QVC: Marketing Agility Drives Innovation

We sat down with Alex Miller, VP of eCommerce and eMarketing at QVC, to learn how this leading retailer uses The Monetate Agility Suite.

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How Does QVC Use Monetate?

At QVC, we use Monetate to optimize the customer experience and sales performance of QVC.com while reducing costs and time-to-market.

We use Monetate for targeting, but also for rapid site development, both content and features. For example, whenever we come up with a new feature we want to try, we turn to Monetate to roll it out and test if it works. If we like the results, then we can build it into our commerce platform; but in the meantime, it’s a whole lot easier to try it first with Monetate.

For example, before Monetate, the process of rolling out new marketing content and features went like this: First we would find out if it could be done with our current package; if so, we’d write up the requirements and get it ranked. After that we would get IT resources assigned and get the design worked out; then maybe, in six months or so, we would try rolling it out onto the site. We wouldn’t test it because the sentiment was Why waste IT resources testing something? As a result, we would often not execute, or we would move forward just hoping our gut instinct was correct.

Thankfully, Monetate has changed all that. First, Monetate lets us roll out features much cheaper and quicker than going through IT. Second, Monetate lets us test stuff and turn it off if it doesn’t work. Third, if something we test does make money, Monetate lets us leave it in place to keep on doing just that.

Of course, QVC.com is not just using Monetate for site development. About a quarter of what we do with Monetate is standard stuff like landing page consistency banners and optimizing site traffic. We plan to do more of this because frankly it makes us money. When you operate at our scale, even a slightly good idea, when layered across 6 million sessions a week, means serious added revenue.

What’s Your Favorite Monetate Feature?

The content insertion capability is huge for us. The ability that Monetate gives us to insert content seamlessly, anywhere on our site without having to modify our template or our pages, that’s phenomenal. That is the dream, that is what everyone tells you they can do, but nobody else can do.

Final Thoughts?

When Monetate first talked to us about their speed of deployment, combined with the testing, combined with the ease of integration, we said: “That sounds unbelievable, but if you can really deliver on that, we’ll get some.” Today, Monetate has delivered on all of that and then some.

Access QVC: Marketing Agility Drives Innovation.