Tafford Uniforms: Test and Optimize Faster than Ever Before

We sat down with David Kaplan, VP of Marketing at Tafford Uniforms, to talk about how the speciality retailer uses The Monetate Agility Suite.

Access Tafford Uniforms: Test and Optimize Faster than Ever Before.

How Does Tafford Use Monetate?

We are using Monetate in a bunch of different ways, from user specific promotions and messaging, to targeting of certain traffic segments, to testing of site content.

The fact that Monetate enables all it does from one simple tag is amazing, even though we’ve barely scratched the surface so far.

The work that Monetate performs for us falls into several categories:

1. Pure content and page design: for example, which images work best, what buttons convert best, that sort of thing.

2. Specific campaigns: for example, offers and messaging based on new-versus-returning, average order size, and so on.

3. Site feature experiments and testing: for example, product badging and predictive search. We can try things like this and if they work we just leave them in place. If they don’t move the needle we’ve saved money and learned something valuable.

We like to think outside the box and Monetate has become part of our game plan. When we get ideas, for example at a show or seminar, we take it to Monetate and ask what you guys think? Is it worth trying? If so, let’s try it.

Before Monetate, when we had to engage a developer to get a marketing idea onto the website, we could go through all the effort only to find the results were not worth it. Now we use Monetate to quickly deploy and test, we can determine right away if changes are worth leaving in place or not.

When we use Monetate to test site content, we call it the “IT developer avoidance tool.” With Monetate, we not only avoid the expense and effort of getting IT to deploy marketing content or features, we avoid costly lessons in what doesn’t work.

You could also call Monetate a “spending avoidance tool.” When you run an e-commerce site, there are always vendors offering to make it work better, for a price. For example, “put our trust logo on your site and increase revenue.” Before Monetate we might have tried something like that for a year to see if it moved the needle. Now we can test in just a few weeks.

The working process with Monetate is also very helpful. Having a regular meeting to touch base with our Monetate account manager is a huge plus for us. The way the Monetate team shares learnings with us makes them almost an extension of our team.

Do You Have Any Favorite Campaigns?

My favorite is something you might call the payment option evaluator. When we introduced a new payment option on the check-out page, our call center started getting complaints from shoppers who had been turned down. So we used Monetate to selectively turn it off, basically hide all references to that option. That enabled us to see the effect on incremental revenue and evaluate the option over time.

Another favorite was on our new site, Best of Scrubs. We used Monetate to give introductory offers to new visitors. That produced a massive increase in conversion and new customer acquisition for us, and without eroding margin on orders from returning customers.

We have also done some interesting things with returning customers based on purchase history; for example, we can extend special offers on plus sizes to a customer who has a history of buying plus sizes.

How Would You Summarize Your Experience So Far with Monetate?

We are constantly looking to improve our performance in terms of RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value). Monetate is helping us with all three.

We love the amount of site control Monetate gives us. The level of flexibility Monetate delivers with just one tag to install, just one time, that’s huge.

The IT avoidance aspect is also a big deal. That is not only saving us a lot of money, it has transformed the speed with which we can now test new ideas and, when the tests are positive, turn them into full campaigns.