Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: Exploring New Frontiers with Cabela’s Angele Young

At the onset of COVID-19, one thing became clear: Retailers needed guidance. In an effort to help brands operate effectively and efficiently in this digital world, we launched Coffee & Commerce with Cascone: A biweekly series with bite-sized episodes tackling the latest in retail, featuring established marketers from today’s biggest brands.

Sports and Outdoors is a category that has seen tremendous growth this year as consumers spend more time at home. Angèle Young, Digital Strategist at Cabela’s, shares how her team managed the transition to digital from an experiential brick & mortar store by balancing traditional marketing channels with digital personalization.

CASCONE: Hi everyone. Welcome back to Coffee & Commerce with Cascone. I want to talk about the sports and outdoors category today, which according to our data has shown remarkable growth online since the pandemic, with overall purchases up 120% year over year and brands seeing first time buyers nearly double since the same time last year. Joining me today to discuss this is Angèle Young, digital strategist for Cabela’s Canada. Angèle, thank you for joining me today. 

ANGÈLE: Thanks for having me. 

CASCONE: So Angèle why don’t you tell us how Cabela’s is focusing their digital efforts during this time and what has changed over the course of the past six months?

ANGÈLE: A lot has changed. I think everyone can say that. We had to be a lot more agile, that’s the biggest difference in terms of consumer behaviors. Especially in Canada, what we found was that a lot of customers have moved toward buying direct instead of Amazon. So during the height of COVID, the government of Canada actually released an RFP for a distribution company to handle all of the medical PPE for the country, and Amazon was awarded that contract. What that meant for Amazon Prime and Amazon customers is that there was a significant delay in shipping. So because of this kind of consumer disruption, it allowed for a lot more opportunity for those consumers to come direct and realize we have the same prices and often do have the same kind of shipping, so it shifted a lot of that behavior to buying direct instead of from those third party sellers, and we definitely saw a big increase in new customers. 

The other big thing was just having to be nimble. A lot of our marketing practices were very rooted in traditional marketing, especially flyers, so being so agile on digital has really allowed us to experiment on some new things, taking a bit of that piece of the pie from the traditional marketing budget, being able to invest it in digital and really be able to show dividends. 

CASCONE: That’s awesome. So you’re saying two major things here. I think it’s cool, especially as we move out of this age of Amazon. Even with the higher demand of people buying online where you would think, “Oh, Amazon’s going to come in and crush all of us because they kind of had to pivot the other businesses.” This was their time to shine, and I think that’s really cool because we at Bluecore believe that Amazon isn’t the only winner. There’s so much more that the brands like Cabela’s have to offer from a 1:1 perspective that I don’t know if Amazon is always going to be able to replicate. So being able to make that shift is really cool.

I’d love to hear more about what you’re saying with regards to the flyers. In a past episode we had with Mark Friedman, he even mentioned some brands view flyers and catalogs as more of a philosophy, and even though it’s harder to measure, it’s kind of core to the business. And it seems like you guys are shifting that a little bit, but I want to get your take on that overall.

ANGÈLE: Yeah, for sure. For both Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shops, the fundamentals of our business are rooted in direct mail. So a long time ago, we started as a direct order business. So really having that printed distribution has been core to our business, but it’s also our history, so we never want to get away from that. But we do realize that there’s a time and place for digital and it’s been really exciting because there’s been a lot of time during COVID, especially in Canada, we realized that consumers didn’t want to be getting a fire pack. They didn’t want to get it at their doorstep, open it up, not knowing who’s touched it where it’s been, so there was a big shift in just digital consumption of media. People still like the flyer format, they like to read it and they like to consume the media that way, but even just changing that budget by decreasing our print distribution to 1 million rather than 3 million and re-allocating that investment in digital was something that I wanted to try. Obviously there was a decent amount of risk involved before, but this was a COVID blessing for us on the digital team to say, “Hey, give us a portion of that and we can make it work.”

CASCONE: The pandemic has challenged what the traditional marketing mix should look like. And I don’t think there’s ever going to be a right mix and it’s going to be different for every brand. Like you said, something like fliers is so ingrained in the Cabela’s heritage, and I would bet that your customers are kind of attached to that too. And they value that part of the business. So it’s cool to see how you can preserve some things and maybe pivot and weight things like digital more heavily. So in that vein from a digital perspective, since you guys are seeing an influx of first-time buyers, what are you doing to drive repeat purchases with that group?

ANGÈLE: That’s a very good point. So one of the things that we noticed early on is obviously we did get a lot of new customers coming, whether it was people that might’ve shopped through Amazon or people in general that wanted to go camping and fishing, since people took up a lot more new activities during the pandemic.

So one thing that we realized early on was that we were really promotional, especially during the height of COVID, just to try to get lots of product out, we needed to really keep up with demand. Right now what we’re seeing is that we don’t need to be as promotional, so we’re focusing more of our efforts, especially with our new customers, on that nurturing relationship. One of the things that I love about Cabela’s and Bass Pro is that when you walk into the store it’s so incredible. The other good thing is when you go and you talk to any of our Outfitters, they are the people that are the most passionate about the sports and the activities that we do.

So part of what I try to do in digital is to capture that experience and put it online as best as we can. And that’s been really crucial for those new customers that might have never had an in store experience or don’t live near a store. We want to make sure that online visit is legendary too, as we’ve kind of built our whole empire on the in store experience.

CASCONE: This is a big topic I’m hearing more and more about: How do you take the community aspect of what a customer, that connection that a customer feels with a brand that is often fostered by the in store experience, and replicate that digitally? It’s really interesting to see how brands are pushing the envelope as far as the things that customers get excited about when they walk into the store and how they can translate that online. So I think it’s really smart that Cabela’s is thinking that way and thinking about ways to foster that connection with education and moving away from this catchable promotion cycle. Before we wrap up, I know Cabela’s is a real innovator and your team tests and learns different things, so I’d love to hear if there is any particular program that you’re really excited about that you’ve done over the past six months?

ANGÈLE: Especially within Bluecore, what I’m most proud of with the work that we’ve done centers around geo-locate offers. So obviously we do a lot of activities that are seasonally different, especially on the geography of Canada. For instance, fishing season, you have salmon on one coast, but you might have pike or walleye in the middle of the country. So I always try to akin the digital experience to the retail experience because that’s what we know. And that’s what we know worked for so long. So if it’s raining in a city, the store manager is going to put out a pad of umbrellas and rain gear to the front of the store because that’s what’s seasonally relevant for that exact day and what’s happening. I want to do that online. So being able to ingest geographical data within Bluecore has helped really hyper segment within our audiences. Then I can say this is our full promotional offerings and this is what people in British Columbia are going to be interested in because it’s raining in Winnipeg. 

This really allows us to show that we know the customer and we’re not just some robot sending random products that might not be of interest to them. It’s really that personalized effort. And it comes from just plugging in that extra data within Bluecore and letting it shine. That’s definitely something I’m really excited about, especially as we head into winter.

CASCONE:  I imagine that same idea works really well with store closures and openings in different regions, like promoting curbside pickup in certain areas, especially as we go into the holiday season. So Angèle, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you everyone for tuning in.

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