This week’s guest is Sue Cho, the Director of CRM at Outside Inc, the premier destination for active lifestyle enthusiasts and home to leading brands in the endurance sports, outdoor, and healthy living spaces.
Guided by her mantra “Think creatively, proceed analytically”, Sue has been doing retention, email and engagement marketing for 14 years, focusing on e-commerce and subscription services.
People say Sue went from EDM to CRM, as she was an electronic dance music singer in the early 2000s. Based in a ski resort town in the Eastern Sierra, just 45 minutes outside of Yosemite, Sue is dedicated to digital, going so far as to have an email tattoo!
In this episode, Daryn and Sue chat about the challenges of working with large databases, her experiences with email marketing mistakes and how to respond to them, how people often misperceive email marketers as spammers, the changing landscape of email marketing due to Apple and Gmail's continuous updates.
It’s Sue Cho!
Follow Daryn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darynsmith
This week’s guest is Sue Cho, the Director of CRM at Outside Inc, the premier destination for active lifestyle enthusiasts and home to leading brands in the endurance sports, outdoor, and healthy living spaces.
Guided by her mantra “Think creatively, proceed analytically”, Sue has been doing retention, email and engagement marketing for 14 years, focusing on e-commerce and subscription services.
People say Sue went from EDM to CRM, as she was an electronic dance music singer in the early 2000s. Based in a ski resort town in the Eastern Sierra, just 45 minutes outside of Yosemite, Sue is dedicated to digital, going so far as to have an email tattoo!
In this episode, Daryn and Sue chat about the challenges of working with large databases, her experiences with email marketing mistakes and how to respond to them, how people often misperceive email marketers as spammers, the changing landscape of email marketing due to Apple and Gmail's continuous updates.
It’s Sue Cho!
Follow Daryn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darynsmith
So we're going to have to get smarter about segmentation, implementing re engagement campaigns. Things like that. I find it exciting because open rates and click rates are like vanity metrics. And what you really want is the end result. This episode is all about email marketing. You're listening to Digital Surfing. My name's Darren Smith and we have our guest today, Sue Cho, guided by her mantra, thinking creatively, proceed analytically. Sue has been doing retention email engagement marketing for 14 years, focusing on e commerce and subscription services. And she's currently the director of CRM at Outside Inc. People say Sue went from EDM to CRM, as she used to be an EDM singer in the early 2000s. Based in a ski resort town in the Eastern Sierra, just 45 minutes outside of Yosemite, Sue is dedicated to digital, going so far as to have an email tattoo. And really, we dig into email today in great depth, and we talk about mistakes that get made, things that work, things that don't, the people's perceptions of email, and what the future of email marketing is. Welcome to the show, Sue. Thank you so much, Darren. Happy to be here. Today's episode is going to have quite a big focus on email and CRM. So my first question is to get into this field. Are you a. Marketer, a designer, a programmer, a writer, what did you study that led you to this field? I actually studied business economics. All I knew as a young university student was that I wanted to be in business and play with the big boys. That was actually a goal, a visual goal of mine. And to make money, make money for myself, for the business. Those are my two goals. I never, ever thought that email marketing would capture my heart and be the love of my career. So I studied business. I studied economics. It was a lot of mathematics and calculus. But it was my undergrad. So email, I was hired as an email coordinator, email operations coordinator as my first email job, because when I graduated university, The economy was tanking. Everyone was getting laid off. It was thousand nine ish. And I wanted to have a leg up and have experience in business. So I worked full time through school. And when I got out, I was just desperately looking for anyone who would hire an entry level recent graduate. So I got this entry level coordinator position and because it was. And operations coordinator, it really forced me to dive into all the technical things quickly on. So I was the one pulling the templates together. You know, we had very few design resources, this is going to age me a little bit, but I learned the coding that I know how to do from my space where we have freedom to change our background color and have image sources and insert music. That's literally where I learned the basis of coding and it translated very well into email marketing. Where it's not one to one, but I could understand like, okay, the image source is here. What happens if I change this code background? Okay, that's what happens. And I kind of built it up from there. Yeah, so to your original question, am I a designer? Am I a developer? I'm a little bit of everything, right? Like I have to be technical because I have to understand code. And also SQL to work with data folks. I have to design, I have to understand best practices and email design, and it's very specific and it's not. Quite up to the standards that graphic designers want it to be. So there's a compromise there. I also have to be good with data analytics, you know, pulling data doing the calculations, doing the reports and making analyses and conclusions out of them. So it's a little bit of everything. And that is. One of the main reasons I love what I do. And now you've progressed to outside or joined outside recently. A bit of background of your role there and for those that don't know what exactly is outside. Yeah, outside. Outside started off as the outside print magazine and now are an umbrella of brands. It's outside Inc. So within outside, we have so many famous publications like Backpacker Magazine, Climbing Magazine. We also have some mapping app products that you guys might be familiar with Gaia GPS or trail forks for the mountain folks. I believe we have about. 20 to 30 brands under our umbrella. Yeah. So our goal is to get people outside. We have media publications on print a little bit still but also online and we have digital subscriptions where you can have an O plus outside plus digital account with access to all of our written content, our visual content, our gear guides. Following big events like Tour de France we sponsor things like that. Yeah, so now I'm working at Outside, which is an absolute dream because... I told you before the interview Darren, but I live in the Eastern Sierra mountains in a ski resort and the outdoors is my passion. And tech isn't necessarily thriving in the outdoors. But I found outside, right? I found outside and I found my place there and they were looking for a director of CRM marketing and. I was floored when I saw the job description, like, really, they're looking for someone who has my experience in the outdoor industry. This couldn't be a better fit. So you're in digital, you love the outdoors, you out there, hiking, running all types of outdoor activity and bumping into people all the time, and then they must say Sue what do you do? And then. I can only assume that they then go, so are you a spammer? Actually, the first thing people ask me when I work, when I say I work for outside is, Oh, are you a content writer? I'm like, Oh no, I'm not that cool. Those people are pretty rad and into their vertical. But yeah, that's the response I get when I say, no, I do email marketing. Like, Oh, you're just a spammer. That's where my Sally girl attitude comes up. My finger comes up, my head starts shaking. I am not a spammer. Okay. I am an anti spammer. My job is to market things that you actually want in your inbox and help you along the journey of our product. That is my job. Oh, I love that. Yeah. I was going to ask you, how do you respond? But you just gave me the answer exactly how you respond to those types. So it sounds like outside is absolutely gigantic. And a ton of subscribers what size databases are you working with? Is it like thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? Like how complex is that set up? Millions. millions under like 20 some different business unit verticals. So as a CRM person that does email, imagine trying to normalize the data for all of these companies that have been acquired at all different times coming in from all different systems with different schemas. It's been as my manager, PJ said, it's like, Taking a bunch of necklaces that have been tangled together and we're trying to one by one. I, and I think that is the perfect depiction of what we're trying to do here. So how do you even start like an approach that data mess? Like there must be subscribers from kind of one. Type of publication that's also a member of the like, you mentioned Tour de France as an example, like some have an O plus, some don't, some have a, an email address before they got married and some like after, and that's I think, like where do you even start with that? We're in the middle of that. Darren, and it's not easy. I'll tell you that. And it takes a lot of coordination between our team, the product team, the DevOps team and the data team, right? Because we all need to, and actually the brand managers between with all of the brand verticals. We all need to have a consensus of how we look at subscribers and cross subscribers. We're working on that. So how do we approach it? I always like to look at Marketing as like a rocket ship, right? Like the whole cliche of launching the rocket ship, but in order to launch a rocket ship, you need to start with a good foundation. And I believe that is always the foundation that you need to have before you launch. So that's what we're doing is let's build that foundation. What is the schema? Like, how do we define someone that's that received O plus for free? Because they're a Gaia member versus someone who paid for O plus and got Gaia because of that. There's all these little nuances. We are still working it out. We're getting closer and closer. But we've had to do things like You know, one of the brands came in and their subscription data schema didn't quite fit with the ones that we already built. So we had to normal or in the process of normalizing that data, translating it into the schema that we have and building a centralized system. So we're in, that's a work in progress because right now still we have a lot of different data sources feeding all these different programs. So let's just centralize it together have the one source of truth that'll then take out the data to the necessary places. And you can't stop marketing for one of these brands while the data gets fixed, right? So you just got to carry on working with what you've got or how's your approach to that? Yeah, what I've learned through my years is every company that I go into say, think that their data is a mess, more of a mess than other companies. What I have found is that it's not true. Even the largest companies have data problems, even compiling the simplest data. And. The bigger your user base, the harder it is to get your data in line, especially if you're selling things on the Apple or the Google play stores, right? Because they own the purchase data and you have to now grab millions of users data in real time. And this is something I learned in my previous position at Calm because we didn't have subscription data. I didn't know if someone was paid, if someone was not. And I mean, as a lifecycle CRM email person, that is detrimental to what I do. And she gave me the greatest piece of advice. Well, not all of the data is wrong, right? We have some data that we know that's true, such as session data. It was funny to me that we couldn't tell if someone was paid or not or renewed or not, but we did know if they completed a sleep story last night with Matthew McConaughey as their author. So you're right. Let's start there. While I simultaneously attempt to fix the data. And we actually came up with some really cool programs with that because you're talking to people that are already engaging with your product and they want patients. So. One of the examples of the emails that we created from that was looking at data and amplitude. I realized the number one activity people did was something called the daily calm. It was our stickiest product in the app. And the daily calm is called daily calm because it changes every day, the theme changes. So. I realized that there was no place for users to see the upcoming themes. There was no calendar. And I realized people want to schedule out their day, like, Hey, I want to meditate this morning, or I'm going to have more time next week. So I worked with the content team to come up with a calendar and a little snippet of what the theme is going to be that email. Was the email that people got pissed if they didn't get it. So when we were like, testing it like one week and not sending it another week, people would get furious and be like, where's my daily calm schedule? Although I really wanted to make an impact on conversions and revenue when I first began at calm, I had to work with the data I got and it was fun. I never built an email program where people were upset where they didn't get it. All right. I'm going to put in calm. I want to go back there in just a second. Cause there's other successes you've had there. But just to end off this topic, do you have to put in manual intervention. I'm like there's obviously email bounces, people that have auto replies and say, my email addresses has changed, does your efforts go into that level of like manual, maybe not, obviously not yourself doing these recons, but Do you have to do that type of stuff or is that kind of noise and you just focus on that kind of the what you can scale from like using AI or purchase databases with correct emails and that type of thing? Like what level of granularity do you have to go into? Darren, it's everything I have to a mountain. I have to look at every single pebble to the entire trail to the peak. It's a fine balance and our CRM team is small here at outside. It's me and my one team member, Steve who does a lot of the operational building and scheduling. But it's a lean and small team. So, yeah, actually, it's funny that you brought up bounces because one of our brands is having deliverability issues and we noticed that because they're having declining open rates and declining open rates is probably the number one indicator that you're having in boxing issues and you're going into the spam folder instead. So with them, we're actually looking at. Are we actually excluding bounces? How many bounces are we getting? What's the health of our list? I am having to do that recon right now with that one brand and it looks like we're going to have to do that across the board. So, yeah, while I was working on like conversion flows and how to get subscription data, there's this other problem that sparked up and now I have to get very micro and granular into it. So I do have to go from big to small, and I think that keeps it fun really, but I have to always check like, Hey, what's the big picture? What's the goal that I'm trying to work toward while I accomplish these little tasks? Cool. All right. Well, as I said, I wanted to put in a calm because you have a great success story there that that you had mentioned around a promo that you ran. Let us know a little bit about that. Yeah, I think this was the highlight of my career cause I don't think I've ever had as much. business impact as I have here. And now I know what I'm capable of. So that's pretty cool to have that in my back pocket. But when I first started at Calm, they didn't have a Black Friday or a Cyber Monday promo strategy. And my background comes from subscription e commerce. So to not monetize and capitalize on Cyber Monday, Black Friday, that was a huge mess. And so we needed to come up with a promo. We have, we actually had a certain dollar amount that we wanted to hit as a whole. And so we got the marketing and the growth and the product teams together in a room and said, Hey, we have. X amount of money extra that we want to hit by the end of November. They're telling us this at the beginning of November, startups, right? And we're like, okay, well, product can't do much. We can't do any app store releases. Growth can only do so much because things were really volatile with paid then, and all eyes came to life cycle and retention. And we're like, well, I guess it's up to you guys. And with the blessing of the executives, we were allowed to do a steep discount on our lifetime membership. 50 to 60 percent off lifetime membership of calm, which has never been done before. And we promoted the crap out of that. First of all, we tested the offer to make sure that we went out with the best offer. And, I'll save everyone a lot of time, the higher the discount, the better the conversion and the higher the LTV that's always been. So we segmented our audience from like current paid to non paid and did a bunch of testing and TLDR, Black Friday generated, or actually it was Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday generated our highest audience title. Revenue day ever and that was the first time we ran the promo and then which resulted in the highest revenue week highest revenue month so that was the first year we ran it the second year. We beat out the record to having the first, wait, let's see, we had our first million dollar day the first year. The second year we had our first 2 million day. And then the third year we hit our first three 2 million days consecutively. So Wow. It was like our Super Bowl, you know, and we had little to no and support little to no product support. So it was pretty much the lifecycle team doing this and working with customer service to make sure everything is good. And with the brand teams to kind of align the social posts with it. But yeah, we were pretty. Darn independent with that promo. So, what was that success? I mean, like I love hearing you mention the word testing. I mean, like I never, well, not never, but so seldomly here marketers go, well, we tested the offer. We tested not only the offer. But then, you know, should we, what should be above the fold? Or, should we have a red CTO or blue CTO? Or should we say, 60 percent off or 60 percent discount? Like did testing have a massive impact in that success or was it like just the right place, right time that's, like what would you put that down to? I think the first year success was the right place at the right time, right? Like the business was booming. You know, mental health is still a hot topic and lifetime subscription to an app for 150. That's going to help your mental and physical wellbeing. That's a steal. And the annual price MSRP was 70 a year. So if you use the app a couple of times a year, it's worth it. So I think that was. A big part of the success was like, people were like, Whoa, this is a crazy good deal. And it was, and I think from the years after that, the testing had a lot to play into it. Right. Because it's like, okay. It was out. Our members know this deal comes around every year now. How do we go up from here? So we started testing creating like, okay, let's take our churned audience and let's split them by how long it's been since they've churned, how likely is that audience to convert for a lifetime, or should we instead present them an annual offer 50 percent off an annual. So we did a lot of little testing there within different segments. Now people did suggest playing with the creative, right? Playing with subject lines and that had some to do with it. The creative, not so much subject lines. Absolutely. Because that's the first impression people get of the promotion to do with which offer do we give to which segment that would then convert them the most. And. I think the evolution of that would have been working closer and closer with data science and utilizing some kind of AI situation to score users of their propensity to. Convert on a lifetime or an annual subscription. I absolutely love that. I love like the data focus, the segmentation. it's absolutely incredible. So well done there. I must say like taking a turn as we like to do a digital surfing, like as much as I love that. One of the things that I absolutely hate that I've done myself is sent out shocking emails, emails to the wrong list, emails with, the wrong, messages, emails with the wrong, from addresses. You in email every day in crm. I'm like, are you beyond those mistakes? Have you made those mistakes? Or have you got a process to make sure you don't make those mistakes? Oh man, this was a huge thing in the beginning of my career. I think the further along I get into my career, the less significant these mistakes become because one, I think I've gotten smarter on what big pitfalls to avoid. And two, the things that I'm doing are a little bit more under the radar where it's forgiving. Like we're moving so fast that it's like, Oh, that was a mistake. Okay. How did that happen? How do we avoid it? What's the solution move forward. That's the way it's been recently, but Oh man, in the beginning of my career, I remember one time working for the honest company, we were using Salesforce marketing cloud, and I was just setting up a newsletter and it happened to be when my manager was on maternity leave. So it was just me, it was just me. And I was launching our monthly newsletter and it was an AB test. And in the AB test tool, for some reason, it gave you an option on who to send it from. And I gave feedback to Salesforce about this, but the options that we had from this email, the from list, every single user in it. So my name was in it. My CEO's name was in it. You know, we had to choose from this dropdown and I accidentally chose our account manager as a from name and email address. So around 2 million people got this. newsletter from the honest company that came from, I don't remember his name, Chad Jones from Salesforce. And it was interesting. I mean, from a consumer standpoint, most of them just chuckled. Some of them were confused. Like who is this person? To talk to, I mean, our, our executives had a field day with that. And, you know, the whole situation of how did this happen? Well, how did this happen? I literally looked at a dropdown and misclicked, like, So I've learned to, yeah, I mean, that leads me to a question I really want to ask is, what is the right response? Because I've heard of employees being fired for things like this. I've heard of agencies being fired. Is that the, like, I won't share my personal opinion because I want your opinion, but what is the right response, to a mistake like that? Support, offering support and having a collaborative team mindset. And that's what my managers have done for me. And that's how I try to manage my team. And the teams that work with me is people don't understand how easy it is to make a mistake. An email, a click of a button, one little typo, and you could send it to the wrong audience. You know. Have spelling errors, so many different things. And I think a lot of people don't understand that, right? Like engineers have a QA process and they have, usually a peer that looks over their code. Like they have all these checks and balances and email is as technical as that, but we don't have those processes in place. What I've learned to do is if there is no QA team that I can pass off my email to, and those QA teams normally don't audit the setup of the campaign anyway. They're just looking at the end result email. Rely on your QA teams. If you don't have a QA team, build your own QA team. And that's it. I've learned that I can't trust my own eyes, especially if I'm the one that's been working on the project alone. So I pull in team members and brand marketers, if they have something in the email that they want to go out, social marketers, someone from the CS team, because guess what? If there's a mistake in the email, the CS team is going to hear about it. So it's not shocking. These people want to help you. They're like, yes, put me on the preview list. And so I have a team of people that are looking at it, like, okay, it looks good. And I've also learned to slow down. Like I'm such a quick person and I think one of the things startups liked about me, and that's why I got hired so much in the beginning was that I was a quick learner and a quick executor, right? But at a certain point there, there's a sacrifice that you make for accuracy with quickness. So I've learned to slow down, not everything needs to happen immediately and check my work. Yeah. And I think that, the point you made earlier is, the recipients, I think, , often there's a perception that they are going to be absolutely horrified, but, we all human. I've done it myself more than once. I think we've all, anybody in marketing should have done that. It's almost like a rite of passage. But, I think so many executives just do not, get that same kind of point of view. Yeah, and I think it's funny when people when companies are like, well, we need to send an apology email. And as marketers, you're like, Oh, God, we have to we're gonna blast the list again, like most people don't want it. But the funny thing is, apology emails have proven to Have higher open rates and higher engagement than the actual send. So sometimes it's like, let's just, I mean, I don't advise any marketers to make mistakes on purpose, just to send an apology email. Opportunity that you don't realize is an opportunity. It's probably going to be the only thing that anybody remembers from this podcast. Apology email. I mean, think about it, right? If you envision your inbox and you get an email, that's like blah, blah, blah, 60 percent off. And then you get another email an hour later that says, oops, we made a mistake. You're like, Ooh, you made a mistake. What's the mistake? You're more inclined to open something like that. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Last question for you then. And I have to ask it's I mean, like in your absolute experts in this field, what is the future looking like for us in the field of email marketing? Oh man. Apple's really Apple and Gmail really love us. I say that because they're always changing things. And it makes things difficult, but that's the lay of the land and we have to evolve, right? So I foresee less and less insight into user metrics within email. Apple started this trend of blowing up our open rates. We don't have visibility into open rates. They are not reliable. And it's hard because iCloud is also a domain, right? At iCloud. com, it's also a platform, right? It's also a method people use to open their emails. So we have to look at both. And it's not always easy to look at if someone opened it on an iCloud system. Versus a dot com address. So that makes it difficult. It's also spilling into clicks. They're Now removing tracking pixels from clicks, which is awesome because we're like, okay, open rates are gone. Let's look at clicks. Now they're like, clicks are going to go away too. Like, okay, that's cool. But I'm a big fan of. Tying email to end result KPI metrics, right? We send emails so people can receive an email and open it. Ultimately, we want people to go to the product, convert to a subscription or read this specific article. So we need to, as email marketers, we need to get a, get better at attributing the end KPI result to our email send metric. Can't even say opens anymore, but of the people we sent this campaign to, how many actually did the end result that we want them to, this is going to affect how executives look at email. Right. Because they're going to see oh, wow, we can blast. Our entire list and get this many results, or we can blast this really active list and get pretty much 90 percent of those results. So we're going to have to get smarter about segmentation, implementing re engagement campaigns. Things like that. I find it exciting because open rates and click rates are like vanity metrics. And what you really want is the end result. So I'm kind of excited for that. It's going to be a pain. It's going to be a transition process. But for me personally, I love the product amplitude. This is just a product plug here. Amplitude makes it really easy to create funnels from like. Your email to the actual action in the product. So if you have something like that, it makes the job a lot easier. All right. Well, I will absolutely put a link to amplitude in the show notes. Sue, it has been fantastic having you on the show today. The insights you've given us are amazing. I, you're the first email marketer that I've had on the show. So, I'm sure, we're going to get an amazing response. For those listeners that are listening that found this interesting, drop me an email, let me know. And we can always have Sue back or I'm sure Sue has some people that she can recommend. So thanks so much for today. Thank you so much, Darren and Hubbell for having me.