If you’re an Internet retailer or manage a B2C website then you probably noticed that the Internet Retailer Hot 100 for 2011 is out, listing “America’s Best Retail Web Sites.” And if you didn’t notice, that’s probably because you’re up to your digits in conversion rate optimization efforts during this high traffic holiday season. So you could be forgiven for not noticing that several Monetate clients made the cut this year: Free People, Hockey Monkey, ModCloth, QVC, RevZilla, and Sheplers. Congratulations to all of them!
Not that I am implying Monetate is solely responsible for these sites making the list (which is based on a range of factors, most important being successful innovation in online retailing, as determined by the editors and publisher of Internet Retailer). I think it’s fair to say that Monetate understands this better than most: A successful consumer website depends on very smart people plus a bunch of very clever moving parts, only some of which are provided by vendors.
In the case of the Internet Retailer Hot 100, some of these vendors are listed under “Vendor relationship” on the winning profiles, but not all of them. For example, there’s a vendor listing on each profile for “Personalization” but not one for “Segment-specific menu display” or “Product badging for top-selling items” or “Weather-based targeting.”
And that is one reason why only 2 of the 6 Monetate customers in the Hot 100 actually list Monetate as a vendor. Some of our clients see us as a Personalization vendor or use us primarily for personalization, but others see us as a Content Testing or Marketing Optimization vendor, categories that are not listed on the Hot 100 profiles. Some clients use us for a whole range of marketing innovations, as evidenced by the customer stories on our website and the long list of Monetate’s Power Features. Other Monetate clients are frankly unwilling to let it be known that they use Monetate, and we can certainly understand that (one client has described Monetate as: “Our biggest secret weapon”).
So, if you had never heard of Monetate before you spotted our name in this month’s issue of Internet Retailer, we would not be surprised. But we would like folks to know that for three holiday seasons in a row our software has been serving up billions of personalized pages for some of the world’s busiest consumer websites. We’re proud of that fact, and incredibly proud of how all our customers are pushing the boundaries of online marketing and merchandising (not just the 6 who made the 2011 Hot 100 and the 2 who gave us a shout out). We look forward to making 2011 even more rewarding for our customers by serving up billions more personalized and compelling web pages for the millions of consumers who visit their websites.
