The 95% Blind Spot: Minty’s Blueprint for Converting Anonymous eCommerce Shoppers
Imagine a skilled store attendant in a physical retail store. They notice you pick up a hoodie, consider the price, and set it down. They might walk over with a timely incentive—perhaps a buy one, get the second at 50% off offer—to bridge the gap between interest and purchase.
Compare that to e-commerce. According to Chris Lettera, the Partnerships Manager at Minty, high-intent shoppers online are often just "ghosts" to the brand.
"For most brands, 95% of their site visitors remain totally anonymous," Lettera explains. "They don't provide their email, they don't fill out a lead form - and even if they add to cart, the brand has no way to reach them. We call this the 95% blind spot."
In this Masterclass, Lettera outlines how the Minty platform leverages its proprietary device graph and AI-driven discovery to help brands reach and convert this invisible audience at every stage of the funnel.
The Road to Revenue Recovery
The core challenge of the 95% problem is identification without friction. If you ask a shopper for their email address too early, you create a barrier. If you wait until the checkout page, you have already lost the vast majority of your traffic.
Minty’s flagship product, Minty Recover, solves this through a proprietary device graph containing over 450 million permissioned US shopper emails. When an anonymous shopper demonstrates high behavioral intent—browsing specific pages or spending significant time on a product—that's where Minty Recover comes in.
"We aren't looking at demographics; we are looking at behavioral intent," says Lettera. "If they show interest and match our network, we can engage them with a timely, direct-to-inbox incentive. It’s about being that store attendant who notices you picked up the sweater. It's about offering the right nudge at the right time."
Because these emails are sent to a permissioned network based on real-time behavior, the results are significant: over 50% open rates and downstream conversion rates exceeding 25%.
There are further optimizations available as well, such as Cashback incentives from minty.com—Minty’s consumer-focused destination where shoppers can discover brands, activate rewards, and earn money back on purchases.
“By always thinking of the shopper, and by drawing from our AI-powered timing, Minty stacks value up and down the funnel. Minty is a comprehensive force multiplier for brand growth,” Lettera says.
Performance-Based Partnerships: The Shift to CPA
In a radical departure from the channel’s status quo, Minty has moved to a pure CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) pricing model for its recovery solutions. By removing upfront licensing and setup fees, the platform reframed its relationship with brands as a bet on mutual success.
"We don't charge for sends, clicks, or impressions," says Lettera. "We're paid when we drive a sale. This allows brands to gauge our performance alongside their existing tech stack with zero risk. We aren't here to cannibalize existing revenue; we’re here to deliver incremental growth."
This performance-first approach, combined with seamless integration into platforms like Everflow, allows brands to maintain high-fidelity tracking and attribution while adding a new, automated revenue lever to drive incremental revenue and new customer acquisition.
Expanding the Funnel: Minty Prevent and Minty Promote
While recovery is the core focus, Minty has expanded its suite to address friction and discovery elsewhere in the shopper journey.
Eliminating Form Friction with Minty Prevent
Even when a brand tries to capture data through traditional means, they often run into the wall of form friction. Shoppers are busy, mobile-distracted, and increasingly unwilling to type their information into a tiny field.
To combat this, Lettera introduces Minty Prevent, a proprietary exit overlay technology. Unlike standard pop-ups that require manual entry, this tool pre-fills (whenever possible for high-intent visitors) the shoppers' email and phone number using the Minty device graph.
"Shoppers don't like friction of any kind," Lettera notes. "When the form is already filled, it reduces the lift for the shopper. A single click becomes an explicit opt-in, allowing the brand to grow its first-party data without the typical drop-off seen in traditional exit intent tools."
Early testing shows a 40% average increase in submit rates when brands shift from manual forms to Minty Prevent's more efficient approach—making for a terrific way for the brand to grow 1st party data.
Move to AI-Driven Discovery with Minty Promote
As the digital landscape shifts toward a post-search world, brands must adapt to how shoppers discover products. Lettera highlights Minty Promote, a tool designed for AI-driven discovery.
By utilizing Model Context Protocol (MCP), Minty syndicates brand offers directly into the search results of major large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
"If a shopper is researching products within an AI chat, we want the brand offer to be right there in the conversation," Lettera explains. "This is the top-of-funnel discovery of the future."
Next Steps: Closing the 95% Gap
The transition from a reactive marketing strategy to a proactive recovery engine is built on three actionable steps:
- Audit Your Invisible Traffic: Look at your site analytics. If your conversion rate is 3%, identify what is happening to the other 97%—many are high-intent but unidentified ghosts.
- Reduce Form Friction: Evaluate your current exit overlays. If you require manual typing on mobile, you are likely losing 40% of your potential first-party data growth.
- Incentivize with Stacking: Consider stacking on-site offers with dynamic incentives like Minty Cashback from minty.com. Multi-tiered rewards often drive the highest conversion rates by delighting the shopper at the moment of peak interest.
Connect with Chris Lettera
Ready to learn how Minty can drive sales and new customer acquisition for your brand? Connect with the Minty team through these channels:
- LinkedIn: Christopher Lettera
- Website: business.minty.com
- Everflow Marketplace: Find Minty (formerly SafeOpt) in the Everflow Partner Marketplace.
