Manchester startup Made With Intent raises £1.5M for eCommerce optimisation

Today, Manchester e-commerce startup Made With Intent has raised £1.5 million. 

Made With Intent is a segmentation platform helping data-led retailers to understand and target customer intent. 

Through intent metrics, predictive targeting and tech integrations, it helps eCommerce businesses to optimise customer journeys based on how people actually buy. 

It gives experience, CRM and performance teams a more appropriate way to respond to and re-engage customers based on their needs—boosting short- and long-term revenue in the process. 

The idea came after the founder, David Mannheim, recognised a fundamental flaw in online retail strategies. After 15 years of optimising conversion rates in eCommerce, he realised the industry’s fixation on conversion metrics was the very thing holding it back.

“The current measures of success are the problem. Metrics like conversion rate, and therefore the actions retailers take to improve them, are short-term, retrospective and aggregated,” David explains. 

“This creates a race to the bottom. A numbers game that forgets how people really buy.”

Made With Intent gives retailers a more human, segmented perspective of their website performance and a predictive targeting mechanism that lets other marketing tech respond to customer needs in real time. 

The company reports this new intent-based approach creates a 9.4 per cent average revenue uplift compared to generic optimisation.

“eCommerce is often guilty of trying to convert all customers at all times,” David states. “It focuses on the minority who are ready to buy, at the expense of those who are not. Our product helps retailers be appropriate for every customer. To progress both in-market and future buyers.”

The platform works by collecting data through an easy to implement script, modelling 250+ signals from online shoppers and returning predictive intent metrics in real time. Visitors are then automatically segmented based on their journey, momentum and how likely they are to buy, exit or return in the future.

This data and the targeting of segments are handled in platform, but the tool is designed to be complementary. 

 Led by Mercuri leads the investment along with Portfolio Ventures and Haatch. 

“Made With Intent has embraced first-principle thinking and a decade of insights to shake up the vast eCommerce market,” comments Alan Hudson, Founding General Partner at Mercuri. 

“As a VC investor, we look at a vast number of potential investments each year, however, we only invest in less than a dozen. Made With Intent's strategy is similar for its customers - to focus on the quality of the prospect, not the number of prospects."

The Seed funding will support the fully remote team of 15 with their product, marketing and partnership efforts. With an existing user base in the UK, Denmark, Germany and the USA, the company aims to reach 100 global customers within two years. 

Lead image:  L-R: Anna Jones, Alan Hudson, David Mannheim and Ella Hughes from Mercuri and Made With Intent.