Sponsored Post: Part of our Vendor’s Voice series to present and promote selected partners’ activities.
WHAT DOES YOUR COMPANY DO AND WHAT IS YOUR USP?
Monetate works with large brands and retailers enabling them to personalise their customers’ experiences online, in store and in marketing communications. Our platform functionality ranges from A/B testing and segment-based personalisation to ensure that a brand provides the best experience possible to their customers. For example, Monetate can present differet experiences to new or returning customers or customers who have shown a past preference for certain product categories. And, we can even make individual decisions about what the best experience is for each individual customer, based upon the information that the retailer and platform knows about them. This one-to-one personalisation approach is unique and drives remarkable results for our customers.
The company’s USP is based on one-to-one personalisation. We enable this unique capability, and we do so with an intuitive user interface that enables marketers to use the platform without having to revert back to the IT department. With the scale to serve more IR500 brands than any other personalisation platform and process more than 2.1 billion personalised pages over the Black Friday ‘Cyber Weekend’ alone, Monetate offers peace of mind that we deliver real-time personalisation at scale.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS THE CHALLENGES BEING FACED BY RETAILERS?
Retail is facing a number of challenges, one of which is Amazon. The retail behemoth has set the bar in terms of price, product availability and delivery in its drive towards commoditisation. It is making it increasingly difficult for retailers to differentiate themselves unless they have proprietary products.
Personalisation offers a powerful tool and doesn’t require retailers to have budgets as deep as Amazon. Through use of personalisation, a brand can show via their interactions that they know and understand their customers, thus building a deeper and more loyal relationship with them.
Data often offers a difficult challenge for brands because data about each customer may be held in disparate systems. To help with this, Monetate’s platform brings together whatever data the retailer has, pulling it from different sources and linking it so that it doesn’t have to be held in one data source or be requested from different sources by an IT department. And the ability to scale is critical to being able to keep up with Amazon, which is why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a necessary piece of delivering one-to-one interactions for every customer.
HOW DO NEW DEVELOPMENTS OF THE MONETATE ENGINE HELP RETAILERS MEET THOSE CHALLENGES?
The Monetate Intelligent Personalization Engine, or the Engine for short, knows in the moment a customer lands on a retailer’s site, where the customer has come from, the device and browser they are using, and the behaviour they have shown in the past on the retailer’s website. Monetate can also draw on data held about customers in other systems the retailer has, such as ecommerce or CRM systems. In real time, the Engine decides on the best experience for each individual customer in order to maximize the success against the predefined outcome set by the marketing team. This outcome could be related to conversion or increased order value, for example. The Engine makes this decision and actions upon it, on the web or to a partner system such as an email provider or in-store clientelling option. The AI-driven Engine learns from the resulting outcome how best to interact with that particular customer and with others in the future.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR VISION?
Monetate’s vision is to help our clients build meaningful relationships, one experience at a time and we do this by empowering brands to interact uniquely with each customer at scale, delivering engaging experiences that drive great business results.
Personalisation within the retail industry is only on the first rung of the ladder. Monetate will continue to grow the product through one-to-one product recommendations – which is already planned and expansion across channels. The company itself is expanding into further verticals as adoption from financial services and travel and hospitality grows.
WHEN AND WHY DID YOU ENTER THE UK MARKET?
Monetate set up a presence in the UK in 2012 following years of exceptional growth in the US and a number of client wins in the UK. At that time, the UK retail market was seen as ready for personalisation and testing and the company won an additional six retail clients within the first year of opening an office in London as it focused on the UK retail market.
WHO ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS IN THE UK?
Monetate works with many retailers to help them focus on growth, increasing conversion rates, acquisition, retention and driving a better customer experience. The company also works with telcos, publishing, automotive and B2B companies. With over one hundred customers in the UK, retail clients include John Lewis, Waitrose, Helly Hansen, Jack Wills, Boden, Boohoo, Office Depot/Viking, Dreams, JD Williams, N Brown Group, Country Attire, Radley and Eurostar with many others in the US including QVC, North Face and Patagonia.
Customer Case Study: Waitrose
Supermarket chain Waitrose is a perfect example of how the Monetate platform can be used to bring a unique customer experience to online and drive both every day sales and sales during the essential peak shopping times.
Having identified that customers who have shopped at least five times online are more likely to be retained in the long term, Waitrose implemented a marketing campaign offering an £80 discount spread across five online shops.
The Monetate platform enabled the brand to offer customers a unique incentive code by assessing how many times they had placed an order. Visitors to the site were targeted based on how many times they had placed an order with the brand online and presented with a unique incentive code based on this.
Each customer was grouped by the number of previously placed online orders, which was used by the Monetate platform to target an individual once logged in and recognised. Shoppers were originally targeted via their email address and once they had placed their first order they were emailed a code for their next shop. Overall, the campaign helped drive new customer conversion by over 30%.
Throughout the 2015 Christmas period, Waitrose used Monetate’s ability to ingest external data from ‘MyWaitrose’ loyalty cards, into its data layer to target previous turkey buyers who had not yet purchased in 2015, with a targeted offer. The result? A 20% uplift in conversion against the control group.
Waitrose’s personalisation strategy highlights how relevant and individual content with customers can deliver an uplift in online orders; Waitrose increased online orders by up to 24% for new and early stage shoppers and over 30% for new customer conversion. It also saw a 20% uplift in conversion by using Returning Visitor Targeting.
“The website is a growing part of the Waitrose brand and we want the customer online experience to be consistent with the quality of experience you get in one of our stores. We’ve seen great benefits from using the Monetate personalisation platform – it has allowed us to work more efficiently and target our customer base more effectively. We also have greater business agility with the ability to react and respond to changing market needs in minutes,” says Jane Godfrey, Digital Optimisation Manager, Waitrose.
