Monetate Personalization Client Summits in London and NYC Brings Together Retail Leaders and Customer Experience Experts

Monetate Personalization Client Summits in London and NYC Brings Together Retail Leaders and Customer Experience Experts

Recently, our team had the honor of hosting two Personalization Client Summits in London (October 13th) and in NYC (October 27th). The key theme of this year’s events was to encourage our clients to stop talking about personalization and to “get moving” and begin delivering better customer experiences. The goal of our sessions and roundtables was to give attendees the tools they need to embark on this path.

Our team was thrilled to have the opportunity to connect in person with our personalization clients from across EMEA and the US, who joined us to exchange ideas, learn more about the latest updates to Monetate Personalization, and dive into actionable ways to improve the digital customer experience across all brand touchpoints.

And our NYC client attendees got to hear our recent big announcement live and in person!

In case you missed it, Kibo spun out its former personalization business (Monetate and Certona) into a standalone entity that is now the New Monetate!

It was an exciting day for our team and we couldn’t think of a better place to share the news than at an event celebrating our customers. After all, it was the support and feedback from these customers that helped us get to where we are today and ready for this new adventure as Monetate.

There was even more fun to be had at our client summits than big announcements. Attendees also got a sneak peek at our personalization roadmap for 2023. We also hosted a couple of roundtable sessions, heard from several of our clients detailing their successes and wins with personalization, and learned about the future of CX and emerging trends from a couple of our partners.

And speaking of wins, our Monetate Personalization clients across the board have been quite busy this year. These leading retail brands collectively launched 100K experiences and influenced over $700B of revenue in 2022 alone. Incredible!

Keep reading for a few highlights from each of our events and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating this year’s award winners.

Monetate Personalization Customer Highlights & Success

During our client summits, we were excited to feature presentations from three of our customers – Musto, Ralph Lauren, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s always a great opportunity for our clients to learn from their peers and how they are leveraging personalization to accomplish their goals.

Let’s take a look at what they shared:

Sailing Into Personalization with Musto

Kibo was pleased to welcome our client Musto as a speaker in London. Musto, a UK-headquartered retailer of sailing and outdoor clothes and accessories, shared their personalization journey with our attendees.

It’s been a busy year for Musto, who moved to a headless website and implemented new testing strategies. Musto has been on the path to personalization, testing various experiences across its product detail pages (PDPs) and product listing pages (PLPs). Musto also tested different types of content on its eCommerce site, including messaging on the homepage, messaging around email signups, and badging.

Now with this personalization foundation in place, Musto is ready to take its strategy to the next level as they incorporate more demographic, context, and behavioral data to build contextual customer experiences. They are also exploring how they can expand personalization beyond their website and working across the business to build a true end-to-end personalized journey for their customers.

We are impressed by Musto’s wins so far, and that’s why they are this year’s winner of the Kibo Personalization Impact Award, as they had the highest programme ROI.  You can read more about their success below where we honor our 2022 Award Winners.

The Evolution of Testing & Personalization at Ralph Lauren

At our NYC summit, we welcomed fashion retailer Ralph Lauren to speak to our attendees. Ralph Lauren is a long-time partner who has worked with us for years and we were thrilled that they shared their story of how testing and personalization have evolved for the brand over the years.

During this presentation, Ralph Lauren shared the theory behind a few of the tests they ran while building out different experiences on Product Detail Pages (PDPs). They also offered great advice for our clients such as trusting data, taking chances, and the need to continue learning and improving to achieve personalization success.

Advanced Personalization: The Secret Weapon of Ecommerce Strategists

Also in NYC we heard from the retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods, who kicked off their personalization efforts in 2013.

While Dick’s Sporting Goods had many goals with personalization, including data-driven automation, a focus on regional relevancy, and increasing engagement, conversion, cross-sell and upsell opportunities, they have always been committed to taking their personalization experiences to the next level.

So, how have they done this? By using their data to fuel advanced personalization. Dick’s Sporting Goods collects an abundance of data and leverages AI to deliver advanced personalization with Certona (Now a part of Monetate).

Dick’s Sporting Goods recommends that other retailers and brands use a solution like Certona that provides an AI-powered omnichannel personalization platform. And like many of our other clients, Dick’s Sporting Goods highlighted the importance of testing and the need to be consistent across all channels with messaging. They also recommended implementing personalization in phases, illustrating the importance of being able to walk before you can run to avoid boiling the ocean.

Roundtable Discussions: Engaging Dialogue for Innovation

One of Monetate’s favorite parts of our client summits is the roundtable sessions. Our roundtables give our attendees the chance to discuss and brainstorm on various topics in small groups at their individual tables. Not only is this a great chance to get to know industry peers, but a wonderful opportunity to learn from each other.

This year, we hosted three roundtables: Maximizing Personalization for Peak, Building a Culture of Personalization, and Segmentation: A Building Block to Personalization Success.

As peak is right around the corner, with our attendees actively preparing and planning, the timing was right for attendees to pick up some tips and tricks from other brands.

For example, one of our attendees offered great insight into how to reduce the bounce rate on PDPs on Black Friday, while another offered advice on how to better personalize your homepage.

We also learned that one of the brands at our event does something they call “Friction Friday,” where everyone on the team takes on a persona and they “shop” the website as if they were a customer and expose areas for improvement.

The roundtables about building a culture of personalization and segmentation resulted in valuable dialogue about the need to embrace personalization and start doing it proactively.

Personalization in the Age of Privacy

What does a cookie-less future look like? How will the various data privacy laws and measures for privacy and tracking prevention impact CX and personalization?

It’s a topic that’s been on everyone’s minds, and Monetate’s Chief Technology Officer Austin Rochford offered guidance and tips for rising to the challenge of this new reality and warned about the drawbacks of third-party data.

In a nutshell, the time is now for retailers to get first-party data into their platforms and start using this data to build experiences for customers as they move through brand touchpoints on their journey through your eCommerce site.


Monetate Personalization Award Winners

We hope you’ll join Monetate in celebrating and honoring our amazing award winners who represent the top retail brands and experts who are shaking things up and bringing innovation to their personalization and CX strategies in 2022.

Drumroll please…and the winners are…

London Award Winners:

Personalization Leaders Award: This award goes to the client with the highest platform usage score. This client is using a wide breadth of the platform and ultimately driving value by using all of the features and products available to them. We consistently see this client ranking highly in terms of adoption and are delighted to present this award to them. A true team effort!
Winner: JD Sports

Impact Award: This award goes to the client that is driving the highest programme ROI. This client has been leveraging a lot of our machine-learning capabilities as well as our product recommendations to really drive impact over the past year. Great work!
Winner: Musto

 

Super User Award: This award was determined by nomination and goes to a person that is truly pushing the fold when it comes to using the platform. The winner is not only a platform expert but also a true Kibo champion. They are always up for trying new things and being creative when it comes to testing and personalization – a true power user!
Winner: Jack Little of Highbourne (City Plumbing)

 

Programme Champion Award: This award was also determined by nomination and goes to a person that has been instrumental in creating the testing culture and implementing the governance that sits at the heart of this client’s programme. Not only have they been innovative in how they scale their activity by automating a lot of their processes, but they’ve also helped to train and enable approximately 100 individual platform users across 20 different teams. Very impressive!
Winner: Jamie Levrant (John Lewis)

NYC Award Winners

Rising Star Award: This award goes to a newer customer who is crushing it! This client has been with Monetate for 10 months and has been super engaged throughout the process. They are excited about personalization, A/B Testing, and growing the program for success. We consistently see this client ranking highly in terms of adoption.
Winner: Sportsman’s Warehouse

 

Trail Blazer Award: This award was determined by nomination and goes to the client who is always pushing the envelope and expanding the program. They are innovative and forward-thinking. We see this customer regularly exploring new ideas across their brands and looking for additional opportunities for improvements in site experience and performance.
Winner: VF Corporation

Strongest Partner Award: This award was determined by nomination and goes to the strongest partner promoting common values, mutual respect, and knowledge that each brings to the table. This client is always innovative with their personalization approach meeting their business and performance requirements while being committed to the program and partnership. This client is using a broad breadth of the platform and ultimately driving value. A true team effort!
Winner: Dick’s Sporting Goods

 

Hall of Fame Award: This award was determined by nomination and goes to a person that has been instrumental in creating the testing culture and implementing the governance that sits at the heart of this client’s program. The winner is not only a platform expert but also a true Monetate champion. They are always up for trying new things and being creative when it comes to testing and personalization – a true power user!
Winner: Ralph Lauren


Thank You to Our Sponsors 

We’d like to thank Contentsquare, Bazaarvoice, and Tealium for their sponsorship of our London Client Summit and for their continued support. For our NYC Summit, we’d like to again thank Contentsquare for leading our “Ask the Experts” session and Contentful for sponsoring our Happy Hour. We look forward to continuing our partnership and collaborating on future endeavors around CX and personalization.

That’s a Wrap 

The London and NYC Client Summits were a great success and we enjoyed connecting and gathering with our clients to celebrate their success and to give valuable insight into emerging trends. We hope the sessions resulted in some valuable tools and ideas that our attendees can implement back in the office when building out experiences.

But why should the learning have to stop after our client summits? Stay tuned over the next several days as we’ll be sharing EVEN MORE content on our blog that you can use that will build on the ideas and strategies we discussed in London and NYC.

We appreciate the relationships we have with our customers, and we look forward to continually learning from them and watching them shine.