry knowledge and make decisions that accelerate its goals of extending and increasing its mobile business.

“Our choice to go with Moovweb paid for itself in one quarter," Johnson notes. "We’ve had exceptional mobile business growth with visits up 34 percent, conversion rate up 93 percent, and revenue up 142 percent. With over 40 percent of our Peetniks on phones and tablets, we rely on the scalable, flexible Moovweb platform to help us deliver a rich mobile experience, so we can focus on expanding to new markets and building our digital business.”

Haresh Kumar is vice president of marketing for Moovweb, a cloud-based mobile platform that delivers experiences optimized for any device.