Partner Q & A: Getting Personal with Monetate

In today’s ecommerce landscape, personalization is no longer just a buzzword or a trend. Personalized shopping experiences are increasingly becoming the standard, and what online customers have come to expect. When Corra’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle clients need personalization and optimization, they turn to Monetate.

Personalization might sound straightforward, but what does it involve? Brett Bair, Sr. Director Digital Marketing Insights and Strategy at Monetate, sat down with us to talk about creating personalized digital experiences, and how Monetate delivers.

Can you give the quick rundown of what Monetate is and what you provide?

Monetate is a personalization and optimization platform for websites, email, and mobile apps. We help marketers deliver engaging experiences across platforms, using the data they already have. The best thing about our platform is that it works with virtually every ecommerce platform, CMS, custom-built site—you name it.

Do most Monetate employees come from tech and retail backgrounds, or other industries?

We come from all of the above. On the Services team, some have worked in retail on the digital side, some worked at agencies, while others worked for vendors that support ecommerce brands. The folks on the sales and marketing side come from an array of enterprise technology vendors, from retail and beyond. The members of the Monetate product and engineering teams hail from diverse technology backgrounds.

What is the first question new clients ask you when they come into a meeting?

The first question I often hear from new clients is, “When can we start?” There’s excitement there—as well as a recognition that what Monetate can offer is really important. In addition to the speed of our implementation and onboarding process, this need for agility and simplicity is often a recurring theme throughout the relationship.

“Personalization can help me find other things I would like based on what the brand knows about me.”

Why is personalization so important for fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands?

I think personalization is really important to those verticals because fashion and beauty purchases are very personal choices, and are typically supported by one-on-one interactions and real-world experiences.

Take a particular suit that looks great on the model. I’m not a model—so how will I know if it will look good on me? Personalization can help me find other things I would like based on what the brand knows about me.

What are some specific features you feel are really powerful for these types of brands?

The retailers we work with always surprise us with the creative ways they use Monetate to make shopping easier for their customers. Here’s a high-level overview of some of the things brands have done with us:

• Size-based shopping: We think this one solves a frustrating problem for shoppers in a really elegant way. When browsing for clothes, why do shoppers have to repeatedly enter their preferred size? One retailer used Monetate to create a personalized, size-based shopping experience. Based on the last few sizes shoppers purchase or add to their carts, that size is automatically selected in future browsing sessions.
• Geotargeting: This creates custom shipping messages tailored to the shopper’s location. This is particularly helpful around the holidays, and for brands looking to expand globally. Brands also use geotargeting to promote nearby in-store events.
• Agile merchandising: This is a big one for fashion and beauty brands. With our Visual Search functionality, brands can show their shoppers the products they are searching for—as they type.
• Product badging: This one is straight-forward, but gets some really impressive results. This product feature allows merchants to place little badges over the hero images in their product gallery, to call out promotions like “Best Seller” or “Customer Top Rated.”
• Connecting offline/online data: Retailers can use these two types of customer data to create tailored experiences using all available data, and deliver them across channels.

 
It’s important to emphasize that it’s not just one of these things in isolation that makes a memorable experience. But when you put it all together, you begin to see how those engaging, personalized experiences take shape.

What kinds of things are we going to see from Monetate in 2016? What’s going to be big in personalization this year?

2016 is going to be an exciting year for us, as we focus on helping our customers deliver one-to-one personalization at scale. We’re developing new features that use automation and model-driven decision making to help marketers build relationships with their customers, at scale. In general, we believe adoption of personalization will continue to grow in 2016, as more and more organizations see the impact personalization can have on their business.

Questions about personalization? Email [email protected] or visit Monetate.com.

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Sasha Butkovich is Marketing Copywriter at Corra, a New York, Los Angeles and London based digital commerce agency creating unified commerce experiences for fashion, lifestyle and beauty. With a team of 100+ ecommerce strategy, design and technology professionals, Corra delivers rich shopping and buying experiences across all channels and devices. Corra is trusted by retailers of all sizes to implement and support the Magento Enterprise, Demandware and hybris platforms.