Email, SMS, and CRM Playbook with Brian Best, Senior CRM Lead at Samsung | Ep. 351

0:00Welcome back to the Marking Millennials. Today's guest is Brian Best, Senior CRM Lead at Samson. Brian has spent 15 years driving digital transformation, helping generate over$500 million in e-commerce revenue, and leading the charge on CRM and e-commerce at Samson. He's seen the evolution of the customer journeys firsthand. What started as a couple platforms has now exploded into 10-plus connected touchpoints across email, SMS, push, and beyond. Brian's passion, CRM as an own channel. He loves building with those hand raisers, the loyal customers who want to hear from your brand. And he's got serious insights on how to keep those relationships warm while balancing compliance, AI, and personalization at scale.

0:50Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. What is up, Brian? Welcome to the podcast. Good for having me, Daniel. I just want to jump right in and ask you, how do you actually run CRM at scale at one of the biggest consumer brands in the world? It has become quite complicated, but also really simple at the same time, if that makes sense. So when I started my journey in digital, I started in e-com and I own most of the areas of e-com.

1:45And CRM has always flowed in as a part of the ecosystem. Another part of it was a paid media piece. And CRM is the owned media piece. And as I've done almost every and touch every single aspect of this whole e-commerce ecosystem, I find myself falling in love more with CRM because it's owned media, because it's the hand raisers that have said, I want to deal with this brand. I want to hear from this brand. I want to have conversations with this brand. I want to engage with this brand. And it makes it really easy for us to communicate because we know what the signals are. We know what motivates these advocates, these loyal customers.

2:21And that's where I like to play versus paid media where it's a little bit nebulous and you're spraying and praying that it connects. Whereas these are the folk that we own. This is the data that we have in our identity graph. And we are messaging directly to them because we know how to keep that nurturing and that nurture journey going, if that makes sense. So, yeah. So when thinking of that whole journey over the last year, what have you seen as the biggest unlock throughout that lifecycle? That's a great question. There's so many things that are being reaffirmed right now. I mean, email is not a new channel by any means, but it's a channel that's still continuously growing, is a channel that is a mainstay for a lot of brands.

3:07And now it is extended over to push notification and SMS. I think one of the things that for me is one of those unlocks is how they all work together. Customers who are equally interested in hearing from us via SMS or push notification through the apps or even web push and email is all a part of telling a unified message so that we're not repeating ourselves across all of these channels that are very similar in use and nature. I feel like we see the most immediate interaction with SMS or push notification or even web push. And we do an email, even though that email is still very productive. It is a big part of our messaging strategy.

3:47But I would say that the unlock is that when we get all of them to work in unison, that we see the best results as well as using retargeting to be a part of the ecosystem. What is a typical, let's say like a basic, typical setup look for you, if you could explain in the back end between the mixture of email push, like if you were designing a flow for a customer, what does an example of one of those flows look like? That's another good question. I think for my team, we work with another team called PPX, which is post-purchase experience. They aren't a part of my team, but they sit in my department.

4:25So we build flows for them. We are helping them ingest the customers that we acquire through lead gen depending on where they enter our dot-com experience then the flow is specific to a line of business whether they come through a mobile product that they recently purchased or a television product or home appliance it changes the nature of the journey and then what we try to do is we try to build on that experience because if you're interested in our brand from one line of business you may be interested in others and we're trying to determine what your preferences are, what other products you may be interested in, so that when we start messaging you, we have enough signals about you to know what we should be messaging and what we should be suppressing.

5:09And after about three different emails within that warming up journey to get you into the fold of the onslaught of communications that we have across the various lines of business, CRM accounts, or e-comm CRM, or push notification and SMS, we want to make sure that we're not over-engaging and the mix is kind of like just right. and so that's part of how those journeys get built out as well. I know you talked a little bit about you said mentioned a little bit like personalization of the journey what are some are you collecting a lot of like first party data on the way along the way to be able to like personalize or how does like what does personalization look like to you?

5:49Personalization is an every evolving I think strategy there are a lot of companies who talk about personalization and some get it right, some don't. I think for us, part of it is understanding the product that the person actually owns, other products that they seem to be interested in propensity-wise, and then just aligning up those messages with them. We also listen to our customers in terms of the feedback that we get from them. They interact directly with our emails at times when we ask them how we're doing, and we're paying attention to what they're also saying. So on top of promotions, they also want to get the brand building blocks, like how does this product work?

6:27Are there any product accessories that go with this product that I currently own? And we are listening to that and personalizing emails using a third-party tool like, for example, Movable Ink that allows for three or four different emails to not have the same content but have the same core. So in addition, I may have bought a frame TV, you may have bought a bespoke AI refrigerator, and we will see complementary information about those products that we currently own, but also the latest products that are coming down the pike that we think you may have a propensity for in your next purchase. So we're doing a lot of personalization that way by understanding what signals you are most attracted to, but then also making sure that we're not overengaging with personalization and just throwing things at the wall just to see what sticks.

7:12We are really trying to get very specific around purchase frequencies, meaning how often do we think you need to be messaged about an upgrade of your product? is that refrigerator a five to seven year lifespan is that phone a two year lifespan in terms of when it's time for you to upgrade and we're messaging and nurturing you accordingly based on that that makes total sense because i by the way i do have a frame tv and love it so i'm just giving a shout out to the phrase because you because you mentioned it um but one thing i know you talked about the the post-purchase journey journey but i want to know if a little bit of because one of the cool things about being part of like the CRM team is also the conversions of people who came in and didn't convert yet or didn't.

7:56So first of all, like, what is the process of identifying people who come to your site and then, you know, they haven't purchased and what is the next step? And then also like, what are some of the ways that you retargeting through those own channels to make sure like to get them to get that frame TV to get them to buy that new phone to get them to maybe be interested in that refrigerator? There are a couple of ways that we approach that. I'll list out a couple of pillars that we follow as far as rules for re-engagement for folk who get emails from us. Don't even go to the site. Don't even open the email.

8:33So if you're not even opening the email, what we can do with that is we can remail you and send you the exact same email content. However, we can play around with the subject line and the pre-header to get you to open. We've run tactics where we know that if we do X or Y, then the open rate could be a little bit higher as far as clickability. That typically happens mostly for the audiences that are cold, meaning that they have opted in, but they may not have purchased anything from Samsung as yet, but we don't know that much about them other than they're interested in the brand. So So we're using where they click, what pages they've visited to kind of get a sense of what signals make the most sense for them.

9:16And we put them in specific buckets within that cold audience ecosystem, more or less. But we start with potentially doing a remail using the same content. Because if they haven't seen the content, then they still may resonate. We just may need to tweet the subject line and remail them that way. But if we do get them to click and they go to the dot com and they're not buying anything, but they engage with content, that's where the retargeting strategy comes in. So if they just review a product or just preview a product on our category pages, there's a category retargeting email that kind of comes out and then pushes them further down the funnel into the middle part of the funnel, which will be the PDP.

9:52if they've shown some interest or propensity for that. If they've actually engaged with the product and added it to their cart, then there's that retargeting email that brings them back to the cart experience to say, you know, time to check out. Not necessarily like that, but it kind of drives the conversation back to the cart experience so that they can actually check out. So there are a couple of different ways. Or if you've noticed that this person hasn't really been engaging with our content in the last six months, then they're put into a different type of campaign, which is about churn and reactivation.

10:21So there are a lot of pillars and levers being pulled at the same time and where people fall in and out of the cycle of CRM communications. Yeah, I know it's probably not your team, too, but I bet you're also pushing a lot of those audiences back into the paid team to build custom audiences to retarget on other channels as well. Absolutely. I mean, it's a part of the cookie engagement on dot com. So some of those audiences that come through or.com are still being engaged within paid media. But I think one of the challenges in terms of compliance these days as CRM rules and regulations are being built, as we start leveraging more and more AI as part of the mix, there are now a lot more guardrails being implemented in Europe, especially.

11:12And now also in America that we need to start becoming a little bit more mindful of. So over-engagement and just the leveraging of information is something that's coming into play. So we're becoming more familiar with what that means and the implications that we'll have on CRM as a practice. Yeah, but luckily, the great thing about CRM is that you, I mean, is the ownage of the audience because you're not algorithm dependent. And you have multiple avenues to use emails to try and get people to come back through email, maybe through other avenues to make sure you can communicate with them. Yeah, it's very one-to-one, which makes it so ideal.

12:01And I think that's why within this large practice of e-commerce, I can find a home here and say, well, this works. And I love it here. I don't think I want to go back to the broader practice of e-commerce at all. I think I love CRM. And I think this is where I'm going to be for a while. I think you mentioned this slightly, but I would love to know how you're thinking about AI in the CRM world and what are you using now and what are you excited to test in the future or where do you see it going is a better question. I see it going to agentic AI a little bit more in that leveraging agents, AI agents to help us build out better strategies around audience segments in terms of what's the best message for next best product or next best action.

13:00once we outline what those actions and products are within, say, for example, a Black Friday, Cyber Monday strategy, right? And also leveraging AI to generate actual creative and what is the best creative strategy and just helping us implement and be faster about how we stand these campaigns up. And within all of that, though, I think as we start leveraging AI and how we use the information, this first party, second party, third party data that we have on our customers, I've been reading a lot about the implications for CRM and how certain practices are going to be up for regulation the next couple of months into years, meaning how we nudge customers to buy the next product, how we whisper in the air to say, maybe this product is right for you.

13:51And they're calling it dark practices to some extent, which is very interesting. So a lot of is coming up for grabs as much as I'm interested in how we can spin up campaigns much faster than we normally could or I mean I still trust my gut implicitly and I think it is only going to help us become a lot more efficient we're not looking to displace anyone at this point we're just looking to be able to spin up versionings specific versions that we may not have thought about when we look at our customer segmentation strategy and how we message and what types of creative we generate, I think AI is going to help us to be a lot more proficient in that regard.

14:34And I am excited for the future where that's concerned because I'm actually back in school right now. I'm working on a second master's in AI policy and management. And so we're actually working on class projects that tie back into CRM. I just started a project that talks about moving from something called surveillance capitalism to more, what is it called? Stewardship marketing and how we move from being on that surveillance capitalist bandwidth moving to a type of marketing that is more customer centric and is preservationist of your private data. And we are going to engage in practices that are far more transparent in terms of price transparency, no dynamic pricing and less of the nudging and all of that, just becoming better stewards of marketers as we relate to engagement with our customers.

15:30Yeah, I think in the age of AI, especially for CRM, the ability to, even like two years ago, three years ago, the amount of reporting you had to do manually, the amount of building lists you have to do manually the mind of understanding customers you have to do manually if you if that is taken by ai you actually can now deliver more personalized experiences based on what customers are actually like preferring they want and i think that is like the next level of marketing is people don't want to say they want to got a framed tv and then next minute you're telling them they should get something that is completely like obsolete to what they even care about they want to get something like maybe frame tv then you connect them to like something on the frame tv or something that's complimentary to the frame tv for example or yeah you need soundbar that is exactly and if they show me for something else then and only then should we start incorporating that other line of business into the mix.

16:42Only if they've shown a propensity for it, not just trying to figure it out because that becomes a lot less personal. One thing I wanted to ask you because I know, like I used to be in marketing ops, but I know like tools are important to like, to be, so what are like, I know you mentioned wonder kind, like what are some, like, what are the tools that are like key to your stack? And then also, what is your favorite thing about the tools? Oh, that's interesting. I would say for me, I have access to less of a stack than I used to because we use agencies and they are the ones leveraging those stacks.

17:22I would say Tableau is another one that we use a lot in terms of ingesting data. I would say it's more collaborative as opposed to tools per se because I have other teams that I work with to get insights. So we've got a team that actually does a ton of surveys, does a ton of outreach, and just really tries to understand customer insights from a CRM perspective, and how it relates to our strategies. And that's what I leverage a lot. And then on top of that, I'm always looking for opportunities to use our agency partners in ways that we haven't been using them before. I'll give you a classic example of that.

17:58So one again, it's our retargeting partner, but we wanted to incorporate a lot more personalization with retargeting, which may sound a bit of an oxymoron because it just basically interacts with people who just interacted on the site, whether we know a lot about them or not. But there are ways that we've been trying to slowly incorporate personalization, and we've been seeing a really good net effect of that. And then also pulling in their partnership with Google Inc., which allows us to bring in dynamic content on the fly for those retargeted customers. I think those are some of my favorite tools, but also Movable Ink, as far as being able to offer the same dynamic principles of giving different content that speaks squarely to them.

18:43That's been a game changer for us because we don't have to create 100 versions. We can have five or six main versions, but then we can have module insertions using the dynamic propensities from Movable Ink to bring in that dynamic content. So, yeah, those are my favorite tools of choice. And then one thing that's very interesting, what do you look for for an agency partner? What does a good working relationship look like with an agency partner? Because obviously there's hard agencies to work with, easier agencies to work with. But what's an ideal partner look like? That's interesting because I've worked with agencies now for most of my career.

19:29I would say I've had great relationships with most of them. One of the things that I look for is communication. Working with really smart people that understand what it is that they're bringing to the table. What are your strengths as an agency? And are we constantly seeing those strengths sharpen over the length cycle of our relationship? That's also super important. And do we get along? and are we bumping heads? Is it a complementary relationship and we see you as an extension of our team? And I think that's practically, that's primarily the core of the relationship. Are you an extension of our team?

20:10And if the answer is yes, then yeah, all citizens are firing. I mean, I've worked at the agency level for like three years. I left Brandside, went to agency for three years to kind of see how that was going to go. And I always wanted to see how the other half lived. And I tried it. I didn't love it. I missed Brandside almost every single day and I came back to Brandside. but it gave me a better understanding of how the inner workings of an agency actually run and operate. I don't know if that would be the best example of that, because I'm sure other agencies operate differently, and they have their own rhythm, I guess.

20:42But I would say for me, again, it primarily comes back down to, are you an extension of our team? Are you helping us lift and grow and challenging us as well? And I think those are the things that we look for in a great agency partner. I love that. I do think that if you ever can get agency experience just to understand the agency world, it's always a good way to understand the inner workings of an agency. Because you also have a lot more respect for agencies when you work for an agency because you understand how some clients treat you versus other clients. clients um how like how many more how much stressful it is to get a email like with fire alarms every second um so that's some agencies i've seen and i've seen a lot of my friends who work with agencies that are like or work for agencies and they have gray hairs from that so i i feel i feel i feel for them i mean i also worked at fast for a decade and i think if i could survive that, I could survive anything.

21:47And then that's kind of how I looked at working at my last agency. I mean, Samsung was my client. So transparently, that's how I ended up here. And coming onto that account, you kept being told that, oh, this is a very difficult client, very stressful, demanding, all those things. But coming from fashion, I felt like, well, if I've survived that for a decade, I think I could survive anything. And I didn't find the account that challenging, I found them to be smart, knowledgeable, and they just wanted good work from us. They wanted work that was representative of their business needs, but also meeting the customer needs.

22:23And then on top of that, obviously, you have to intersect what the agency POV is about, right? And I think having that exposure to Samsung made me feel like, okay, I could work here and leave the agency behind. And that's kind of what I did, essentially. a couple more questions one question for you I know I know holiday season is coming up what are some like tips and tricks you can give people in CRM like preparing for this the season whether it's Black Friday Cyber Monday or the the actual holidays I would say a tip of the trick would be to look at what your projections are in terms of your favorite targets for this year is it far and above higher than it was the year before.

23:12And if it is, then you need to start earlier than you had planned, or you need to build in some additional KDPs, meaning additional campaigns prior to that, in the event that your CRM revenue may be a little soft. I think for us here, I think every year everyone's starting, retailers are starting early and earlier. I think this is going to be a really interesting year with tariffs happening. And a lot of companies are bracing themselves for that because it's going to directly impact everyone's consumers. And so we're not really sure what that's going to look like come the holiday season. Is it going to be lukewarm versus hot?

23:51And so there's a lot of unknowns. And I think starting early does give you a bit more runway to kind of get a sense of where things are going and start building those gift guides now and start deploying them now to kind of get a sense of interaction of what people are engaging with. and start prioritizing your best products and your best offers up front and building out that strategy all the way to the end of the year. I think you also make a good point on the tariffs. I mean, if you do have a product that might be longer to ship or take longer and you're waiting until the Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and it says three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, it could be this long to ship for you.

24:32you might be lose a lot more customers and just saying, Hey, like black Friday is coming early. You get this now. Because it's going to take, take five to six weeks to ship because of tariffs. Oh, we don't know what what's going to happen with tariffs. So like might as well get it before a tariff hits for that product. And if you're relying on components to build your existing product here in the U.S. And then I also be a challenge trying to get those components brought in or the price of those components being passed on to customers. Like a lot of that, a lot of those unknowns are going to come into play this year.

25:10So it's going to be a very interesting quality period. Lastly, I like to ask this question to everybody on this podcast, but what's a marketing hill you would die on? Oh, what's a marketing hill that I would die on? I would say I would die on the hill of CLTV. It's something that a lot of brands don't talk about or leverage enough, customer lifetime value, understanding purchase frequencies when and how often people buy your product. And also, what is that entire life cycle of the relationship between the consumer and a brand looks like? Is it five years? Is it 10 years? Make that part of your creative calculus.

25:50Let's make that part of your promotional calculus. And everything kind of emanates from that Mac, right? And I think a lot of brands do not leverage that. And I keep championing it over and over again. It's not anything new. It's not rocket science. It's been around forever, but a lot of brands aren't leveraging it or even know what their CLTB calculus is. And I keep having to reinforce that again and again. And I'll never stop talking about it. So I think that's one of the hills that I think I'd probably die on. Yeah. It's interesting because us marketers a lot of time have to, we're so focused on getting that sale, getting that conversion, where we don't think about what happens after the conversion.

26:39And like you said, post-purchase and making sure that person comes back and becomes a raving fan of the brand. That's sometimes more important because it's so much easier to keep a person a raving fan than trying to create a new raving fan of the brand. Exactly. It costs so much for acquisition. If you look at your CPA or cost per acquisition versus what it takes to nurture this person to the next sale and then also subsequent sales because you know what your CLTV value is, you can divide that by your CPA and then figure out like which ones which one should i be investing in more should i be spending more time pulling people new customers in or should i be nurturing my existing customer but still keeping that lead gen in it in that acquisition funnel you know lively but you but retention and repurchase that's that's to me the lifeblood of any brand yeah because you could what i've noticed a lot of the times is there's some channels that look so good in the sense they will look good look decent in the sense of conversion but they like after the conversion they they just like flop and those people never become a customer again or there's a lot of refunds or um the journey there was like false promises or it was not they weren't nurtured enough as a customer and i wouldn't say false promises but they weren't nurtured enough for the customer and then you look at another channel that might have a little worse a little better and their lifetime value is way better and you're under investing on that channel.

28:20So sometimes it's better. We've had channels where when I used to work at B2B, like Facebook, we used to have such low cost per acquisition, but retention was horrible of those customers. So we had to like, the cost was actually not worth it at the end of the journey. I call it a mousetrap, really. I mean, how sticky is that mousetrap to keep them engaged and coming back and loving the brand? And if you build the right type of mousetrap, and I'm talking about the stickier ones versus the ones with the metal clasp, right? I'm talking about the stickier mousetraps. If you build one of those correctly, then you will have those customers coming back and really advocating for your brand because they love the experience.

29:03It's not just a product, but they love the experience that they have as they engage with you and the products and the information you share with them, leveraging CRM and also leveraging that CLTV calculus as well. Not over engaging, not pushing products that make no sense for them, but pushing products that actually get them to their next or pushing engagement gets them to their next purchase organically. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for coming on the podcast, sharing all your knowledge. Lastly, I want to leave it. Is there any way people could connect with you or is there anything you want to talk about?

29:38Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with me, LinkedIn is obviously the best place. On LinkedIn, I'm Brian R. Best. So BRB for short. You can easily find me there. I work at Samsung. So that's pretty easy to navigate. Those keywords, name, company, fine. Reach out. I'm happy to chat. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Daniel. I appreciate it too. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.