The basic point of this post is exactly what the title says: online retailers still have time to get website testing and targeting in place for the 2010 holiday shopping season, the unofficial of which is November 29, the first Monday after Thanksgiving, 8 weeks from yesterday.
The finer points of today’s post concern the practical aspects of timing your testing and targeting plans, and some examples of the emerging consensus that a truly competitive holiday retail performance now requires the use of testing and targeting technology.
Talk about timing: While it is technically possible for the Monetate team to get testing and targeting campaigns live on your retail website within as little as 48 hours of contract signing, the power and efficacy of these campaigns improves considerably with longer lead times. In other words, the sooner you get the Monetate tag on your site—a simple copy-and-paste that you can probably perform without bothering the IT department—the sooner our servers can start collecting and analyzing visitor data.
The more of that data we accumulate for you, the more accurately you can target on dimensions like previous site visits and prior purchase behavior.
Talk about speed: The difference between a good holiday season in online retail and a great one could come down to the speed with which you can put your marketing ideas into action. When you get an idea you want to be able to test it quickly, and if it produces the desired effect on conversion rates and revenue, you want to quickly move the idea from test to production. Consider this quote from an article that appeared recently in Internet Retailer:
“RevZilla.com, a retailer that sells sport motorcycle gear, parts and accessories, can launch marketing campaigns up to three times as quickly since implementing personalization marketing technology from Monetate Inc., says RevZilla co-founder Anthony Bucci.”
Anthony worked in e-commerce for many years before he joined forces with several other riders-with-technology-backgrounds to create RevZilla.com. For more of his observations about customer targeting and market segmentation read the full article at Internet Retailer.
You can also catch a video interview with Anthony on our website or on our YouTube channel. Also interviewed on video recently about the advantages of testing and targeting with Monetate is Alex Miller, VP eCommerce and eMarketing at QVC. You can see three clips from the interview here.
So, if you want to get on the road to holiday sales success with testing, targeting, and personalization, get your motor running and fire off an email to our Sales Director, Marc Hatton, a veteran of back-to-back, record-setting holiday seasons (that email address is mhatton at monetate dot com) and ask for an online demo.
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