For me, Monetate’s 4th annual Summit was an extensive Q&A session.

For three days, I got to have face-to-face, in-depth conversations with clients new and old, seasoned users and those still in the onboarding process. But despite those different experience levels, a few questions repeated themselves in many of my conversations.

Since they are focused around our most recent releases and announcements, I figured a quick recap couldn’t hurt.

1. What does Engage do? Does it replace my ESP?

With Monetate Engage, we’ve taken many of the capabilities you leverage on your website every day, and brought them into email. It was introduced earlier this year, and is an enhancement to your existing ESP.

We consider it an enhancement, because your ESP still controls the sending of the email and the static portions of your template, while Engage allows for dynamic targeted content within your email, with the added benefit of open-time personalization.

With Engage, you select default and dynamic content for targeted audiences, and it determines which experience to deliver when the customer opens your email, as opposed to when you send it. (And don’t worry about how many targets you select; with ContentBuilder—more on that later—you can create dynamic creatives to support your personalized messages.)

Once your default and dynamic content is set, you generate a snippet of HTML, which is copied and pasted into your existing email template. When the customer opens the email, a server call is made to determine which experience to deliver; this is done incredibly fast, and is not discernible to the recipient.

2. How do I get the Monetate Builders? Do I need training to get started?

If you’re a Monetate client, you already have access to the Action, Target and Event builders. They’re included as part of your Monetate Platform, and accessible within the UI.

Because our goal is to put more control in the hands of the marketer, each builder launches an on-site, in-line editor with point-and-click simplicity. These builders can be used within the same campaign, or separately to customize your experience. They are meant to be intuitive, with little training needed to get started. (If you’re not using it, you should visit our customer Knowledge Base, which features best practices, documentation, and learning modules for self-support.)

Here’s a quick breakdown of what each builder does:

• ActionBuilder makes it easy to configure site experiences that can be reused across Monetate campaigns, such as inserting, editing, hiding or showing HTML elements without writing any code.
• TargetBuilder allows you to easily define and select audience segments based on three criteria—cookies, DOM elements, and JavaScript variables.
• EventBuilder allows you to track standard and custom engagement events for campaigns or interactions without writing throwing code or making any physical page changes.

Joining these three in the near future is ContentBuilder, which will allow you to design a single creative asset to support all of your campaign variations by utilizing custom variables targeted to key audience segments.

3. What is LiveRamp? Where can I get more information about your partnership?

LiveRamp aggregates your first party data—such as offline and CRM information—and allows you to combine it with the already-robust targeting options you have. Their proprietary matching system allows you to build connections between all of your data, and get a more complete view of your customer.

With this partnership, you’ll be able to easily onboard your first-party data for use within Monetate. Leveraging the LiveRamp data is as simple as making point-and-click selections using Monetate TargetBuilder.

It’s important to note that this is an additional service, and is not included with Interact. It will be similar to our LiveAudience partnership for third-party data with BlueKai.

_____________________________________

Interested in learning more about Monetate’s vision?

Join Hillary on Wednesday, April 30, at either 10 a.m. EST or 2 p.m. EST for our “Next-Generation Website Testing in a Customer-Centric World” webinar to see how you can help shift your organization beyond a testing culture to one of enhanced personalization.