Offline retail businesses are facing lots of challenges
these days. Although they pay high rentals for the prime locations, they are
still not able to get the desired footfalls. If a customer visits a shop, there
is 25-90% chance (depending on nature of store) that he will do a transaction
and that makes footfalls extremely important. This is exactly where MintM comes
in Picture.
MintM is a bundle of few unique things which allows
merchants to engage customers through various mechanisms like offers, loyalty
rewards and open communication.
For a merchant, there is no solution available in market be
it card, smartphone or phone number based system which doesn’t require an action
from the user. Most of the solutions involve user action which is either in the
form of user taking out the loyalty card and showing it to the merchant or he
has to launch a smartphone based app in the store. On contrary MintM works as
fully automated system without the need of any user action. With MintM merchant
gets mobile presence, increased loyalty, increased foot fall, better engagement
with the existing users and deep customer insights, something a typical Retail
CRM can’t provide. Simple analogy is what Google is to the online world by
bringing in traffic to websites; MintM is doing the same for offline world by
getting more footfalls for our partner merchants.
“At heart MintM is still a consumer company” – Says Sachin
Garg. For users MintM makes their life simple. They can create a really simple
yet smart Indian shopping list, share it with their friends and family and also
get to know relevant offers from nearby participating stores. They can collect
mints by visiting participating stores and convert them for exciting rewards
like gift cards, coupons and prepaid recharges all on their mobile without the
need of calling a customer care or getting on a website. They can do much more
with MintM by storing their loyalty cards on their mobile, get it scanned at
POS terminals and in the process freeing up their wallet with the need to carry
those cards for reward points. Currently MintM users gets mints for visiting
stores like Central, Mom&Me, Cinemax, Pizza-Hut, Reliance Digital,
HyperCity, Big-Bazaar. Many more are in the process of being added.
On international markets, MintM is still focused only on
India but has been approached by several overseas businesses to start operating
there as well. MintM may start to look at expanding other countries in near
future.
MintM was founded by Sachin Garg and Vibhor Gupta who are
IIT and ISB alumni in March 2012. Both of them have been associated with
running a technology company successfully for over 6 years. Prior to that
Sachin worked with companies like Cisco, Intel and Motorola and also holds a
couple of patents in his name. Vibhor who is co-founder at MintM holds an MBA
from prestigious Indian School of Business and earlier worked with Tech
companies like Infosys, Cognizant and Wipro. MintM has been funded to the tune
of 500K USD and is also looking for external investment to increase its
merchant base throughout India and overseas.
Users can download MintM app from www.mintmapp.com. It is
also available on Google Play Store for Android Phones, iTunes for iPhone and
BlackBerry App world. It has been designed keeping in mind the changing needs
of Indian customer. The app has so far over 75,000 users and has been
consistently ranked in TOP 10 in shopping category on App markets.