Mountain Gazette Uses Wing to Improve Response Rates to Customers by 29%

Outdoor magazine Mountain Gazette relaunches as a bi-annual publication and uses Wing to support its customer care and ecommerce platform administration. Wing helped the Gazette 8X their print run in a span of 2 years.

Founded in Colorado in 1966, Mountain Gazette is a pioneer in the outdoor trade publications industry. In 2020, it relaunched as a bi-annual coffee table celebration of outdoor culture. The Gazette’s audience consists of some of the world’s greatest athletes and outdoor enthusiasts, including tech CEOs and marketing professional.

The new Gazette sold out its first issue within 3 weeks. Today, their renewal rate is upwards of 90%, and they have an impressive waiting list for advertising partners, including brands like The North Face and Patagonia.

The magazine prides itself upon its focus on authentic stories about outdoor culture.

Mountain Gazette

Mountain Gazette is the original outdoor magazine. It was resurrected in 2020 as a bi-annual coffee table celebration of outdoor culture. The new Gazette launched in the summer of 2020 and sold out its first issue within 3 weeks. Today, they have a 91% renewal rate.

With Growth Comes Pain

Mountain Gazette’s relaunch was a success from the beginning. Editor and owner Mike Rogge and his team sold out their initial print run of 1,000 copies in 3 weeks. . Their subsequent spring edition of 3,000 copies sold out almost as quickly.

They have been consistently increasing the number of prints since then, and as of writing, are scheduled to print 8000 copies for their next run.

As they have kept growing their loyal, engaged customer base, the core team found themselves struggling to keep up with all the customer service queries and emails, and other business queries that would reach them. It escalated to a stage where it would take them a week to get back to some people.

And sometimes, some communication would just fall through the cracks, or get buried under piles of newer unattended messages.

Prioritizing Customer Care

The editorial team was spending less and less time on editorial, marketing and sales-related activities, typical for publishers growing faster than anticipated.

Customer service was taking a significant hit – the team was replying to emails much later than they wanted. Ideally, they wanted to reply to all queries within 48 hours, but at times it was taking them 7 days or more.

Mike met the Wing sales team, and requested an ecommerce assistant with knowledge of Shopify and Google Business Suite, and experience in customer service.

The Solution

Wing found Komal for Mountain Gazette. She is skilled in website management, customer service for ecommerce stores, and other ecommerce store activities like product cataloging, inventory management, and price checking and comparison.

Once Komal got onboarded, she started working on customer support for the Gazette. She mainly handles three tasks for them:

1. Email customer support – addressing and resolving all customer inquiries, maintaining inbox 0, and sending templated responses to FAQs

2. Manual order creation – adding products, customer details, and shipping information to orders, reviewing these details, and sending invoices

3. Ecommerce platform administration – as needed, making changes to the Gazette’s ecommerce store pages or blog post links, updating customer addresses on the company’s ecommerce management platform and on their subscription payments platform

Outcome

On a scale of 1 to 5, Rogge says that Komal is a 6. Komal routinely goes above and beyond her duties, which has been invaluable for the team.

Overall, the Gazette is satisfied with how well Komal has integrated into their team.

According to Mike Rogge:

“We’d actually started getting feedback like, ‘Komal is so friendly!’ or ‘Komal is the nicest person ever!’ We didn’t expect her to be so customer-facing, but she’s become the face of our customer service and she’s a beloved member of our team now.”

Komal’s efforts even helped the team find 2 or 3 key emails that had slipped through the cracks. One is a licensing deal to print the magazine in Japan. “That was real money we were leaving on the table,” Mike said.

When Komal came in, things became smoother for the core team.

“My marketing director and I talk about it all the time,” Rogge said. “There’s pre-Komal Mountain Gazette, and post-Komal Mountain Gazette, and post-Komal Mountain Gazette is a much better place for us to be operating in.”