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Petco Animal Supplies is testing to see if including customer-written product reviews in its outbound e-mail will lift sales conversion rates.

In January the company sent e-mails about top-rated products along with customer-written reviews to its more than 1 million addresses. This month Petco plans to do an A/B split test by sending product offers with reviews to half of its e-mail customer base and offers without reviews to the other half.

Though companies such as Amazon.com have featured ratings and reviews for years, Petco may be the first to test whether adding them to outbound e-mailings increases conversions.

“The idea was to leverage customer involvement in the Web site and use it as a marketing tool,” says John Lazarchic, vice president of e-commerce for Petco, San Diego. “Most recent surveys say customers are very interested in what other online shoppers have to say. They trust the voice of other customers more than they trust the retailer or manufacturer.”

Petco toyed with the idea of posting customer reviews on its Web site for several years. It held off because of potential management headaches like having to screen the reviews for inappropriate content such as obscene or inaccurate comments.

Late last year Petco's site began featuring customer ratings and reviews using a recently launched service by outsourcer Bazaarvoice.

Companies using Bazaarvoice can customize the number of product attributes that customers can rate. Petco, for example, asks reviewers to assign products one to five “paws” under the categories “overall,” “pet satisfaction,” “appearance” and “quality.”

Bazaarvoice charges a setup fee plus a monthly service fee — starting at $2,000 a month for companies selling less than $10 million a year. Charges are negotiated based on page views and order volume, Lazarchic says.

Petco's e-mail test is part of an effort to demonstrate that product reviews drive sales conversion rates high enough to justify the service's cost.

It's also an attempt to drive more multichannel shopping because people who shop several channels tend to spend more than those who buy through just one.

For example, a 2004 study of J.C. Penney customers commissioned by Abacus Direct found that triple-channel shoppers — those who bought online, from the catalog and in retail stores — spent an average of $887 a year and dual-channel shoppers from $446 to $608 annually, depending on channel combination. By comparison, Internet-only customers spent $157 a year, retail-only buyers $195 and catalog-only $201.

A significant percentage of Petco's e-mail addresses are collected through its loyalty card program in retail stores. As a result, many of Petco's e-mail subscribers are offline-only buyers.

Lazarchic confirms that Petco's multichannel customers spend far more than those who use just one channel. He adds that Petco's e-mail subscribers who shop solely at retail locations are bigger spenders than retail-only customers who aren't e-mail subs.

“We see value in getting the e-mail into customers' hands and keeping Petco top of mind,” he says.

Petco's multifaceted e-mail program also includes sending online shoppers alerts about sales on products they've already bought.

“Because we're in the consumables business, people buy the same pet products over and over,” Lazarchic says. “If you buy a bag of dog food from us, and that dog food goes on sale in our circular, we'll e-mail you that it's on sale.

“Our circular has 500 or 600 items in it, so I can't e-mail the entire thing. So what we try to do is target [customers] with items we know [they] already buy or items on [their] wish list that are on sale.”

But Petco e-mails featuring product offers that aren't based on customers' past purchases generally don't perform as well, he says.

“Historically, we know that if we just pick top-selling items and e-mail them to people, conversion isn't that great,” Lazarchic says. “It's very hard to target in the pet space. You have to know a lot about that consumer.”

He notes that as a result, when Petco isn't sending e-mails based on customers' purchase history, the company often promotes particular product categories.

However, including customer-written product assessments in e-mailings may do more than boost conversion rates — it could expand the customer-review program's reach.

“People are really emotional about their pets and love to talk about them,” Lazarchic says. “We have a really intensive e-mail marketing program already. We thought it would be great to take some of the comments [from customers who are] having great success with products and get them into the hands of people who don't come to the Web site [often].”

Lazarchic declines to say how well the first batch of e-mails with product reviews performed. But it apparently did well enough that he isn't abandoning the effort.