Italy
location
1965
founded
1000+
employees
Proactive Campaigns
- Standardize customer communication across 50+ countries;
- Automate customer follow-ups throughout the lifecycle;
- Track email performance and conversions inside Zendesk.
We tried a lot of these email senders, but no one is as user-friendly as Proactive Campaigns, and no one is as well integrated with Zendesk.
We use GrowthDot inside Zendesk more than Zendesk itself.
How Farmina uses Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk
Farmina Pet Foods, a global pet food company operating in more than 50 countries, uses Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk to automate customer communication and manage email campaigns from a single platform.
The company implemented the app to:
- Automate welcome emails for new customers
- Send follow-up campaigns related to nutrition plans and recommendations
- Standardize customer communication across 50+ countries
- Build email templates without HTML knowledge
- Track email opens, clicks, replies, and conversions
- Compare campaign performance across different markets
Before Proactive Campaigns, different teams managed customer emails differently in each market, resulting in inconsistent communication and manual work. Today, Farmina manages automated customer journeys and email campaigns directly within Zendesk while maintaining visibility into engagement and conversions.
In this interview, the team shares why they chose Proactive Campaigns, how they use automation to engage customers throughout the pet nutrition journey, and how email tracking helps them measure performance across countries.
Could you tell more about your company and your role in it?
Our main business is an industry that makes pet food. This is the core of the company. And we decided to enter this digital world with Zendesk to get in touch with our customers more closely and more effectively.
So after we implemented Zendesk, we noticed that we needed some tool to manage these close communications via email. Basically, we have a lot of campaigns, and the idea was to put all these campaigns inside Zendesk, and to include all the countries we operate in — now more than 50 countries — inside Zendesk. So basically, we needed to standardize all communications and have everything in just one location.
When we found GrowthDot's Proactive Campaigns, we saw the possibility to create these campaigns and automations. So we have a lot of step-by-step follow-ups with our customers. It’s important to send emails in specific periods to these customers — to check if the pet is okay, to see if the customer uses the voucher before it expires, and so on.
So our main communication tool is now GrowthDot for all these customers, and we can see all reports, conversions, and so on.
What was the main problem before using our application — communication or combining everything in one place?
The worst thing is that each country had its own tool to send these communications, and we didn’t have standard templates for each country. So maybe the US was sending one kind of email, Italy another one, and some countries didn’t have any kind of email at all.
Now we have just one tool to standardize everything and send all these emails via Zendesk. We have a register of everything, we can see the conversion for each country, and we can compare them.
How did you manage this before you found Proactive Campaigns? Do you remember how it was?
We don’t have any tool for that. It was manual work. Each one creates their own template and sends it if they remember on the date, or sometimes just forget to send an email. So we didn’t really have this kind of communication before.
That sounds like a lot of work, right?
Yeah, it was manual work, and we had a lot of people doing this in every single country. Now we have just one team in one country that manages all the templates, manages the communications, and sets the correct data and the correct days to send these campaigns.
Why did you decide to choose Proactive Campaigns? What was the main reason?
I searched in the Zendesk Marketplace for tools. We tried Klaviyo, we tried Mailchimp, and a lot of these email senders, but no one is as user-friendly as Proactive Campaigns, and no one is as well integrated with Zendesk.
So for Zendesk, we just found this GrowthDot solution (Proactive Campaigns), and it works very well. In the beginning, we had some troubles, but now it works very well.
Was there any specific feature that caught your attention at the beginning?
Maybe the template builder is a very good tool because we have some issues with guys at Farmina who don’t know HTML. So the template builder helps a lot. And these automations help a lot because previously we had to send these emails manually.
So basically, these two features are the most used features that we have today.
Could you share a use case — why, when, and how do you send email campaigns to your customers?
Yeah, so we have now, I think, the welcome templates that we send every time a new customer comes to Farmina. So we have an automation that sends this email.
We also have the recommendation follow-up and the plan created and not confirmed. So basically, when the customer receives some recommendation for a brand or any store, we follow up with this customer until he buys the food. And after he buys, we follow up after 10 days, 15 days to see if the pet is eating right and if everything is going well with the nutritional plan that is created.
These three main campaigns that we have are automations we use most. We also use them to track everything, like if we have some specific pets or specific breed.
And now we are creating every single follow-up that’s necessary for our business.
Does the app help you track performance, and how?
Yeah, we insert the tracking link in all emails, so we can see when the customer clicks. We also see when the customer opens and when the customer replies to the email campaign.
So we see an increase — like in Italy we have around 30% conversion for this kind of mail. So when we send a mail reminding the customer that they created a plan, we need them to confirm it and start receiving and purchasing the plan.
Now it’s around 25 to 30% conversion, and we can see it via some Zendesk custom fields.
Using the tracking link is very important, and now we can understand the conversion for each country.
How does conversion data help you? Do you use it to understand customer engagement or improve campaigns?
We send this email, and after it is opened or clicked, we have consultants who are prepared to check what’s going on with these customers and start manual tracking of them.
You’ve been in touch with our support quite a lot, so how has your experience been?
Yeah, for sure. The support works, there’s no doubt about that. We have a lot of requests, and I understand that some of the requests need very large development on your side, but it works every time.
And when we have some more issues, more problematic issues, you are ready to answer us and promptly reply to our demands, and it works very well.
In the beginning, we had some struggle, but now it works very well. I think you understand our needs now — it’s a large company, a lot of customers, a lot of customizations. So now I think GrowthDot understands how we need GrowthDot to be a part of our core business right now inside Zendesk.
Zendesk is our main tool, and GrowthDot is our secondary tool, but we use GrowthDot inside Zendesk more than Zendesk itself.
Results
By implementing Proactive Campaigns for Zendesk, Farmina transformed its customer communication process from a manual, country-specific approach into a centralized and automated system.
Key results include:
- Standardized email communication across more than 50 countries
- Centralized campaign management within Zendesk
- Reduced manual work by replacing manual email sending with automated workflows
- Consistent customer follow-ups throughout the pet nutrition journey
- Visibility into email opens, clicks, replies, and conversions
- The ability to compare campaign performance across countries
- Conversion rates of approximately 25–30% for some nutrition plan reminder campaigns
- Improved collaboration through a single team managing templates and communications globally
Today, GrowthDot's Proactive Campaigns app plays an important role in Farmina's customer communication strategy, helping the team engage customers more effectively while maintaining consistency across global markets.
FAQs
Farmina chose Proactive Campaigns because it is highly integrated with Zendesk and more user-friendly than other email tools on the market.
The team uses tracking links to monitor opens, clicks, and replies. They also track conversions and use Zendesk data to compare campaign performance across different countries.
