In addition to the details of Monetate 11 in the press release and on TechCrunch, and in the cool new video, we wanted to provide some perspective here on the blog.
In 2008, Monetate–the company–started shipping a ground-breaking software application–called Monetate–that was designed from the ground up for website marketers and merchandisers. The product is a cloud-based SaaS that is backed by a team of e-commerce experts dedicated to helping Monetate clients get the best possible return on their website investments.
Over the next three years, the Monetate code was tweaked and expanded. New features were added, often as a direct result of suggestions from our growing client list. The system architecture was refined, and refined again, to deliver lightning-fast performance, proven fault-tolerance, and the kind of scalability that can handle the biggest shopping sites on the busiest shopping days.
More Than a Pretty Face
The one thing about Monetate that didn’t change much in those first three years was the interface, partly because the original design was simple, functional, and easy to use. But over time the Monetate feature set began to outgrow the UI. So we redesigned it. We wanted Monetate 11 to enable marketers at all levels to handle all aspects of creating, measuring, and managing large numbers of campaigns to test and deliver targeted website content, without the need to call on the IT department or specialized coders.
Here’s a example of how easy it is to launch a campaign with Monetate: marketers simply need to enter the “who, what, when, and why” of the campaign into the Monetate dashboard, seen here:
Test to the Max
Every experienced marketer knows that the performance of any offer or message is hard to predict, so the answer is to test it against a control group. That’s why the default setting in Monetate 11 is to automatically A/B test against a control group. The test results can be tracked in real time so you can quickly see the impact of your offers and messaging on key metrics like conversion, average order value, cart abandonment, and revenue per session.
When tests trend positive, Monetate 11 allows you to disable the control group with one click. That means the content that performs best is immediately visible to all site visitors, maximizing lift and incremental revenue with zero additional cost or coding.
While Monetate 11′s interface makes A/B testing about as easy as it can get, the product has enormous testing power, supporting an infinite variety of A/B/n and Multivariate tests. This ease and power mean that some of our clients now routinely run more than 100 concurrent tests per month.
To make testing, targeting, and personalization of websites even easier, Monetate 11 now features iPad compatibility so that marketers can design and manage campaigns from just about anywhere (check out the marketing guy using Monetate on his iPad in the home page video).
Because we think large-scale testing is the best way to achieve website optimization we have equipped Monetate 11 with a rich set of tools that make it easy to manage a lot of campaigns. These tools include campaign cloning and action copying. In practical terms that means you never have to repeat yourself if you create a campaign or part of a campaign that you want to replicate or re-purpose. And Monetate 11 has campaign tagging and filtering which enables you to organize and view your campaigns in whatever way makes the most sense to you.
Target Offers and Promotions by Customer Segment
Monetate 11 delivers an unmatched range of targeting options that enable operators of commercial websites to tailor content to disparate traffic segments and create more relevant, compelling, and valuable interaction with their customers. Targeting abilities provided by Monetate 11 include:
GeoTargeting: Tailor messaging and promotions according to your site visitor’s location. Use geographic targets like country, state, shipping zone, and media market, or target based on demographics like median income. You can also segment offers according to distance from physical stores, offices, or shipping points, even the real-world locations of your competition.
Weather-based Targeting: Emulate the brick and mortar retail strategy of adjusting displays and promotions based on the weather. Monetate 11 knows what the weather is like where site visitors are located so you can target traffic segments with climate-appropriate products, messaging, and promotions.
Behavioral Targeting: Target based on any aspect of past or current visitor behavior on your site. Mix and match from a rich menu of criteria including buying patterns and brand preferences, product and category browsing history, number of days since last visit, number and value of items added to cart, and much more.
Personalize the Online Shopping Experience
Monetate 11 features rules-based product recommendation capabilities that allow you to target recommendations based on complex business rules, as well as your knowledge of customer preferences. This ensures the right product is put in front of the right customer at the right time. Additionally, the powerful image compositing tool that is built into Monetate 11 enables you to automatically create high-quality creatives to run alongside targeted campaigns.
The Flexibility to Add Functionality
Monetate 11 gives Marketing the ability to test and deploy HTML and JavaScript. You can further leverage Monetate’s single tag install to evaluate third-party website features like customer reviews, social media integration, product videos, and predictive search, with no back-end coding or IT involvement required. That means you can use Monetate to seamlessly convert successful test deployments into permanent site features.
Analytics & Reporting
At the heart of the Monetate platform is an analytics engine that provides you with all the data you need about traffic segments and purchasing patterns to make informed decisions about the promotions, messages, and other content they deliver to consumers. Monetate 11 adds tagging and filtering of campaigns to provide multiple perspectives on key metrics like conversion rate and average order value. Since Monetate lets you design and run multiple concurrent campaigns while simultaneously testing them in real time, without having to rely on your IT department or specialized coding staff, the result is vastly improved marketing efficiency and website ROI.
The Bottom Line
One of the key metrics that Monetate 11 allows you to track is incremental revenue, in other words, how much additional revenue a particular offer or messaging campaign created with Monetate is generating from your website. This number is often more impressive than another number on which a lot of marketing literature focuses: conversion rate lift. You might see a 3% lift in conversion rate and not think much of it. But if your website has a lot of traffic even that small percentage can spell six figures in cash, and a whole lot more in annualized incremental revenue, the money the campaign could–all things being equal–generate over the next 12 months.
What really matters to your bottom line is the incremental effect of each campaign. We have seen marketers tune their websites over time, test upon test, gaining a percentage here, a percentage there, finally adding up to serious growth in site revenue (check out this case study at Integrated Solutions for Retailers and this article in Retail Info Systems News).
But “finally” is not the right word. The test and target process is always ongoing. There is always more you can do to personalize the site experience so that it is more compelling to your visitors. And that’s how we view Monetate, the product. We got to Monetate 11 through a lot of incremental changes rolled into production once a fortnight, building to a level we considered worthy of a number: Monetate 11.
To get a closer look at Monetate 11 schedule a demo today.
