Posted March 27th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
I’d like to ask you two questions about Monetate’s software, but first I’d like to share one of the pleasures of my job, reading the Release Notes report from our tech team. Now I realize that “Release Notes” might not sound like exciting stuff, but I get a real kick out of reading what new features–and tweaks to old features–have made it into the latest version of our software.
For example, this week’s Release Notes includes this little gem: “For dynamic text, show a bounding box when dragging text elements.” Sure, it might not sound exciting to you–unless you’re a hardcore Monetate user–but I read it as one more step forward in the ongoing process of making our software the best it can be. Here’s another example: “Unique campaign names are now enforced by the application with number suffixes.” That should prove very helpful when you’re running a lot of campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted March 19th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb
They did it in ancient bazaars beside the Euphrates and they do it in the massive Internet emporiums of today: Discounting.
It’s probably the oldest trick in the world of retailing: offer a discount on the price of whatever it is you’re selling. Yet when I talk to online retailers today I get the feeling that few things worry them more than the fear they’re giving too much discount to too many people.
In the old-fashioned world of face-to-face retail, controlling the amount and number of discounts or offers was something merchants did themselves. You could mentally assess each customer and decide–on a case-by-case basis–who got offered what. Ironically, opening a store on the World Wide Web makes offers harder to control because, unless you’re careful, you’re extending offers to just about everyone. Inevitably that includes some people who would have bought without a discount (and as the traders in the bazaar will tell you, that’s like giving money away).
The answer is to do just what canny traders in the markets of old used to do: Segment your site’s visitors and extend offers selectively. To get a clearer picture of how this strategy works in practice, I want to share a case study involving the difference between offering a blanket discount of “10 percent off” to all site visitors and restricting the offer to a specific group of visitors. Read the rest of this entry »
David Brussin
Stephen Cobb
Blair Lyon
Tom Ellis