How Monetate's Agility Suite can improve experience

I recently chatted with Monetate about their new Agility Suite and how that may impact online marketers through 2012.

Kristina: We’re hearing a lot of buzz about real time data and customer experience. Are these going to be two hot areas throughout 2012?

Blair Lyon, Vice President, Marketing, Monetate: The primary challenge we hear consistently from CMOs is identifying technologies that help them improve the customer experience. In daily operations, marketers are constrained by their internal systems, and they’re frustrated that they cannot effectively execute on what consumers expect. They are being challenged to handle complex ideas and maintain relevancy across new consumer touchpoints, and they require tools that provide them with the agility to do so. The organizations that rise above the competition in 2012 and beyond will be the ones that figure out how to effectively harness the vast amount of customer data they have access to, and use it to deliver a more relevant online experience.

Kristina: For all brands, not just retailers, how important is the personalized experience?

Blair: It is imperative for all brands to make the customer’s online experience more relevant and more targeted. Consumers’ needs are affected by a wide range of factors, such as past site behavior, demographic information, geographic factors like the weather, what device they’re using to access your site, where they’ve been before and where they came from. Making the messaging and content on the website extremely relevant first requires the ability to change a customer’s experience in real-time, and then the ability to change that experience based on data (both historical and real time). Customers, even the non-retail customer, will keep coming back if you give them a smart and relevant online experience.

Kristina: Is this type of targeting about lengthening site visits or about increasing conversions?

Blair: Targeting can be about lengthening site visits, increasing site conversion, and a wide range of other factors. Different types of businesses have different key performance metrics that they are trying to achieve. That’s why testing and site optimization are so important, because you can quickly identify and influence areas in which you can positively increase your business goals.

Kristina: How does Monetate’s Agility Suite make the customer experience better?

Blair: In order to dramatically improve the customer experience, CMO’s need to move faster, act on real-time data, and change website content quickly and easily. The Monetate Agility Suite allows marketers to leverage the speed of the cloud and browser technology to do things that were previously seen as impossible or too costly to implement. Now marketers can dramatically improve conversion rates with the ability to test an unlimited number of marketing campaigns outside the IT queue, connect with key segments of website traffic in real time, maintain messaging consistency between distinct marketing channels throughout the purchasing cycle, optimally merchandise and display products, and change anything, anywhere within the web experience.