A pet-care retailer's move to Bloomreach — personal, multi-channel, and GDPR-safe by design.
A global animal-health group runs its direct-to-consumer stores on Shopify. We replatformed the engagement layer from HubSpot to Bloomreach and built a privacy-first personalization engine — subscription pop-ups to post-purchase, across email, SMS, MMS, and consent-based Meta and Google audiences.
Personalization and privacy are usually framed as a trade-off: the more you tailor, the more data you hold, the more exposure you carry. Done right, they're the opposite — a program built on clean, consented data is both more personal and more defensible.
Here is how we moved one of the world's largest animal-health and pet-wellbeing groups off HubSpot and onto Bloomreach, wired to their Shopify stores, and built a personalization engine that reaches people across email, SMS, MMS, and paid audiences — with GDPR and anonymization designed in from the first event, not bolted on at the end.
Outgrew the tool, not the ambition
The client is one of the world's largest animal-health and pet-wellbeing groups — best known for clinically-backed calming and skin-care products for cats and dogs — which recently launched a direct-to-consumer ecommerce arm on Shopify, operating across several markets in the US, the UK, and Europe.
HubSpot had served the early days, but it wasn't built for commerce at this depth. The team wanted three things it couldn't get cleanly: genuine personalization driven by catalog and behavior; multi-channel reach beyond email; and — operating across European markets — airtight GDPR compliance, with consent and anonymization handled properly rather than hoped for. So they chose Bloomreach, and asked us to make the move and build the engine.
More personal and more private — not one at the cost of the other.
Clean data first, then personalization on top
We're a senior CRM collective, and we run a migration in a deliberate order: get the data foundation right — including consent and anonymization — before building anything on it, so every downstream layer is personal and compliant by default. We get the most out of the platform the client chose (Bloomreach on Shopify) and coach the team to run it after we step back.
The engine came together in four parts: the foundation (data, events, and privacy by design), the on-site layer (weblayers and subscription pop-ups), the personalized lifecycle (activation and post-purchase), and multi-channel orchestration across owned and paid channels.
Data, events, and privacy by design
A personalization engine is only as good — and as safe — as the data model beneath it. We rebuilt the architecture in Bloomreach around real-time commerce events from Shopify, with a clean identity model, and made consent and anonymization first-class parts of that model, not an afterthought. Then we migrated off HubSpot in a controlled cutover, with no gap in sending and no lost history.
Commerce data model
Customers, orders, and catalog rebuilt to power personalization — designed to answer "what's relevant to this person?", not just "what did they buy?"
Event management
Shopify behavior — views, carts, purchases, stock changes — tracked as real-time signals every scenario and channel can act on.
Consent & anonymization
Per-channel consent captured at the source; personal data pseudonymized in the model, so analytics and testing run on anonymized profiles.
A zero-gap cutover. We migrated off HubSpot without a pause in sends or a loss of subscriber history — and coached the client's team to own the new data and consent layer.
GDPR compliance you can point to
Operating across European markets, compliance couldn't be a policy document — it had to be wired into the system. We built the program so that consent governs everything downstream: what's collected, how it's used, which channels a person is reached on, and whether they ever enter a paid audience at all.
Consent and anonymization built into the data layer — enforced everywhere it flows.
Why it matters: when consent is enforced in the data layer, personalization and paid reach get safer as they scale — not riskier. Compliance stops being the brake and becomes part of the foundation.
Weblayers and subscription pop-ups that convert consent
Personalization starts before the first email. Using Bloomreach weblayers on the Shopify stores, we personalized the storefront itself — recommendations tuned to browsing and purchase history, dynamic content that reacts to what a shopper cares about, and a back-in-stock capture that turns an out-of-stock dead end into a first-party signal.
The entry point is a subscription pop-up designed to earn opt-in, not nag for it: shown with intent, worth the exchange, and — critically — capturing explicit, per-channel consent at the moment someone joins. Every downstream channel inherits that permission cleanly.
Activation and post-purchase, made personal
Two moments decide whether a store grows: turning interested prospects into first-time buyers, and turning first-time buyers into repeat ones. We built both as deeply personalized journeys — driven by the individual's behavior and pet, not a blanket message — alongside the everyday scenarios that carry the rest.
Activation and post-purchase lead; each journey built once and personalized per shopper.
Personal, not generic: the activation and post-purchase tracks pull from each shopper's own behavior and pet profile, so the content is chosen for them — which is exactly why they outperform a one-size-fits-all send.
Beyond email — owned and paid, from one hub
Email was never going to be enough. We made Bloomreach the hub of a multi-channel program: owned messaging across email, SMS, and MMS; paid reach through consent-based retargeting audiences synced to Meta and Google; and inbound capture that tracks Instagram lead ads straight into Bloomreach — so a prospect who raises their hand on social lands in the same personalized journey as everyone else, on the channels they've agreed to.
Inbound leads and outbound reach, orchestrated from Bloomreach.
The point: one profile, many channels, one consent record. A person is reached only where they've opted in, and paid audiences are built from the same consented data — so reach grows without the compliance risk that usually comes with it.
More personal, more channels — and clean on consent
The migration was invisible to customers, as it should be. What changed underneath is a program that personalizes the moments that matter, reaches people wherever they've opted in, and does it all on a consented, anonymized foundation.
Read this honestly. The defensible outcomes are the clean migration, the multi-channel reach, and the consent-and-anonymization framework — the mechanics we built and can attribute. Revenue-side gains (repeat rate, activation) build over time and vary by market and season, so we scope them to the programs they came from and treat the engine and its compliance as the headline.
A personalization engine the client can trust — and run
- Foundation & privacy — a commerce data model with consent and anonymization built in, migrated off HubSpot with zero sending downtime.
- On-site — weblayers and a consent-first subscription pop-up personalize the storefront and earn clean, per-channel opt-in.
- Lifecycle — deeply personalized prospect-activation and post-purchase journeys, alongside welcome, cart, and back-in-stock.
- Multi-channel — email, SMS, and MMS, plus consent-based Meta and Google audiences and Instagram lead tracking — all orchestrated from Bloomreach.
- Compliant by design — GDPR and anonymization enforced in the data layer, so personalization and paid reach scale safely.
Kept honest: the strongest, most defensible outcomes are the clean cutover, the multi-channel orchestration, and the consent framework — the parts we built and can point to directly. Revenue from the new journeys compounds over time and varies by market and season, so we scope it to the programs, not to a single seasonal figure.
If you want personal and multi-channel — without the compliance risk
You've outgrown HubSpot for commerce
It got you started, but catalog- and behavior-driven personalization is a fight. You need a commerce-first platform, moved to without downtime.
Email isn't enough anymore
You want SMS, MMS, and paid retargeting working together — from one profile, not four disconnected tools.
GDPR keeps you up at night
You're personalizing across markets and need consent and anonymization enforced in the system, not promised in a policy.
Personal, multi-channel, and safe
If you want deeper personalization and more channels without the compliance headache, book a 20-minute look and we'll show you how it fits together.
Book a 20-minute look