The Future of Retail Marketing Through Personalization and AI With Renae Scott

Intro: 00:00

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19  

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. 

Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

RPM delivers smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. 

Today’s guest is someone I’m really excited to bring on. Renae Scott is the Founder of Bee Collaborative, a strategic marketing firm helping small retail brands grow with clarity, confidence and real results. 

With over 20 years of experience, including leading marketing at Victoria’s Secret, spearheading development for the state of Ohio, Renae brings both strategy and soul to the table. She’s known for cutting through the noise, aligning teams and turning vision into action. I think you’re going to love her sharp insights and straight talk approach. Thanks for joining me today, Renae.

Renae Scott: 01:35  

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Rick Rappe: 01:38  

Well, in my research, I found that you had started out selling rocks from Lake Michigan as one of your first ventures. Can you talk about that a little bit and how that influenced your approach to marketing and business development?

Renae Scott: 01:51  

Sure, sure. You’re forcing me to go way back to when I was a little girl. Yeah. So I grew up in northwest Indiana and along the shores of Lake Michigan, and my family would camp up in that area. And what I would do is collect the rocks that I would find.

You know, when we were walking along the waterfront of Lake Michigan and I ended up with a bucket full of rocks, and I thought, what can I do with these rocks? And lo and behold, I thought, well, I’m going to sell them now. Again, I was so young, I didn’t think about the fact that I lived on a dead end street, and there wasn’t much traffic on that street. But I was able to put a little table out front and sell them the equivalent of like a little lemonade stand. And thankfully for some patient neighbors and some very generous neighbors, I was able to get a few sales out of it.

Rick Rappe: 02:39  

Your first. Your first entrepreneurial venture? Wow, that’s pretty creative. I mean, lemonade might have been easier, but the profit margin was really high on rocks, so that’s exciting.

Renae Scott: 02:49  

Exactly, exactly. I had to put in the effort. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 02:53  

Well, then from there and I know it was it’s probably a little while later. You had a long career at Victoria’s Secret? 16 years, I believe. Can you talk a little bit about your time at Victoria’s Secret and how that how that evolved?

Renae Scott: 03:07  

Sure, absolutely. Well, I will say I didn’t I didn’t set out to go work for Victoria’s Secret. Maybe if I step back to when I was a little girl again and make that connection. My other favorite things to do is when that Sears catalog would come, or that toys R us catalog would come. I’d open it up at the holidays and I’d circle up, circle my wish list for Santa.

And make sure that that was well known. And then fast forward, I found myself graduating from college and having the opportunity to work at Victoria’s Secret, and I started as what they called a mailing analyst or a marketing analyst, if you will. My parents, what I was going to do, they thought I was going to be working in a mail room. So, you know, I was I was a mailing analyst responsible for Responsible for helping them mail out 350 million catalogs a year. While I didn’t do the planning, I handled all of the segmentation and actually executing that segmentation. 

So if we needed to mail people that had purchased in the last 12 months that had purchased a bra, we were pulling those customers, bringing them in, running tests, getting the segmentation done, making sure it was compliant with the Post Office, passing the names off to the merge purge vendor and the printers, and ultimately getting it in the mail. So that was what I was responsible for when I very first started at Victoria’s Secret.

Rick Rappe: 04:34  

Wow, that sounds exciting. I, I got to work on a really large scale direct mail program early in my career as well. I worked on the AT&T wireless program, and we were mailing like a million pieces a day. And it’s such an interesting experience, isn’t it? When you work on a large, large scale program, you can test and measure and learn anything that you want to test, which is exciting.

So you really started on the data side. It sounds like. Or are all of the execution side as well I guess.

Renae Scott: 05:05  

Yeah, I would consider it more, you know. Yeah. Execution or what we called operations. But that’s where I started to get my real understanding of what the importance of data driven in the work that I was doing. So yes, you have to make sure it gets done correctly, but if you don’t have the right data and you haven’t set up the, you know, the the campaign for success, then all the strategy and the work that was put together was, you know, all for naught.

Rick Rappe: 05:31  

Yeah. We have a special guest on the podcast today. It’s Renae’s cat. And what’s your cat’s name? I gotta ask right now so that I can give her credit for her name is podcast.

Renae Scott: 05:43  

Her name is pixie and she’s a kitten. And she has been sleeping all morning. And then she heard me get on this call.

Rick Rappe: 05:50  

And.

Renae Scott: 05:52  

Thought that she needed to make an appearance. So thank you for understanding.

Rick Rappe: 05:55  

Oh no, it’s great. It’s my first feline guest on the Response Driver’s podcast and we’re welcome. We welcome all types. So this is perfect. Thank you.

Hopefully she’s a marketing expert. She looks like she might be a marketing expert.

Renae Scott: 06:07  

She she’s definitely brings some sass to the marketing game. Yes.

Rick Rappe: 06:11  

Very good. Well I want to dig in even deeper, probably to your experience at Victoria’s Secret. And and maybe we can come back to that in a little bit. But I guess I also wanted to ask you then how did your career evolve from your time at Victoria’s Secret to starting Be collaborative?

Renae Scott: 06:30  

Sure. Well, I will say that I had some really great mentors in my time at Victoria’s Secret and as someone that was leading execution or responsible for execution, I was asking a tremendous amount of questions about why we’re doing this. What about this? Could we consider this? And actually feeding some ideas back to the people that we’re leading strategy.

And again this didn’t happen overnight. This was this was obviously over over my tenure there. But I was able to be mentored and people identified that, you know, you would be much better suited on the strategy side because you have a tremendous amount of respect for the strategy. And then now you understand the execution. And so for 16 years, during my time there at Victoria’s Secret, I grew and evolved my career. 

And obviously along that, along my journey, parallel to my journey, marketing was evolving and becoming much more digital focused. And Victoria’s Secret didn’t just hand us a checkbook and say, okay, now start investing in digital. We were challenged to say, okay, where can you take the money out of print marketing and move that into digital? Again, as a publicly traded company, there was no not much tolerance for losing sales or things of that nature. So we had to test our way into where we could make some cuts back from a print perspective and reinvest that into digital and prove that we were, if not at least breaking even on those changes, but also growing and hopefully improving our margins as a result of it.

Rick Rappe: 07:59  

Wow. That’s great. What did what were some of the things that you learned along the way when you were, you know, making that transition and looking for ways to tighten the budget on traditional print marketing?

Renae Scott: 08:12  

Sure. So, you know, based on different customer segments, we were testing things like the number of contacts you sent people, how many pages you sent them, trim, size, paper weight, things of that nature that allowed us to still put a contact in front of someone unless we were doing holdout tests, of course, but we could still put a contact in front of someone while still shifting dollars. So those were some of our very early learns about what we could do. As soon as you then got like two lightweight of a paper, you started to erode and take things away from your brand projection, and we were always very cautious about that. But we did try to minimize page counts, maximize and have a good presentation in terms of the feel of that catalog that was coming in the mail.

And then we’ve advanced our testing to actually doing hold outs, long term hold outs of what happened when you took that print piece away from somebody for an extended amount of time. And, you know, those are difficult, somewhat painful tests to execute because you just have to have so much precision to not, you know, get in the way of the testing that you’re doing. But that was ultimately what we had to do. We had to show if we took catalogs away for a long period of time and I’m talking like six months, what then does that do to the long, you know, the long term health of your customer file and, you know, their repeat purchasing? Because what we found is, you know, you’re giving them a print catalog or a print piece that comes in the mail, but they’re also seeing an email at the same time. 

Or they might be seeing something in social media, right? We know that a customer journey is so dynamic in this day and age, so we would see what we were able to prove most the most, the probably the quickest is as soon as you put that catalog in the mail, you would immediately see their response in their click through on our engagement go up. So the catalog was driving a behavior, even if they were choosing to use an offer code that they saw in an email or something on social media. So again, it was one it wasn’t 1 to 1. It wasn’t that just a catalog drove a behavior or just that an email drove a behavior? 

The customers were very savvy, and they were looking at all of the pieces that they were receiving and then making, making their purchases.

Rick Rappe: 10:32  

Yeah, we’ve done some interesting testing with catalogs even. We have a kind of an interesting mini catalog format that we’ve used for several of our clients. And it’s it’s interesting how it has a very long response curve. So it stays in people’s homes for a long time. A lot longer than a postcard or a letter package, which is very interesting.

And even the following mailing that follows the catalog, it will have a poor result. But what we’ve found time and time again is that it drives the secondary bump in catalog responses based on, you know, tracking the 800 numbers and things like that. So it’s very interesting how catalogs have a real dynamic, long, long response curve. So yeah.

Renae Scott: 11:16  

We had a we had a portion of that that we would do where we would do a second mailing. And essentially the catalog was was the same. We just put a different cover on it so that it looked the same. We printed it all together actually, for an economy of scale benefit, we we would mail it about 3 or 4 weeks later and we saw something very similar as that first mailing would get a bump as a result of that second mailing and everything aside from the cover, most everything else in the catalog was the same.

Rick Rappe: 11:46  

Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. This is kind of a detail oriented question around catalog marketing. So but I think you might be able to help me understand on a, on a big Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Are they analyzing the results on like a product by product basis inside the catalog to figure out what’s selling and where’s the optimal place to put things in the catalog? And do they break down the product sold within the catalog results?

Renae Scott: 12:18  

Yeah. I mean, yeah, we would actually take it down to the, you know, picture level and product level. So what was the response rate for that picture? Because there might have been a couple of different items featured. And then also looking at the response rate to that particular item.

And we would that’s again where we would do some testing on this. This set of pages would have this type of product and then this other, you know, test B, option B would have the maybe a less dense presentation. And again we would look at what what the margins were. But yeah Victoria’s Secret was incredibly disciplined about the the profitability of the catalogs that were being done. And so yes, every every item, every photo, every choice that was made about that catalog was was definitely analyzed.

Rick Rappe: 13:08  

Was it all done with an in with your in-house team, or was there any outside agency support for this?

Renae Scott: 13:14  

All of that type of work was done in-house. Victoria’s secret certainly used agencies, but all of that analytics was done in-house. Again, cross-functional partnerships between marketing, finance, merchandise planning teams, merchants, creative teams. I’m sure I’m missing partners. But definitely a cross-functional effort.

And looking at, you know, what, what was being presented and what the results were. One, one fun fact out of that, that work that we would do is we would have, you know, some healthy conversations about or healthy competitions. Rather, you know, what should we put on the cover or what should be the product assortment? And we would try and predict what we’re going, what was going to be the top sellers. And usually marketing won those competitions. 

No offense to any of my partners that might be hearing this and listening, but again, we got so we were so in tune with the customer and what she was looking for through our analytics that we generally knew and could help with the product assortment and product presentation even better than some of our merchant and merchandise planning partners.

Rick Rappe: 14:23  

Yeah, and you had so much data to build off of. That’s what’s exciting when when you get into that big data driven system and you’re doing such a massive amount of response analysis, you can move away from guesswork and start to move into really data informed decision making.

Renae Scott: 14:38  

Yeah, absolutely. I’m a I’m a huge data nerd and I love to look at the data and I love to, you know, plot it all out and compare this year to last year and this year to last month. Yeah. The data that I like to say the data doesn’t lie. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 14:53  

Wow. Well, again, and I don’t know if you’ve talked about this yet, but I, I’m curious now about how that all that experience that Victoria’s Secret has helped you transition into creating. Be collaborative.

Renae Scott: 15:06  

Sure. Well, my, my goal at be collaborative as I’ve continued to grow and advance my career. And I took that little foray into economic development, as you mentioned in the intro, I, I really wanted to get back into supporting retail businesses. I have a passion for retail. I myself, you know, love to shop, love to look at the human dynamics that go into to into all of the human, you know, human behavior there.

And I really wanted to help support small businesses, the small up and coming retailers. I feel like they need an opportunity to have some great marketing leadership, but maybe can’t afford it. So be be collaborative is a we offer a fractional service, and I can bring my years of experience and what I did at Victoria’s Secret to small retailers with their great product. So that was how it was formed. I have a passion for working collaboratively, which is why, you know, that’s in the name and I want to hear what CEOs want to accomplish and what they want to do with their small, growing retail brands. 

And then I can bring my years of expertise to the table and hopefully that’s, you know, a good marriage of bringing those two together and really helping their small brands and businesses grow.

Rick Rappe: 16:18  

Wow. Yeah. I imagine all that experience of working on such big programs with unlimited testing budget really pays off in terms of knowing how to help smaller companies.

Renae Scott: 16:30  

Yeah. And I, you know, I’ve, I, I sometimes I think it might be a little bit intimidating of, oh if you did something that big and that, you know, scalable Victoria’s Secret, you’re, you know, we don’t have anything, you know, that size in what we’re doing today. But there’s something that is applicable from work I’ve done in my past to, you know what what small retailers should be considering today. You always want to be using data. You always want to be testing.

And those are just some really key, important principles that I would share with any founder that, you know, you want to make sure that that’s a key part of what’s in your marketing strategy.

Rick Rappe: 17:04  

Yeah, I think I learned a lot of I’ve formulated my own guiding principles, working on big accounts like AT&T and DirecTV and Microsoft and big companies like that. But I’ve taken that expertise now to a lot smaller companies, regional companies and startups. And, you know, a lot of the same guiding principles really serve. Serve me well, you know, just protecting what works. Making sure that we don’t we don’t just jump into something without testing it.

We want to make sure that we test into a control and learn how it’s going to perform. And then you can use that predictable result to scale things up and know that you’re going to get a great return. And then obviously, you still have to always keep testing against the control and make sure that we we are always pushing performance further, always looking for breakthroughs. That methodology is absolutely time tested and proven. So that’s that makes a lot of sense.

Renae Scott: 18:06  

And I would also add into, you know, everything that you so nicely recapped is just because a test didn’t work one time doesn’t mean it won’t work again in the future. So some some low hanging fruit opportunities for, you know, CEOs out there might be if you tried something and it didn’t work. Okay. That was a, you know, a learn for that moment in time. But now you’ve got new product assortment.

Your customer file has grown. A whole host of things may have changed. So retest. You know, a small team doesn’t develop a play and run it one time and then scrap it. If it didn’t work in that one game, they’re likely going to try it against other opponents in other games. 

And I would say you bring that same kind of testing to what you’re doing from a marketing perspective. Try to repeat tests, minimize the risk, of course, but you want to repeat tests and make sure they really, truly didn’t work. Instead of just saying, well, we tried it once and it didn’t work, so we’re not going to do it again.

Rick Rappe: 19:02  

Yeah, I think another thing that I found and learned, and you probably can speak to this, was just making sure that you understand the right KPIs to look at in the in the process. We tend to focus on cost per sale or cost per customer acquired. I mean, when you’re selling to an existing customer base, that’s probably a different number, a different number. So what do you what would you use as your main KPI that you would look at in determining success?

Renae Scott: 19:32  

I mean, I look at a whole host of things. So I think it just kind of depends on, you know, what we’re trying to do. But I definitely look at cost per acquisition. Usually you’re trying to look at, you know, the growth that you’re bringing to the customer file. I’m looking at some type of form of lifetime value.

Companies call it a little bit different, but how long what’s the the the what’s the recency of when your last purchase was from that customer and what the time frame is. What is what are their cycle times and what your existing customer base is buying? Does that start to lag or can you accelerate that? Again, different ways that you’re you’re going about bringing about bringing in revenue. I like to do brand perception, making sure, you know, what is brand recall look like again, through some hold out testing that may be a little bit too advanced for smaller businesses, but I do like to make sure we get a sense for what the brand recall is and how the health of the brand is relative, and outside of being able to tie it back to a definite sales number, if that makes sense.

Rick Rappe: 20:41  

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Well, I think that the important thing that you said in in that was, you know, you’re looking at the financial metrics and the return on investment, which is so critical. We we sometimes run into clients that look at response really heavily, and they ignore the cost aspect of it. And that seems to be somewhat dangerous. Right?

You can you can lead yourself down the wrong path of high responding or yeah, high responding, low conversion, things like that.

Renae Scott: 21:13  

So yeah, I mean it all to me it all comes down to profitability and. Right. So you might have you might, you might take an approach with an older segment or a new customer. So you might get a lower response rate, but you know they have a higher order average value. That’s that’s good when you’re looking at acquiring new customers.

But at the same time, if you have a really low response rate from your best customers, oh, you might have some, you know, some concerns in there. So you can’t I don’t think it’s one one dimensional. You really have to consider all of the variables. And you know, data data is key. And response rate, profitability, you know, total average order size, things of that nature are important. 

But looking at any one of them in a silo can can lead you down a dangerous path.

Rick Rappe: 21:59  

Yeah. When you were working with the data or this is a really data specific question, but I rarely get somebody that has so much data experience on on the podcast. I want to ask you all these data questions. Were you appending more data to the customer file so that you could work with demographics and other other points of data other than what you had about their purchase behavior.

Renae Scott: 22:26  

So sure, yes, we work with third parties to bring in additional information. So we when I first started, we were very traditional RFM driven. And so we would look at as many variables and as much data as we could bring in to append as I advance my career. And as you know, Victoria’s Secret got more sophisticated in their marketing. We went to more modeling and the modeling team, the analysts that handled all of the building, the models, the predictive modeling, they were the ones then that really came to rely on on some of that data to inform the models that they were building.

I, you know, I don’t think that anything from a demographic perspective really significantly drove any of the models, but they were contributing factors. I think at the end of the day, some of the foundational recency, frequency, monetary product categories, the data that companies have in-house, if they don’t have money for third party appending, will get you a significant way. You know, significant part of the way in advancing what you’re doing from a marketing perspective. You just have to make sure it’s organized and clean and using it. Those are some of the key pieces that come in. 

So yes, third party demographic data can be helpful. But it it I’ve I’ve never found it to be a substitute for your own first party data.

Rick Rappe: 23:53  

Right. Yeah. It’s interesting how that’s evolved over time. I used to work with predictive modeling years ago on the AT&T account, and we had millions and millions of dollars to spend and a team of statisticians to work with. Now, it seems like predictive response modeling is much more accessible for smaller businesses, which is exciting.

Renae Scott: 24:15  

Yes, absolutely. I think that’s you know, if you’re if you’re trying to figure out ways to invest in technology, you know, that’s that’s something that I think every company should at least explore or figure out how they can have it as part of their roadmap if it’s not something that they can afford today.

Rick Rappe: 24:31  

Yes. For sure. We’re we’re getting a lot of traction. We had a program where we did a lot of creative testing, offer testing, format testing, and we were getting more and more successful as we went. But then we did a predictive response model based on the responders that we had created from the earlier campaigns.

And we basically doubled performance with a predictive response model, and that made it so much of a more successful sales channel for that particular client that all of a sudden they were thrilled and ramping the program up dramatically.

Renae Scott: 25:07  

So yeah, I, I think that’s phenomenal. And I can I, I can tell you we saw pretty similar results. Again. It was something that we tested going from RFM to modeling Victoria’s Secret, I can’t say was they were somewhat risk averse. I’ll say it that way.

So they really wanted to prove something out. Sure. So we did a lot of RF testing between RFM and predictive modeling. I can tell you that we we cut the test short because it was able to prove itself out. And using modeling was was a better was better predictor of performance than RFM. 

So we were able to implement that pretty quickly.

Rick Rappe: 25:48  

Having those predictive models. I mean, basically for those listening that don’t know what a predictive model can do, I mean, I would describe it as essentially it allows you to rank order prospects or customers from most likely to respond to least likely to respond. And it does so fairly accurately. I mean, I don’t know if that. Would that be a good description?

Renae Scott: 26:10  

Yeah, I, I, I agree with that. And the, the models that I’m familiar with usually rank order them in two ways. They rank order them in response and then they rank order them by sales or expected average order size. And then the statisticians I work with would generally end up implementing or recommending that we go with. That’s something that was a little bit more of a blend.

Yeah, we we did test those a couple of different ways. So that’s what just the thing that I would add is yes, it’s about rank ordering people. It’s how you rank order them. You can rank order by response. That’s going to look slightly different than rank ordering by average order size. 

And if you can find a way to, you know, take both and bring it bring that together, then it makes that execution a little bit more straightforward and streamlined. Because you’re less less, you’re spending less time thinking about, well, should I give it to somebody that bought in the last three months and spent $100? Or what about somebody that spent bought the last 4 to 6 months, but they spent $250. You’re not thinking about it that way. You’re saying, okay, give me that next, you know, next bucket of people to mail. 

And. You, like I said, you’re thinking. You’re thinking through, like thinking through from a profitability perspective and what their expected response is going to be. And also the thing that comes out of modeling is it helps you identify more strategically how many you want to mail. So do you want to mail a million or do you want to mail a million to. 

You’re not using the data to tell you you’re letting the model show you. Okay, well, this is where you’re expected break even would be if you will. Okay. That’s the depth then that you would want to mail to.

Rick Rappe: 27:58  

That’s interesting. We always run into that question when we’re talking about how deep do we want to mail. The question always seems to come up about frequency. How? How regularly how frequently should we be mailing?

And it sounds like you might have done some testing around that. What did you learn?

Renae Scott: 28:17  

Oh, gosh.

Rick Rappe: 28:19  

Is that a can of worms? Maybe we should.

Renae Scott: 28:22  

Yeah, I was gonna say. That might be a whole, whole different podcast, I would say. You have to know your customer. And in this day and age, being able to leverage technology will help you go a long way in identifying how many times somebody should be mailed. Right. So you and I need will need different touch points, different frequencies that we should, you know, be contacted.

And hopefully you can use the data to help inform that. And I’ll leave it at there for now. For today.

Rick Rappe: 28:54  

I’m sure. Yeah I’m sure it depends on what products you’re selling and how frequently people need those products, obviously. I mean.

Renae Scott: 29:01  

Exactly.

Rick Rappe: 29:02  

Victoria’s Secret obviously is selling something that women might purchase on a regular basis, and so that would have a different frequency than some other, some other type of company.

Renae Scott: 29:13  

And I think it comes down to the person. So. Right. We would have debates about okay, well they bought they just bought within the in the past 30 days. So we don’t need to give them a catalog.

Well that could be true in some with some people. But that’s not true for everybody. And again, that’s what we found through some of our holdouts of some people very much need that print piece to hold in their hand, whether it’s a full catalog or, you know, a small eight page flyer and other people, that piece of print collateral isn’t as important. So that doesn’t mean they go away. It just means they get print a little bit less frequently. 

That’s what.

Rick Rappe: 29:51  

Yeah, yeah. When we were doing a lot of work with predictive models on AT&T, we found this really interesting data point through our analysis that we did where, you know, we were identifying the best direct male responders and driving to a call center. And then we took the other group that we weren’t mailing. And we found and through through our analysis that they were going to retail, they were retail shoppers, and they absolutely wanted to go into the stores and talk to someone in person. So that list became very productive, but it just had a totally different call to action.

And we were driving, you know, we created the AT&T Drive to Retail program and we mailed for all their stores across the country. So it wasn’t that the it was it was understanding the differences in how people want to purchase, which is really important.

Renae Scott: 30:42  

Yeah, absolutely. And that a print piece absolutely drives an in-store behavior. I think you touched on something that’s really critical that again, I think people think, okay, I mailed it. What happened from a digital perspective, if you if you remove the fact that they walked in a store. They may not have had that print piece in their hand, but they received that print piece in the mail and it drove them to make and do something in your stores.

And you’re you’re not taking that into consideration. You’re missing out on some key data.

Rick Rappe: 31:13  

Yeah. It is hard for smaller marketers to do those types of analysis projects because really, I guess the way that you learn those types of things, mostly in the big, big programs, is through holdouts where you don’t do something to a group, and then you see how that differs from the group that you did do something. And where did those people, how many of those people bought through any channel is sort of what you would look at and analyze. So yeah, and I think that’s super interesting.

Renae Scott: 31:41  

I think that’s why many retailers have some type of a loyalty program, setting aside loyalty aspect and rewarding people, but trying to be able to have that, that common denominator in being able to connect all of that, those transactions. So all the marketing went out. And then here were their transactions. So that’s a benefit of a loyalty program, right? But I don’t think again, a small retailer that’s that’s trying to grow has to stand up a loyalty program.

If you can be as straightforward as capturing somebody’s cell phone number and using that as their identifier and connecting that across an online transaction and an in-store transaction that will that will help a small retailer with some of that early data before they’re able to, you know, do some of the significant testing that you, you know, you can do when you’re a Victoria’s Secret.

Rick Rappe: 32:30  

Yeah. That leads me to my next question, which is what common marketing challenges do small midsize retail businesses face? And how does be collaborative help them address those those issues?

Renae Scott: 32:44  

I think one of the biggest things that I see is just they have data and they’re not using it or or it’s not not in good hygiene. It needs needs to be organized and, you know, be useful to the marketing teams or to the company as a whole. So that’s usually some of the early ways, early things I see. Or they have done something in a from a print perspective, but they haven’t put a source code or any kind of a tracking code on that print piece to be able to track. So you always want to make sure you’ve got some type of a code that, you know, when you’re calling into a call center or when you’re going online, and that it could also include an offer code of 10% off.

But just make sure it’s a unique identifier that is only on that print piece. That allows you to be a starting point for your data collection and your data aggregation. But yeah, your data is only as good as you know you keep it in terms of from a cleanliness and a data hygiene perspective, whether that’s your customer file or your sales files. And then you know how you use it and implement it in the future. So those those are probably the big things.

Rick Rappe: 34:00  

Right? Wow. A little bit of a question about how you engage with companies as a fractional CMO. How do you approach building and leading marketing teams within your client or within your client’s organization?

Renae Scott: 34:18  

It’s a little bit of it depends on, you know, on the client and what they have in place today. So sometimes I’m in more as a kind of a liaison to whoever their head of marketing is. They may not have as much experience as I have, you know, from my time at Victoria’s Secret. So I’m able to come in and help their, their, their current head of marketing, whatever their title is, with, you know, some things that they can look at and consider. So I’m somewhat of a marketing mentor to them and a right hand person to them for a short time.

Other times, you know they may have more of a junior person leading their marketing, which is great. So I come in then as that right hand person to the CEO, and I’m making sure I really understand what their business goals are and where they what they want to do and what they want to accomplish. And I look at their existing marketing plan, what they’re doing today, and do I see a direct correlation between what their their business goals are and what their marketing goals are? And if not there, we’ve got we’ve got to refine some things. We’ve got to change some things up. 

So I come in and I, you know, it’s it’s really a customized solution on what the company is doing and where I can take them. I like to start by doing audits with them in conjunction with the company, so that I can then help identify where they where they need help. But usually I always spend time with the marketing team in some capacity learning about their individual strengths, what they see in the business. As part of that collaboration, I just love to hear what the associates who are working on marketing today have to say. They’re usually a wealth of knowledge that their voices just aren’t being heard in the company. 

So I like to hear from them about what they’re seeing from the work that they’re doing, what thoughts they have, what they’d like to see improved. That can be everything from technology to how they talk to the customers. Usually those internal associates are a wealth of knowledge that you really can can extrapolate some great information from.

Rick Rappe: 36:24  

Yeah. Do you think that a lot of companies in in that you work with, they rely too heavily on digital or too heavily on traditional media? I mean, do you run into sort of that situation?

Renae Scott: 36:43  

Yeah. Yes. I think people put too many eggs in one basket without understanding why they’re putting their eggs in the basket. So, you know, we put we’ve put a whole bunch of money into, you know, paid search or programmatic advertising. And then we start to look at the numbers and I’m like, well, how did you decide that this is how much money you wanted to invest in this particular channel or this particular vertical?

Well, you know, somebody recommended it. Well, you know, did you test it? No. Not really. So yeah, I find that people unfortunately end up maybe chasing that the next shiny object or what’s presented to them as, oh, this is going to be, you know, the savior of your marketing program or really turn things around. 

And what I can say is, my experience tells me that you want to have a really healthy marketing mix. You know, that marketing mix is all predicated on who your customer is and how they shop and how they interact with your brand. But you want to have a healthy marketing mix. A good, healthy mix between print and digital. And it’s how those two tools are used together to complement each other. 

Really goes a long way. And I think a tip for anyone listening out there is to not look at your channels as competition. Email is not competing with direct mail, and email is not competing with paid search. You really need to be thinking about how they work with, work together and complement each other and contribute to that closing that sale at the end of the day, because, as I said earlier, it’s generally not a particular marketing activity that drives a behavior. It is a series of marketing activities that work together and work in combination that produce, you know, a customer making a transaction with you.

Rick Rappe: 38:35  

Yeah, that’s so true. And that is great advice as far as mixing the channels and using things together in conjunction Junction with each other. It’s so important. It’s really hard for some smaller companies, I’ve found, to not to some companies that we work with tend to get focused on the cost per say, or how cheap it is to send emails out. Direct mail is obviously much more expensive and harder to produce and takes a longer time, and so it’s sometimes overlooked or ignored.

But it’s a really important to really get CEOs and marketing leadership to think in terms of cost per sale rather than cost per piece, you know, because you can get such a different result when you look at the what you’re what you’re able to produce from those things. Yeah.

Renae Scott: 39:27  

So and it’s why a little bit coming back to your question earlier about, you know, what metrics do I look look at. It’s why it’s not so much of a black and white answer. I mean, anecdotally, I can look at that. But, you know, for example, that you just gave about email. Well, that’s it’s so cheap.

But if you just it’s so cheap that the profitability pays for itself pretty quickly. But if all you do is email and you don’t take a look at, okay, what’s happening with your unsubscribe rate. And what’s happening with your customer file. You’re going to you’re going to end up in a lot of hot water. And you know, it’s interesting around the holidays, companies are pretty notorious for even sending sometimes 2 or 3 emails a day.

Rick Rappe: 40:12  

Yeah, I’ve gotten a lot of that email marketing. It goes right into a folder and I don’t open it.

Renae Scott: 40:18  

So exactly. So there’s a cost to that that I don’t know that companies always consider. Right. So it’s so cheap just, you know, keep blasting out more emails. Oh you have to look at the cost associated with that.

Rick Rappe: 40:30  

Yeah. I mean and the, the scalability of some things, it’s good up to a point. And then it doesn’t become any more scalable than that. So you have to look at other alternatives to continue to grow and scale. And I think that in the in the social media market and other digital channels.

You know, the audience is very fragmented. And so you can’t reach your whole audience on any one given platform. You have to have a lot of different platforms. We we like to talk about direct mail, being able to reach, you know, nearly everybody with a lot of information appended to each one of their records that we can use for things like predictive modeling and those types of things. So.

Renae Scott: 41:13  

Yeah, I’d like to direct mail in that piece that comes in your mailbox. They have to physically touch it. If they if it comes in the mailbox, they have to take it out of their mailbox. And even if they walk it directly to the garbage can or the recycle bin, they still touched it, right? Yeah.

Had an opportunity to have an interaction with your brand email. To your point, they can set up a rule, send it to their trash, send it to a folder, what have you. And they may it may not ever see the light of day. So yeah, there’s something to be said for the fact that, you know, that piece that comes in the mail has to be touched and there’s an there’s an immediate interaction.

Rick Rappe: 41:49  

Yeah, we love that about direct mail as well. Obviously.

Renae Scott: 41:53  

I’m so glad that that’s how I started. It certainly wasn’t planned, but that I feel like that foundation has just been so important to me in terms of what it taught me about, you know, data and marketing. Yeah, I, I so appreciate it.

Rick Rappe: 42:09  

Yeah. I lived through the transition from pre-internet, having my career in direct mail through the rise of the, of internet, and a lot of direct marketers went to digital marketing and you know, how to have had a lot of success. But I’ve stayed true to direct mail pretty much my whole career just because I love it. And it’s it’s interactive and we can do such great things with testing and learning and optimizing. and we know it’s productive for the companies that know that learn how to use it really well.

So yeah, I, I tried and true.

Renae Scott: 42:44  

Yeah I did a stint when I was, you know, doing economic development for the state where we, we got people engaged from a digital perspective. We were able to append data and, you know, figure out who they were. And then we did some print CRM to them and then came back to them with additional things from a digital perspective, because you’ve got you had we had more opportunities for storytelling in ways we wanted to project the brand from a print perspective, but then digital. So again, coming back to the fact of they’re not don’t think about your channel channels as competition. Think about how they’re complementary in certain channels are better at, you know, certain things than others.

And how do you how do you think about all the channels collectively as part of your marketing instead of doing this or that? It should be this and this?

Rick Rappe: 43:34  

Yeah, right. One of the one of the great programs that we run is a retargeting program, which is triggered off of people visiting websites, visiting the website. And that type of a, you know, we know they’re shopping online. We know they’re interested in the product that we’re selling. And, you know, they didn’t buy.

But man, if we hit them again with print marketing right away, we get astronomical response rates and and fantastic results. So yeah, you have to use all these things together that makes makes perfect sense. Switching gears a little bit now I want you to think into the future. What emerging marketing trends do you foresee having the most significant impact on retail businesses in the next five years?

Renae Scott: 44:19  

Oh gosh. I think, you know, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I and you probably hear that from probably everybody that you talk to. So I think having really good strong. leadership and take technical capabilities to pair with that. You know, I let I do the heavy lift of data aggregation and so on and so forth for you.

But there’s no replacement for the experience that a ten year leader brings to the table, or someone that’s been sitting in a seat on your marketing team brings to the table. So that that’s one thing I would say. And then I think the importance of the importance of and the discipline around personalization and your martech stack. So again, you can be leveraging AI, but personalization is far more than just personalizing or, you know, your salutation in an email. You know, dear Renae, is not personalization with everyone getting the exact same email. 

How are you using data? How are you leveraging and pairing your data with your AI and all your martech stack? To really think about how you personalize those emails that you’re pushing out? So what I get is really customized and specific to me. And what you need to get Rick as a customer is going to look and feel very different. 

That’s where that’s what’s emerging. That’s what has that’s what’s here. I shouldn’t say emerging. I guess I would say that’s what’s here. And companies really need to be embracing that.

Rick Rappe: 45:48  

That makes great sense. What advice would you give to young professionals who are aspiring to build their career in marketing?

Renae Scott: 46:01  

Well, I think being curious is is huge. And then, you know, I would I would always challenge them to not to be channel agnostic. Right. So you hear about people that are coming up and I’m a social media, you know, I my specialty is in social media or I do email marketing, which is great, right? Everybody has to start somewhere.

But I think growth and marketing isn’t always about going up the ladder. There are it’s very healthy to make horizontal moves so that you can learn about other marketing channels, especially if you want to keep growing and advancing. I was able and fortunate to be able to touch on a few different, you know, few different verticals within marketing as I also grew my career, and I think it makes me a better marketing leader today because I know what’s behind sending an email. I know what it takes to put, you know, a CRM piece or a catalog in the mail. So it’s not just about, oh, just go send that email. 

Well, no. If we want to send an email and we want it to do right, it’s not a 24 hour project. Here’s what needs to go into making sure we really have everything buttoned up and ready to go. So my advice to those that are up and coming is learn as much as you can about all the different, you know, channels in marketing, because I’ll make you a more well-rounded marketing leader as you grow your career.

Rick Rappe: 47:22  

That makes great sense. Wow. Out. We’ve covered a lot today. I wanted to ask you, are there any other books or resources that you found in your career that profoundly influenced your approach to marketing and leadership?

Renae Scott: 47:40  

I think the Strengthsfinder by Marcus Buckingham have always been books that have helped me maybe reinforce who I am as, as a person and as a leader so that I can capitalize on those strengths. I once had a leader tell me that I should spend less time thinking about the things I was trying to change about myself. You know, I’m a I’m generally a pretty direct person, and sometimes that can rub people the wrong way. So I’ve just tried to be really cognizant of how I deliver and how I work with people. But I spent made that less about who I am.

And really tried to just capitalize on, again, who I am as a person. The gifts that I’ve been given as an individual are really what make me who I am. And so being cognizant of who I am and being cognizant of those around me has really, I think, been the most beneficial.

Rick Rappe: 48:33  

Playing to your strengths is definitely something that is super valuable, but it’s hard to do when if, like most young people tend to focus on what they’re doing wrong rather than what they’re doing right.

Renae Scott: 48:48  

Yeah, I mean, that’s a shore them up, right? And you don’t want them to be glaring so that every time somebody talks about you or is considering you for a promotion or considering you for an opportunity, you don’t want the theme of that conversation to be all the things that you’ve got opportunities around. So like I said, shore them up, make sure that there’s not any red red lights, but don’t overexert your emphasis and your focus to those things. You really need to stay focused on your strengths while you shore up any opportunities.

Rick Rappe: 49:16  

Well, this has been so great learning with you, learning from you today. You have so much great experience and and expertise. How can listeners connect with you or learn more about Bee Collaborative’s services?

Renae Scott: 49:28  

Absolutely. My website is beecollaborativellc.com with two E’s beecollaborativellc.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn. Renae Scott. And you know, drop me a line. I’d love to connect and and be able to see how I can help support businesses.

Rick Rappe: 49:47  

Fantastic. Well, it sure has been great meeting you and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

Renae Scott: 49:52  

Thank you so much for having me, Rick. I really appreciate it.

Outro: 49:55   

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover? Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.