Monetate, a platform primarily known for landing page optimization, has expanded well beyond the A/B test. Appointing long-time board member and entrepreneur Lucinda Duncalfe as CEO on Tuesday, the Philadelphia-based company says it’s tackling a “multi-billion dollar” market opportunity: digital personalization.
While Monetate’s early product strategy around website targeting and optimization drove early growth for the company, Duncalfe said: “We’ve seen this evolution in the industry to the place we feel we’ve been all along, which is the discussion around real one-to-one marketing where marketers think about consumers in a channel-agnostic way.”
Last summer, Monetate was in a very transitional phase. Then CEO David Brussin (now executive chairman) told AdExchanger that while Monetate did not dabble in media, the company was “very active” in channels other than desktop, and that it would commit the same level of optimization to email, display and mobile that it provided for landing pages.
Fast forward to last fall when Monetate made good on those promises and rolled out Monetate Email and Display, cloud apps that allowed marketers to target customer segments based on a number of behavioral triggers. Monetate wrapped these tools into its cloud marketing hub Monetate Acceleration Cloud designed to interface with preexisting data infrastructure and hook into commerce technologies like (SAP) hybris and IBM.
The company also partnered with Oracle’s BlueKai to roll out Monetate LiveAudience, a homepage personalization engine that takes into account offline purchase histories.
Monetate wants to explore this intersection between multichannel marketing automation and programmatic targeting.
“I think the magic of the programmatic side of the world is that it’s automated, too, so as we pull together all the data and perspectives about the customer, ultimately what will happen is you’ll get a coalescence of all of these perspectives on an individual,” Duncalfe said. “That data is going to improve the effectiveness for both sides – programmatic buying and display, as well as the marketer’s relationship with the consumer.”
Monetate is among a handful of companies that’s expanded from its roots in site optimization. Sitecore, for instance, launched last month a Sitecore Commerce Experience platform for personalization. Qubit, which began as a tag management company, rolled out a number of digital marketing apps to activate visitor data across all channels for retail marketers.
The concept of site optimization is no longer confined to websites and – at least for vendors – now involves full digital experiences.
Monetate has about 300 customers with strong adoption in the retail sector, but is seeing traction in hospitality and financial services verticals. The company employs over 200 and expects to increase that sum by 20% by the end of the year. It has raised about $46 million in venture funding to date.
