April 2024 Bonfire Marketer of the Month: Nestlé Purina PetCare US’s Sarah Lands Ramrup

Each month, Braze selects one individual as our Marketer of the Month in order to celebrate the exceptional work being done by members of our Braze Bonfire community. Whether it's providing support for their fellow marketers or going above and beyond by sharing their innovative ideas and strategies, these individuals are making essential contributions to their companies, their users, and the customer engagement space as a whole.

This month, we’re recognizing Sarah Lands Ramrup, Senior Personalization Lead at Nestlé Purina PetCare US. One of the world’s most trusted brands for pet-focused products, Nestlé Purina PetCare US serves up pet food, pet treats, and cat litter for a wide array of different markets and needs. In our conversation, we spoke to Sarah about personalization, cross-channel engagement, and driving ongoing customer loyalty. Let’s dive in.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your career path?

Honestly, my career path has been a varied one, full of unexpected turns—this role included!

I started my career as a data analyst at an electrical distribution company that was going to market with B2C commerce for the very first time. After rotating around the team for a bit and learning different areas of our department, I found my passion in analytics and data. I spent my days analyzing data in Google Analytics, sharing performance on our site from acquisition to conversion on the path to purchase.

Then, after three years, I switched companies to a loyalty and incentive agency; I started in analytics, creating new ways to assess lifetime engagement and lifetime value, and later moved into product management. At first, I was a data product manager, leading our enterprise consumer data strategy and helping to build a data lake as well as productizing AI and predictive models to forecast churn, retention, and lifetime spend for loyalty programs. Later, I led product development for a digital portfolio, which included solutioning the right tech during pre-sales with clients based on their objectives.

I joined Purina back in 2020, working at their Analytics Center of Excellence (CoE), where I blended my background in product and analytics to lead digital product analytics and marketing technology implementation. In 2023, I moved into my current position, which was a brand new role that I’d proposed as part of our engagement strategy, with the goal of having it serve as connective tissue for our personalization efforts as consumers move through our digital ecosystem.

Interesting! What do you focus on in your current position?

My role is focused on figuring out how we can activate personalization and ecosystem use cases to support better experiences and engagement for our consumers. As part of that work, I spent most of 2023 focused on identifying where we could leverage our existing data and technology to support these efforts. We quickly got a few wins on the board, but it was clear early on that our ambitions were too big for the tools we had on hand back then.

In fact, we first started exploring Braze as a technical solution to help fulfill our personalization needs. Now that we have it integrated, I’m leading our personalization efforts with the Braze platform at the core of our activation strategy. My role is focused on intaking and prioritizing relevant use cases across our digital ecosystem and weighing in on how Braze can be used to meet consumer needs and deliver business value.

I also lead implementation, given my technical and analytical background. It’s fun wearing both hats, where sometimes I’m building an architectural diagram and data flows, and other times I’m talking to the business about how a use case can drive value and ladder up to our KPIs.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Well, it used to be coming up with ideas! So many folks at Purina are passionate about pets and we continuously draw on that to find new ways to personalize the pet ownership experience.

Now, though, it’s activating. We have the right data, the right platform, and the right team, and the means we can deliver on our ambitions. Instead of leaving a workshop or a brainstorm with plenty of ideas, we leave with a backlog of actionable opportunities that we can then prioritize for activation. And now we’re translating those into real requirements for execution. When we build an activation and it goes live, well, it’s amazing to see.

What company goals have you focused on and how do you prioritize?

At Purina, we are so focused on driving loyalty and engagement, and we prioritize based on business value and consumer needs.

With such a robust platform, prioritization is critical to our work. We have to navigate demand from so many teams and it’s critical that our personalization tactics deliver business and consumer value. We focus on use cases that directly ladder up to our business KPIs and help to meet key consumer needs; from there, we prioritize based on feasibility, data availability, and sample size.

What is one campaign or initiative you have worked on in your current role that you’re most proud of?

Our first use case, HAPPi, which is a bonding and enrichment program that’s available now in the myPurina app. It’s a proprietary program where you spend 15 minutes every day with your pet to foster a deeper emotional connection, and Braze plays a big role in the orchestration for this product feature.

The way the program works is that there’s a daily activity, and the activities are grouped into themed weeks where each week may have different journeys, where we keep track of the day each user is on and then serve up the next day’s content automatically. It’s a fantastic way of showcasing the power of the Braze platform, which serves as the logic engine for this program. Basically, Braze allowed us to quickly build and launch this feature, while also allowing us to have the data we need to send reminders, push notifications, and in-app messages as users work through the program, which has different user journeys based on whether the user has a dog or a cat.

What initiative or campaign are you most excited to work on this year?

Content Cards on the home screen of myPurina. These components used to be static, but with Braze they’ll now be dynamic and personalized. We’re throwing everything we’ve got into these— different formats, different business rules, lifecycles for each card, and personalization for every pet owner and for each of their pets. It’s going to be an amazing set of activations for us to build out this year.

I can’t help but mention a second one: We’re so excited to leverage Braze in a partnership with our loyalty program, Purina Perks. We’ll be using Braze to ensure that we bring forward the right recommendations, the right promotions, and the right offers, all at the right time for the right pet.

Interested in collaborating to build the future of customer engagement? Join a collective of experts to forge connections, share ideas, and accelerate your career at the Braze Bonfire Community.