Marketing Masters Monday

This series puts the spotlight on one member of our Marketing Masters program every Monday. To learn more about this program, check out our blog post and for the full roster, visit our Marketing Masters website. Meet Steve Mastrocola, CRM Director at SeatGeek and hear what Steven's proudest moment in his career, what he likes most about using Iterable and more! If you have any questions for Steven about how he's leveraging Iterable in his marketing campaigns, let us know in the comments.

When and how did you get your start in marketing?

As I was looking for a summer internship during my junior year of college, I stumbled upon an opportunity in the marketing department of Sports Illustrated for Kids. I fondly remembered how much I loved reading SI for Kids when I was younger, so I applied and wowed the hiring manager with my old school knowledge of Buzz Beamer. That summer I really enjoyed the daily mix of creativity and analytics in the marketing department, so after I graduated college, I quickly seized on a retention marketing opportunity that popped up at Time Inc. (the company that owned SI for Kids)…..and I’ve basically never left retention marketing since.

What’s been the proudest moment in your career?

I worked at the magazine publisher Time Inc. for a long time, and as you’d probably guess, they had a lot of homegrown marketing tools that were a bit outdated in comparison to what modern marketing platforms offer. During my last two years there, I led the project to move retention marketing for all their brands off those old inflexible systems on to a new modern marketing automation platform. Being able to design the operational and strategic setup of our integration allowed me to transform the way our team worked and allowed us to really individualize our marketing for each consumer. Ironically, the success of that project is what made the CRM opportunity at SeatGeek so attractive to me, as I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to build a CRM operation from the ground up at a powerful brand like SeatGeek.

What’s a mistake you’ve made at work, and how did you deal with it?

I am a big Villanova basketball fan. The day after they won the championship in 2016, I was so incredibly pumped I decided to wear a Villanova basketball t-shirt to work instead of the more formal business attire required at the large company…..despite having a huge presentation to the new CEO that day. I brought a formal button-down shirt to switch into for the CEO meeting, but didn’t anticipate the SVP I worked for spotting me in my Nova t-shirt and having a complete freak out that I was going to walk into the CEO meeting like that. So, needless to say, I put that button-down on earlier than I anticipated, but a “mistake” I definitely don’t regret.

What do you like most about using Iterable?

The freedom. The most frustrating thing in the world is when you are working in a platform and it won’t let you do what you want to do because arbitrary rules are set up. Iterable has done a great job creating the fundamentals and providing optional tools built on top of that, but not forcing them. So I can use a WYSIWYG editor if I want, but skip it and deal with base HTML instead, or I can set up a base recurring campaign and list for an ongoing email but build out a complicated workflow with tons of different rules if I want to get sophisticated. The uniqueness of catering to both the novice and the pro is what sets Iterable apart.

What marketing campaign are you most proud of?

We send a lot of very different campaigns at SeatGeek, but our MLB emails and pushes are the best IMO. To help the user with the buying decision, we dynamically populate all the info they need right in our email, from weather to pitching matchups to bobblehead night.

Besides Iterable, what are the other tools in your marketing toolkit? How are you leveraging them?

Email is still far and away our biggest CRM channel, so while it’s boring and nerdy, I find our email deliverability tools to be crucial. We regularly check Google Postmaster, SNDS, seed testing and blocklist reporting to ensure the emails we work so hard on creating are actually getting to users’ inboxes.

If you weren’t a marketer, what would you be?

Probably a nurse? I’ve long been fascinated by the medical field, but can’t imagine dealing with med school and residency, so being a nurse seems the most up my alley.

What apps, gadgets or tools (besides Iterable!) can’t you live without?

Having young children means I almost never have free hands, so I can’t do without my Amazon Echos. Sadly, the most common phrase the Alexas in my house hear is, “Alexa, play Disney Jr. songs.”