Q&A with Marylin Montoya, VP Marketing at AB Tasty

Leaders in customer experience today are making sure they incorporate testing everywhere, especially in personalization.

M7: How high does AB Tasty build end-to-end experiences that drive growth across its clients’ digital channels?
MM: AB Tasty provides solutions that help companies validate ideas before investing in them, and then enables them to implement these validated ideas efficiently, whether we’re talking about a mobile application or a website. In terms of customer experiences, AB Tasty ensures that what’s being built for a specific customer is aligned with that customer’s expectations (a validated personalization scheme for example) and that the global experience exists without a glitch or mishap. Since ideas from copy, to the performance of a widget or banner, are validated, what the customer sees is the best version of that element. The ability to maintain this standard across digital channels creates not only consistency but also seamless experiences. Our solutions align internal teams (marketing, product, engineering) so that the end result is a highly personalized and seamless customer experience.

M7: What core strategies does AB Tasty adopt to help clients achieve cross-channel marketing success?
MM: Consumers today go through a variety of channels to interact and discover brands. What’s key is for every experience with a branded asset, be it in-store, online or an application is that the experience be pertinent, seamless and technically perfect (no bugs or mishaps). Brands today have only one opportunity to make a great first impression and so the experiences from the first touchpoint have to be the best version of itself. AB Tasty empowers brands to combine testing with personalization, in order to make the experience not only as relevant as possible but also as optimized as possible. Leaders in customer experience today are making sure they incorporate testing everywhere, especially in personalization.

Don’t be afraid to test ideas and be wrong. You don’t have to get every answer right; you have to have the will and tenacity to be wrong and test until you’re right.

M7: What key suggestions would you give B2B companies fighting to find engagement and acquisitions through digital marketing?
MM: I believe that tactically B2B companies have to employ many of the lessons in B2C. Although the transaction or sales cycle may be different than in B2C, there are many strategies that can be transferred. The big one is personalization. Few B2B companies take personalization to the degree that B2C companies do. The other is optimization and testing practices. These strategies have a real impact on driving more engagement and more conversion.

M7: What do you believe are the top three marketing challenges that have arisen in the post COVID-19 era?
MM: For companies that were not investing in digital experiences, COVID-19 most likely had a very dramatic impact as everything moved online. Those companies have been in a race from the beginning of the pandemic to evolve their online strategies. The other is customer intelligence – those companies that had invested in understanding consumer behavior online are the ones that have had the most insight to know how to maneuver and react during COVID-19 and have likely experienced a huge advantage due to it, while many other companies have been “driving blind”. The third is very specific – logistics companies and their impact on customer experiences at e-commerce companies. With the massive surplus of online business, logistic, delivery, and transportation companies had to improve and adapt their practices to manage the increase in demand. This created a collateral effect on e-commerce companies that had to navigate delays or delivery bottlenecks while managing customer expectations.

With the massive surplus of online business, logistic, delivery, and transportation, companies have to improve and adapt their practices to manage the increase in demand.

M7: How are promotional tactics changing for products or services launching during these periods?
MM: There has been a large adoption of interactive experiences and hyper-personalization. Websites have continued to infuse social and social media itself has become a marketplace for brand discovery – either through influencers or paid promotion. Product offerings have become more personalized themselves, through bundling strategies but also customization. Go-to-market has come more accelerated, with shorter timeframes and more dynamic, but ephemeral content. Social plays the main role for launch, along with interactive experiences through video or mobile applications in parallel.

M7: The best piece of advice you have ever received?
MM: Don’t be afraid to test ideas and be wrong. You don’t have to get every answer right; you have to have the will and tenacity to be wrong and test until you’re right.