The Power of AI Segmentation – Ryderwear’s Story

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to be with us. I'm Daniel Hagos, the General Manager for Emarsys for Asia Pacific. For this session, I'm going to invite Justin Bausch from Ryderwear, CRM Manager, and it's going to be a fantastic session. So let's all give him a round of applause. Let's start by introducing yourself. I think everybody knows Ryderwear but you can tell us about a company as well. Yeah. So Justin Bausch, CRM Manager. I've been at Ryderwear for about a couple of years now. We operate in the e-commerce space with activewear and we've now got a few official Ryderwear gyms in Australia, so eight at the moment and I'm looking to expand to about 20-25 over the next few years. And honestly, probably the best gyms you'd ever find and $8.95 a week. I'm not trying to sell this or anything. To me it's very impressive. Okay, awesome. All right, cool. So you're a very well adopted client of ours. You do really fantastic stuff and even more impressive is that you do with a very lean team. So could you explain not necessarily day to day, but what do you do? How come you're so well adopted? How are you using technology to make sure you're doing such fantastic things with a small team? Yeah. So I'm a team of one. We operate Ryderwear out of the US, UK, and EU and I manage the loyalty platform as well. Honestly, it's probably no testament and it's no coincidence that I feel the less barriers there are, the quicker that you can get things out. My great Customer Success Manager, Sonali, every time she comes up with a new technology or a new idea, I'm the one pushing for the Docusign quicker than what she's giving it to me. That's saying something because Sonali is pretty aggressive. But she gets things done. Yeah but I'm more aggressive. But that's just the the less barriers for us, the quicker we can get to market. And we always want to try and innovate, we always want to try to use the tech stack because a lot of people, I feel, buy these Ferraris that are Emarsys and they drive it like a Camry. They could be doing so much more but unfortunately, there's just those barriers that I don't have that they need to overcome, which is the internal ones and stakeholders and getting the buy in from a lot of people. Okay. I think the internal processes we can come to, because I think that's important as well. And we spoke about autonomy and internal marketing autonomy, if you can call it that. You've had a journey and we're discussing earlier and you're saying you weren't always as well adopted as you are now. What's that journey been like and what have you done and how have you taken it upon yourself to really make sure you're getting value from the technology that you've invested in? Yeah. So when I first came on board, I looked at the data for Emarsys and I think email revenue contribution was sitting at about maybe 4-5% of the business, now we're sitting at just under 20%. Campaign revenue was bringing in about 80%, automation was 20%. Now it's flipped, automation revenue is 80% and that's really where you should be aiming for. A lot of people talk about the right message at the right time. To me, right message at the right time is your automations but you spend most of your time caring about subject lines. You care most of your time about is this email going to look on brand? Whereas if you start to tinker with your automations and the slow incremental value that you see from it and then using all the tactics that Emarsys provides, like we have about 20-30 plus automations going at once when we first adopted and for a whole year it was really about 4. So it's just having the power to the marketer to allow your marketing team to want to tinker with the automations. Like so many people were scared to open up their abandoned cart emails and automations be like, Oh, if I touch something it's going to break, but like break it, test it. And then if it works, great. And we see great results from it. It's so good as well having so much revenue coming from automation because it's almost free, right? And once you've set it up and you have to tweak over time, it's just running automatically. So what type of automations do you do? Like what are the what are the the top ones for you? So pretty much our abandoned cart, fast cart, abandoned browse, our welcome emails and now we're just looking at all our really good campaigns that we've sent out in the past and setting those up as recurring automations. We used to oh, let's take out new subscribers on a brand story which to me, no one cares about our brand story. They want to see what are our best selling products. So I looked at what are the best campaigns that we've performed, what we've sent out, and now we're setting them as recurring automations. Do you know to introduce them and nurture them to the products that's being really successful, using Max AI I like how half the people in this room not using Max AI. It's incredible, honestly like, have you tried beating a chess machine? Like you know you won't be able to beat it, so how can you beat Max AI? For us, that has been great, using Max AI as well. It allows the program and the platform to determine when someone's going to be defective, inactive, who's going to engage. And it's been really beneficial for us. Can you elaborate on Max AI as well because a lot of people might not know of it or might have heard parts of it? And it's often from Emarsys, so it's good to hear it from you where you use it, right? So if you use it day-to-day, like what does it mean for you? How do you use it as a tool? So basically I can just rely on the machine to tell me when a customer is going to engage out of their email, when they're going to defect. So rather than just coming up with the idea like I was having a chat with another Emarsys client and they say, we send it out to our engaged audience and I say, "What's engaged for you?" And it's the last 190 days or whatever it is. But you can rely on Emarsys to tell you when they think a customer is going to engage with the email. So it's taking that guesswork out and relying on, I guess, the technology. And it's also in line with what our CEO Joanna was saying earlier as well, that AI is this really sexy topic that everyone's obsessed with at the moment, which is fine, but breaking away from the buzzwords like for us as a business, we're focusing on how to use technology to make the life of the marketer easier, right? And it sounds like that's what's happening for you. You made a great point, which I'm sure marketing would love, you even referenced it now by saying power to the marketer and using it in a sentence, which is great. Marketing are going to be very happy about that. Power to the marketer and you said that there's power to the marketer from how we see it as a technology vendor, which is how can we empower the life of a marketer to be easier so they can do more automation, they can do smarter marketing, etc.? You mentioned earlier from a business perspective and the shackles that some businesses, some marketers might have in their organizations. So what's the freedom that you have to make these decisions to make changes, in an organization, because it's really important? Right, 100%. And that's the biggest barrier. I've worked to companies where I've tried putting an exclamation mark in the subject line and they're like, Oh, that's not my brand. And I think to myself, if you're that tedious of those little changes, then you're not going to be adaptive to anything that you want to change. So my boss empowers me because he's confident that every change that I make, good or bad, it's going to be a learning. If I break something, doesn't care. Like I've worked for the companies, if you break an automation, it's like the worst thing ever. But at the end of the day, we're not saving lives, we're sending emails. But if these little changes add up and you prove it with a B testing and data, you might be sending it to 30% less people with Max AI in our segment but those savings that I'm not sending out to those unengaged people change out the creative; it might not be on brand those little changes all adds up and you just have to try and break those hurdles and barriers down internally. And that's the biggest barrier I feel. So how do you do it? Do you do internal campaigning? Do you pitch? Do they just leave you to it? I don't want to say, what does your reporting look like internally but if there's a new idea like is there a internal conversation you need to have, like do you have to present things in certain ways? I mean, I work remotely every day, but I just call my boss to say "I'm doing this," and he goes "cool." And then I'll report back two weeks later, I'll do rigorous A/B testing and then I'll do the results. And then that gives me the passion to want to do it like the idea that I have to brief something in to all these stakeholders just to get something slightly approved, it's a bit of a turnoff. I mean, it sounds, it sounds awesome. But also I think that it's a shame because for a lot of brands and we were discussing this before, there's a fear of automation, a fear of marketing, a fear of sending out campaigns. So they're scared of actually launching new programs because they think maybe it's going to be a problem, maybe it's going to be an error as well. So it's good to hear that your organization gives you that freedom and that space. Another area that we were discussing was, which you've touched on, is capabilities and saying that you've been very kind to be a reference for us for when we've been speaking to new clients. And whilst you give very good recommendations; thank you, very good, you asked them questions, you asked them about their capabilities, which I think is really great. It's really healthy. And it means that we're not just trying to get clients on board who want to buy the technology, but actually can get value from it as well. So can you elaborate on that? Because I think it's a very healthy way of us speaking to businesses to say it's great, you've got the budget, it's great you want to do it, but can you do it? And how do you get the capabilities? Yeah, well, one of the references I just did recently, instead of talking about why Emarsys, I asked them about their resources, like who is going to be running the program. And it made them stop and think and it completely changed their hiring process. Rather than just getting a campaign manager with someone that just coordinates assets, they wanted to get someone that was technical, more to dive deeper, open the hood, tinker with things, A/B testings. I've made so many incremental changes to my automations that I'm just having those people that want to do it and are passionate about it are probably most important because at the end of the day you're the ones driving it. Emarsys can only take you so far. And it's a great platform and we're so happy with it but you're not going to get that value unless you haven't got the right people actually wanting to make changes with it rather than just push out campaigns. And how do you do it? Do you do training? Do you just experiment tests and learn? How do you do it? Just experimenting like our Predict Recommendations module while training is just the ugly sister at the bottom of the emails. Sonali and I spoke about it, we're like, "Hey, let's give this more love." So now I've pushed that module up to the top of our email. So even though we do a new collection launch, that product recommendations module when it's at the top of the email, increased our revenue by like 30% every campaign that we do. Originally if we had a brand manager or something, they'd be like, "No, no, no, that's not got anything to do with the new collection drop." But when I A/B tested across 20 campaigns and the data is saying that module is way more important than what you're giving it, I'm going to go with the data than just not being on brand. So just little things like that, little changes, wanting to break that up, putting in more court actions underneath that less products in the in the Predict recommendations module. Yeah, people think that that module there is just going to be just plug and play and sit in it. But there's so much AB testing that you can do with simple modules like that as well. Okay, cool. Two last questions for me. Firstly, just looking at the room, how many people here are in a team? If they are in the marketing team or in a team of one, could you raise your hand if you're in just by yourself in a CRM team, keep them up so I can count. Okay, so there's maybe five people. How many in a team that's five or above? Okay, so probably most in the middle. What advice would you give both set of teams of one and also to the larger teams because there's different challenges? Yeah. 100%. Team one. So myself and the others included that raise their hands in the room, I really appreciate the freedom and flexibility that we have. I think even though you're doing all this work by yourself at the same time you are the driver of the growth and the change and I think that's quite rewarding. The bigger teams, I would say, really give that power to your marketer, really allow them to want to make changes even though they might not be on brand, really push for that drive and push that change because the only barriers to take yourself from zero to a power level which what I feel like we've done at Ryderwear are yourselves. You're the biggest barrier. I feel like the the teams of one are going to huddle a laser and like find a corner and drink together. Crazy after party. So they're going to be like "Teams of one!" 100% All right. Last question for me. Looking forward, so you're always doing incredible things as a brand and you as a CRM manager as well. What does the future look like? What are you going to be working on? What can we all look forward to? So at the moment, we're revamping our loyalty platform. So we use the Emarsys loyalty platform. We haven't given it a lot of love, really driving more love to that. And also we're rapidly growing all our gyms across Melbourne, in Australia, sorry, global. And so what we want to do is being able to operate as a store front as well. So you can imagine trying to connect that offline-online data every time you scan in, get a reward point, redeem that for the coffees and the juice bars at the front. And I guess tying that incentive of working out with loyalty points and things like that, you can redeem on. So that's that's probably the biggest focus for us moving forward. Awesome. All right, Justin, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being such a fantastic advocate for Emarsys. And I'm sure there's going to be lots of questions from people later so they can find you at the bar. Awesome. Thank you. All right. Thank you.