Skout Organic is a healthy snacking brand that relies on simple, plant-based ingredients. And simplicity isn’t just a selling point when it comes to ingredients. For Founder Mark Collis, if there’s a way to simplify a long, arduous process…he’s interested. Especially true if it will free up time to focus on more strategic, growth-focused activities.

The Challenge

To say that managing email marketing lists is a headache, would be an understatement. Tens or hundreds of thousands of rows of data. New contacts on a daily basis. In the words of the wise Kimberly Wilkins, “ain’t nobody got time for that.”

The mechanics of email list management, deliverability and optimization is a full time job (or two, or three) for large brands. But for growing DTC brands with a small marketing team, that’s not an option. Skout’s marketing agency, Disruptive Engagement, could have done this task, but their expertise is put to much better use on strategy and creative. 

“I used to spend hours managing our email list every month. It’s such an important touchpoint with our customers, and having the right list is critical to saving money and increasing deliverability,” Mark Collis, Chief Snacking Officer, Skout Organic. 

To add an extra level of complexity to the task, Skout uses consent-driven Gobot to de-anonymize website traffic. This is a popular way to grow a brand’s first-party dataset, but it also results in an artificially inflated customer list.

The Solution

To offload the burdensome task of list optimization, Skout Organic turned to orita’s self-service platform. Now, orita dynamically manages Skout’s email marketing lists, programmatically suppressing and activating contacts in Klaviyo when the time is right. 

Typically, brands turn to general best practices for when to suppress contacts from their list. For example, “suppress after 90-days of no engagement” or “remove from list permanently after 365 days of no engagement.” But general rules can only get so close. 

For Skout, customers typically churn after 206 days without engagement. So no industry-standard practices would serve the brand well. 

The machine-learning software continuously analyzes the way customers interact with the brand, gaining a better understanding of when customers should be receiving emails based on purchase cycle and seasonality. It also receives sales and website visit data in real-time, re-activating any temporarily suppressed contacts the moment they engage with the brands website or an old email.