Greg Thompson, Director of CRM at Scene+, believes some of the strongest marketing starts with data and the ability to turn it into a compelling story. From developing increasingly personalized Year in Review campaigns to creating a content portal that streamlines email production, he’s always looking for ways to make communications more meaningful and the work behind them more efficient.
In this Q&A, Greg shares why data storytelling is his greatest marketing superpower, how his team turns member engagement into quick wins, the campaign he’s most excited to work on this year, and why asking the right questions is key to getting more from a partnership.
What campaign are you most excited to work on this year?
Year in Review is always one of our favorite projects, partially because it is very well received by members and draws strong engagement, but also because it gives us a chance to be creative and think outside the box.
The bar for Year in Review campaigns has been set high by businesses like Spotify, so we look at it as a challenge to find ways to create a highly personalized, interesting, and meaningful communication. Being a loyalty program, Scene+ has a large amount of member data that can be used to create a personalized summary. However, with a breadth of data comes the challenge of thinking through the many, many “what if” scenarios to ensure all members receive a positive communication.
2026 will be our third Year in Review campaign, and each one has become progressively more personalized and engaging. We’ve leveraged Movable Ink to dynamically pull in member details around transactions at each partner, bucket members into earning tiers, and even include a scratch-and-reveal offer.
Planning for the 2026 edition is just kicking off, but we are excited to begin this work!
What is your greatest marketing superpower?
I started my career in the market research space in a very data-focused role. My job was to work with clients, understand their needs, and then build a survey or questionnaire to provide them with the answers they were looking for. Once the survey was completed, I would analyze the data and put together a summary and recommendations.
I did this for about three years before shifting into a more traditional marketing role. Although it wasn’t a long period of time, I think those three years at the start of my career really helped define me.
Data is such an important part of marketing, and having the ability to look at a complex data set, make sense of it, and pull out the key insights is so beneficial. Further to that, having the ability to use the data to tell a story is priceless. At the end of the day, a lot of what marketers do is storytelling, and if you have numbers to back up your story, it becomes a lot harder to question it or poke holes in it.
My superpower isn’t anything overly flashy or exciting, but I truly believe that, in the marketing world, having the ability to leverage data to build a story is a superpower.
What’s your greatest efficiency hack for working smarter, not harder?
To me, this is the biggest challenge going forward. There is a constant demand to do more and do better, but with the same amount of resources. Finding efficiencies is imperative, and with the evolution of technology, this has become both easier and harder.
AI offers a huge opportunity for efficiency, but there is also risk, along with learning curves and constant change that needs to be managed. Part of the challenge is being efficient with how you use these tools. AI will certainly be a huge part of marketing going forward and will absolutely create efficiencies, but I believe we are very much in the early days and are still learning how best to use it.
The greatest efficiency we have in place today is a content portal and email automation. We developed an online portal that allows teams to submit content and offer requests. This content is then turned into email blocks within the portal itself, where it can be previewed for quick approvals.
The portal is connected to our email service provider, which allows us to build the email in the portal through drag-and-drop functionality. We can then click a button to have the email built through a series of automations and tests delivered to our inbox.
Creating this portal and automation process allowed us to remove several steps from our end-to-end process and completely eliminate the need for an email developer to be involved. It shortens timelines significantly and opens the door to hyper-personalization, so we’re getting closer to our end goal while using fewer resources to get there!
What’s your favorite marketing strategy to use that always drives a quick win for your team?
A go-to marketing strategy for me and my team is leveraging follow-up communications to target members who have already shown some form of engagement but haven’t completed the desired action yet.
We often use this approach when running one of our big mass-marketing events. After the event, we’ll target members who did something like click a link within an email or on our website but failed to complete the desired action. We’ll send a follow-up communication, typically including an offer, and remind them why they should complete it.
These members are already engaged with the program and our marketing communications, so we typically see very strong engagement with the follow-up. Since they have already shown interest in the topic, response rates tend to be strong as well. When we include an offer as an extra incentive, the results become even better.
The best results we’ve seen, which take a little more work, come from building campaign-specific follow-up triggers. Twenty-four hours after a member takes the initial action, they receive the follow-up reminder. It’s basic Marketing 101, but it works!
How do you get the most out of a partnership with a company like Movable Ink?
The marketing world is such a diverse place, with experts in many different areas, but it is truly impossible for any one person or organization to know everything. This is why having strong partnerships with businesses that can clearly add value and help drive objectives is essential.
Over the past several years, we’ve grown and developed our relationship with Movable Ink by having open conversations about our objectives, challenges within the business, and areas of opportunity.
Movable Ink works with several of our other partners, so they are in a unique position to share details on how those partners are using the platform to improve their marketing efforts. In many cases, they bring the Scene+ team together with other partners to collaborate and share learnings.
Movable Ink has been operating in the CRM space for so long that the team has acquired a vast amount of knowledge. For us, the best way to get the most out of our partnership is simply to ask questions: Is this possible? Have you ever done something like this? Do you have examples of other partners doing this?
Sometimes the impossible becomes possible when you ask the right questions.
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