Retail & E-Commerce
Casey Kohner
Global Email Marketing Manager
Fun Facts
I biked 175 miles across Wisconsin, from the Iowa border to Lake Michigan, in just one day. Twice. There were many snack stops!
I enjoy tinkering with LED lighting, and a few years ago, I made a programmable set of marquee LOVE letters for my wedding.
My parents were auctioneers, so I have an affinity for antiques and finding gems among the junk at resale shops.
Casey’s Bio
With almost 24 years at Trek Bicycle, Casey is the Global Email Marketing Manager responsible for overseeing Iterable operations in 34 regions worldwide. He excels at creating data-driven, localized email strategies that engage and inspire Trek’s diverse customer base. By blending creativity with analytics, Casey drives impactful campaigns that strengthen the brand’s digital presence and foster customer loyalty with audiences across different cultures.
Featured Quote
It’s a unique challenge to coordinate marketing teams that use 30+ languages and country locales. With Iterable, the nesting of locales within single campaigns makes us much more efficient in helping our global offices run high-impact marketing.
Interview
When and how did you get your start in marketing?
While working in Trek’s B2B e-commerce department, I was asked to join the marketing team in the mid-2000s to help with all this new “social media” stuff. The rest is history!
What’s a mistake you’ve made at work, and how did you deal with it, or what
did you learn from it?
Data validation in dynamic campaigns is always a challenge. We recently ran a campaign with dynamic reply-to addresses, most of which contained a typo that we missed. We identified impacted customers, sent a follow-up message, and met with the internal stakeholders to understand the origin of the error and how to prevent it in the future.
What tips, tricks, or pieces of advice would give a new Iterable user?
Custom events are huge opportunities. If there is one thing I would have done differently during our implementation, it’s integrating as many custom events as possible with full event field details.
What led you to choose Iterable over others in the market?
It’s a unique challenge to coordinate marketing teams that use 30+ languages and country locales. The nesting of locales within single campaigns makes us much more efficient in helping our global offices run high-impact marketing.
As a consumer, what brings you joy from a brand’s outreach/communication?
I recently moved to a new state and had to find a good auto shop for basic car maintenance. Picked one in my neighborhood, and upon picking up my car after service, I found a gift bag with a thank you note, coffee mug, and hot chocolate packet. Later that month, I received a simple folded newsletter in the mail containing maintenance tips and local stories. It’s an old-school approach but a refreshing difference I hadn’t expected. Now I understand why they are so popular.
Besides Iterable, what are the other tools in your marketing toolkit that you
can’t live without?
Digioh has been instrumental in executing high-impact lead-gen campaigns for us. We’ve also used them for less traditional use cases like add-to-cart merchandising and adding content to our site that our existing CMS couldn’t do.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given?
I keep coming back to the advice to “Simplify your business.” This can mean using tools to automate processes for efficient execution or diving into the business problem you’ve been asked to solve to understand and deliver the sweet spot ratio of resources to outcomes. Complex solutions require lots of documentation and are often challenging to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.
Campaign Portfolio
Trek’s Personalized Approach to Driving Repeat Retail Sales
To scale personalized email marketing efforts from local store managers and staff, with the primary goal of increasing repeat sales across Trek’s retail locations.
Trek’s retail marketing team leveraged Iterable’s Catalog to create personalized email campaigns from local store managers and staff at scale. This approach aimed to foster a more authentic and personal connection with customers. The execution of these seemingly simple plain text emails involved managing complex data for nearly 300 store managers, requiring meticulous attention to detail for contact information accuracy and rigorous quality assurance processes to maintain campaign effectiveness amidst manager turnover.
These personalized emails delivered significant positive outcomes for Trek’s retail stores. Specifically, they drove solid sales results and successfully initiated numerous new conversations between store managers and their customers, interactions that would likely not have occurred without the implementation of these Iterable-powered campaigns.
This personalized email, seemingly sent by your local Trek store manager or team, proactively checks in on your bike and encourages you to schedule a tune-up before your next ride. Leveraging store-specific details and aiming for a direct, conversational tone, it seeks to re-engage customers and drive service appointments, ultimately fostering a stronger connection with the local Trek shop.
