Mint Velvet x Datitude
Mint Velvet is a British success story, growing to over 100 locations internationally, including standalone stores and concessions, in less than 10 years. As our first client, Datitude is particularly proud to be Mint Velvet's core data solutions partner.
Working Together
Original Project Background & Challenges
Our partnership with Mint Velvet began in 2012 when they asked us to build a customer analytics solution. Back then, it was struggling to understand customer behaviour with the tools it had, and its biggest challenge was understanding how effective its direct mail (DM) activities were.
did it drive new customer acquisition or loyalty, or both?
could customer segmentation be used to improve margins?
was it even a profitable channel?
At the time, DM campaign analysis was outsourced to a specialist agency and, whilst the response and financial analysis were good, it was severely limited by the time taken to get results (6 weeks after campaign completion), and the breadth and depth of analysis was limited by the data available. Mint Velvet was missing opportunities to improve performance whilst the campaign was live, and it could not fully understand the drivers of customer behaviour, essential for taking corrective actions. It needed a solution that would provide:
robust and detailed analytics of customers, products and orders
real-time DM campaign analytics to improve marketing communications, website messaging and stock availability whilst in progress
connected data from across the business to inform direct marketing decisions, eg. knowing customer lifetime values, use of promotions and returns rates from all time and all channels, not just the data from the campaign recipients for the period of the campaign
highest accuracy to find look-alikes with more timely and accurate customer data.
Datitude's Original Solution & Results
Datitude introduced fast and secure access to accurate, up to date and trusted trading and customer data in a single managed, scalable, and easy-to-use solution. It integrated and processed source data from multiple systems (store, ecommerce, merchandising, email, web analytics, e-receipts) to create standardised data sources and a single version of the truth across customers, sales, and stock.
Out-of-the-box workbooks, reports and analytics, including visualisations and dashboards, were automated and accessed via a Tableau front-end.
Our Role
One of the immediate benefits gained was the ability to report and act upon customer data insights literally as the DM campaign landed. It also brought the management of its direct mail campaigns in-house and so it became more agile, able to use data to engage with customers on a more personalised level, which is where the real gains are. It also increased the success of cold data selections as a direct result of providing more timely and accurate data to data co-operatives.
In addition, Mint Velvet can now build campaigns by channel, segment, discount type and product using customer insight. Plus, it knows each campaign's profitability because Datitude's tools more accurately attribute orders to the right campaign with intelligent match-back analysis.
The Success Story Continues
It's hard to believe Mint Velvet's relaxed glamour concept only originated in 2009, with the first store opening in September that year, followed a month later with the launch of their website. Fast forward 10 years and it's grown to over 100 locations (standalone stores and concessions), launched new product categories and is at the forefront of omnichannel retailing.
As Mint Velvet has grown, so too has our relationship with them, and the scope of our work has increased significantly. We've developed the original core business intelligence and customer data analytics solution to include:
2 further user interfaces which offer UI solutions for different users' needs.
Datitude's own proprietary web application with simple Report Builder and Data Extract tools
The Data by Datitude Excel add-in enables users to quickly and easily access reports already built in Datitude straight from Excel, all with a single sign on. Users can use tools they already know and love whilst having confidence in the data.
In their Words
"Mint Velvet began their relationship with Datitude in 2012 when consistent growth dictated that we needed greater business insights around trading activity and customer behaviour. Datitude provided Mint Velvet with access to integrated data, from multiple systems, through a self-service data analytics front-end, alongside a suite of out-of-the-box reports and dashboards. The platform also has the ability to extract data for slicing and dicing data in any way, including directly into Excel.
Datitude has been a daily go-to for Mint Velvet over the course of the last 10+ years, helping to shape business decisions. However, Datitude’s real point of difference is them - the team that run the business really understand ecommerce, so they are always able to provide real-life insights and are passionate about helping businesses learn and adapt via their product."
LIZ HOUGHTON
CEO & CO-FOUNDER
