We checked in with Colton Perry, VP of Marketing at PetFoodDirect.com, to see how “America’s Largest Online Pet Store” uses The Monetate Agility Suite.
How Does PetFoodDirect.com Use Monetate?
We started with the low-hanging fruit. For example, Monetate gave us the ability to align creatives from our email offers through to the website landing, and then reinforce the offer throughout the site experience. And Monetate makes it so easy, I can optimize an email blast to half a million customers in just five minutes.
Of course, PetFoodDirect.com is using Monetate for a lot more than email conversion. We are probably running 30 or 40 different campaigns right now. For example, people coming into our online store from certain high-traffic search words get branded offers related to those keywords. We’re also aligning more of our display media with Monetate so we carry the creative messaging in the ad unit through to the site. We’re even using Monetate to support our TV advertising.
One of the most successful tests we’ve run with Monetate was called “Don’t forget,” where we looked at the contents of the customer’s shopping cart and, if it didn’t contain a product from a specific category, we would display a reminder like “Don’t forget to purchase that category.” That test showed a huge increase in average order value and an annualized revenue increase of something like $1.2 million.
What Do You Like Most About Monetate?
Personally, I like the way Monetate is helping me meet and exceed my annual goals as VP of Marketing. Monetate is helping me hit my conversion rate and average order value targets, as well as targets related to repeat purchases and a specific product line we are promoting.
Monetate is an easy tool to use and deploy and yet it gives me more sophisticated targeting rules and capabilities than some of the other products I’ve worked with. To me Monetate is not just an A/B and multivariate testing tool, it’s a targeting tool that helps me understand who visited my site but didn’t purchase, where they are geographically, those kinds of things.
I also like how Monetate can be used across our whole way of doing business. For example, one of our challenges is shipping costs for a heavy product like dog food. One of our highest traffic states is California but they’re out West and we’re out East, so I’m always thinking what can kind of tests can I run to learn more about that challenge, ways of overcoming it. Monetate lets me do this without having to add anything to the IT queue.
Final Thoughts?
The flexibility and speed to deployment of Monetate have been a big help to PetFoodDirect.com as we pursue an aggressive growth strategy. Personally, I love the infinite options that Monetate puts at your fingertips. As a marketer using Monetate you’re only limited by your own thinking.
When your mission is “to provide pet parents and owners with online access to the widest possible variety of pet supplies” you have to be agile, and that’s how PetFoodDirect.com is building its business. The company offers over 16,000 products which it ships all across the U.S. as well as to military personnel overseas. As an online pure-play, PetFoodDirect.com has always been a nimble marketer; now read how the company has made Monetate an integral part of its agile enterprise.