West to eTail and Other Real-time Marketing News from Monetate

Posted February 19th, 2010, by Team Monetate

real-time-newsIf you’re a retailer attending next week’s eTail West event in Palm Desert, California, we’d love to meet up with you there. On Tuesday and Wednesday you can find us at Booth 64, our brand new booth that reflects our focus on real-time marketing. Stop by for a demo of Monetate Real-time Marketer (and a chance to win an Apple iPad, seriously).

There are more details about the event in the news release (that’s a .pdf document). You can find all of our contact information here, including a link to our handy contact form.

We are also sponsoring the Email Marketing & Personalization Summit on Monday. David Brussin will be joined by David Kaplan, VP, Marketing at Tafford Uniforms, a Monetate client. They will be discussing the practical application of real-time marketing to online retailing. Here’s what Mr. Kaplan had to say about that recently:

“Real-time marketing makes a big difference for us and our customers; it means they see relevant content on every visit, which makes their site experience all the more compelling. We can make sure of that because we can target content by behavior, location, source, or any traffic segment we choose.”

You can find more about the Summit in this news release (.pdf). And you can read more about what we’re doing with real-time marketing at Technically Philly, an online news magazine that recently sat down for a chat with with David Brussin. More…

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Posted in Blog, Events

How Was Your President’s Day? Marketing real events in real-time

Posted February 16th, 2010, by Stephen Cobb

Abraham_LincolnI can’t remember who was president the last time I took a day off work for President’s Day. It’s not that I’m lacking respect for our past presidents but—like a lot of other people who work in I.T, retail, marketing, and a range of other industries—I usually find that the work has to go on despite this particular holiday.

However, I did do some Presidents’ Day shopping, starting with special offers that arrived via email first thing in the morning. Here’s one of those emails, sent to me under the very simple subject line of  ”Presidents’ Day Event — Save up to 70%” from OfficeMax:

Obviously, OfficeMax was following the time-honored Presidents’ Day marketing tradition of promotions that discount a select group of products.

One product promotion that caught my eye was the Brother Labeler (putting labels on things is something I’m always planning to do, but somehow I never get round to it, often because I can’t find the last labeler I bought). From a marketing perspective, OfficeMax was already making considerable progress with this particular consumer. I had not only opened the email but paid attention to the contents. Then they scored a “click-thru” as I clicked on the labeler offer and arrived at the product page on the OfficeMax web site.

presidents-day-marketingYou can see the product page here. What you can’t see, because it wasn’t there, was any reference to Presidents’ Day. The price of $9.99 matched that quoted in the email offer, but this was referred to as INSTANT SAVINGS and not a Presidents’ Day promotion.

And that raises an interesting marketing question: To what extent is conversion affected by discontinuity of messaging?

Note that I am not criticizing OfficeMax here, for all I know I was in a control group or A/B test of visitors who were shown the product page without a Presidents’ Day sticker on it. Furthermore, I’m not saying that adding a Presidents’ Day sticker would have clinched the deal for me or any other shopper. What I’m saying is that it might make a difference, might trigger a conversion, but you don’t know unless you test.

There is plenty of evidence that marketing around real-time events is effective (heck, in the world of brick-and-mortar retailing it’s a tradition far older than Presidents’ Day). Where online retailing can really shine is in testing the extent to which degrees of real-time connection prove effective for virtual shoppers, then capitalizing on those test results. Of course, doing that requires a very nimble real-time marketing platform. Fortunately, such things do exist and can be put in place very quickly, hopefully in time for the next big real-time marketing event.

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Posted in Blog, Strategy, real-time marketing, testing

New Decade, New Blog, Same Goal: Helping you achieve marketing excellence

Posted February 14th, 2010, by Team Monetate

Marketing campaignsThat’s right: New decade, new blog, same goal as the old blog, yet better. Why better? Because the blog will now reflect Monetate’s new focus on real-time marketing. As we see it, ”real-time” is the key to e-commerce and m-commerce success in this new decade.

Sure, all the past posts are here, with their focus on practical ideas and advice for improving the performance of your online marketing and merchandising efforts. But moving forward our focus will be a particular approach to marketing, an approach we refer to as “real-time”.

Working with our clients over the past two years we have seen the terrific growth in online revenue that is possible when commercial web sites respond in real time. At first we thought this growth was simply a result of the post-click tailoring of content to different traffic segments, the instant generation of personalized pages that Monetate has pioneered. But over time, and through extensive analysis, we saw that there was more to it than that.

Real-time marketing means more than marketers creating campaigns that can customize page content on-the-fly to match what you know about the visitor viewing that page. It also means marketers being able to put campaigns in place on their schedule, in real time, not some stretched version of time created by the e-commerce platform or the availability of I.T. resources.

We firmly believe companies that “get” real-time marketing will be the ones that exceed expectations in this new decade. And the marketers and merchandisers who understand and implement “real-time” are the ones who will excel.

We are thrilled to be in a position to help make that happen.

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Posted in Blog, General, Housekeeping, marketing, real-time marketing