How e-commerce platform Thirstie reduced their sales cycle by 30% with an analytics feature powered by Faraday

Thirstie is a technology company that offers an end-to-end solution for the alcohol industry, connecting brands with consumers through an integrated e-commerce platform. Their services include regulatory compliance, delivery logistics, and data analytics to streamline the online sale and delivery of alcoholic beverages.

Challenge: Pioneering direct channel consumer data for the alcohol industry

E-commerce has revolutionized the way alcohol brands reach their consumers, offering a direct sales channel that bypasses traditional distribution models.

This direct relationship unlocks the most valuable data asset for a brand, a list of end customers. Prior to the emergence of an e-commerce channel for alcohol, alcohol beverage brands' customer insights were limited to the data they could garner from their distributors and retail sales data.

Recognizing the opportunity within this order data lie, Thirstie set out to make consumer insights a central component of their service offering. Their goal was to go beyond mere transaction data, providing brands with deep, actionable insights into a given brands’ customer base.

Obstacle: Going beyond transaction data with predictions

While Thirstie had ample transaction data, they lacked any additional data on these buyers. Thirstie’s ability to deliver customer insights meant they would need access to 3rd party consumer data and the analytical resources to make sense of it all.

Challenge one, was licensing and reconciling thousands of transactions with a large consumer database would be both expensive and complex, involving substantial investment in ETL and computing power.

Challenge two, was identifying meaningful patterns and trends consistently and at scale.

Why Faraday: Plug and play persona analytics

Facing a long development cycle in a competitive market, Thirstie looked to Faraday as an infrastructure provider who could not only handle data enrichment and ETL, but also the modeling workload to derive insights from this combined dataset. With access to Faraday’s Identity Graph, Thirstie only needed an email address associated with an online transaction to tap into hundreds of data points on every customer in their database. The consumer data covered the full spectrum of demographic, financial and psychographic data, ensuring a complete view of each brand's customers could be built.

With this combination of transaction and consumer data, Thirstie used Faraday’s k-means clustering models to produce customer persona sets by alcohol beverage type.

Each time a transaction was observed, Thirstie used Faraday to assign each buyer to the appropriate persona, populating this information automatically in their data warehouse. Instead of building a bespoke solution, Thirstie could link Faraday’s consumer data with their warehouse, ensuring data is refreshed daily.

Thirstie displayed these personas in an analytics dashboard in their product, providing its clients with a rich understanding of the distinct socio-demographic segments within their customer base.

Thirstie also made this data available at the order level, so that their clients could leverage it for personalized engagement and advertising..

Results: A Faraday powered core offering reduces Thirstie’s sales cycle by 30%

By partnering with Faraday, Thirstie was able to quickly bring deep insights and customer personas to its users, on scalable infrastructure. They did this without having to increase their expenditures on data science resources or the licensing of third party data assets.

Since partnering with Faraday in 2020, Thirstie has seen its client base more than quintuple, and the length of its sales cycle has dropped by 30%.

In May of 2024, Thirstie was acquired by Cocktail Courier.