Royal Mint uses Optimizely One for impactful customer experiences and robust experimentation.

Introduction 

Founded in 886, The Royal Mint is one of the oldest organizations in the world. At their factory in Wales, they manufacture currency coinage for the U.K. as well as currency for other countries around the world.  

10 years ago, The Royal Mint recognized that the use of coins in society was diminishing, and it was time to diversify their business. They introduced a commercial consumer line of business for commemorative coin, which celebrates historic people and events. They also expanded into precious metals, enabling customers to invest, buy, and sell precious metals. And they introduced collector services to support coin collectors in their purchasing and selling of historical coins. 

When they made the strategic decision to diversify, they recognized that a strong ecommerce website with experimentation and personalization capabilities would be crucial to their transformation journey. They decided to partner with Optimizely, the world’s first marketing operating system, to build an all-new digital presence.

Solution 

Their first requirement was to integrate their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into their CMS.  With Optimizely, they were able to build a seamlessly integrated system.  

Now, every time a purchase is made from The Royal Mint website, the transaction feeds into their ERP. This allows them to instantly understand what products customers are buying and what to manufacture next in their factory.  

Scaling website security and speed through high-demand 

As a government, finance, and investment-oriented business, website security and performance were also important for The Royal Mint. The team liked that the PaaS-version of Optimizely Content Management System is hosted by Microsoft Azure, so they can benefit from Azure’s scalability, reliability, performance, and security. 

Today, The Royal Mint uses Optimizely’s CMS to manage multiple websites, and experiences significant spikes in traffic with every product launch. They rely on Optimizely's compatibility with Cloudflare to ensure their websites remain secure and performant through heavy spikes in traffic.  

Up-leveling an already successful experimentation program 

As a brand, The Royal Mint is focused on providing the very best service to the customer. Understanding that testing and iteration is key to optimizing the customer experience, they already had a healthy experimentation program in place.  

With Optimizely, they were able to expand their experimentation. They tested the placement of key CTAs on their site, and used A/B and multivariate testing (MVT) to support high-impact changes to their content and the layout of their content on key product pages.  

The team combines their experimentation learnings with user feedback to make incremental improvements to their website’s UI, leading to the best possible customer experiences. 

Results 

The Royal Mint launches more than 30 new products a year and sees considerable spikes in web traffic with each launch. The day of King Charles III’s coronation, traffic to their website peaked at 1.4 million page views, 200,000 sessions, and 200 payments per minute.  

“These spikes in traffic are normal and are a real indication of the way that traffic can be handled with Optimizely One,” says Hobbs. “Being able to manage those spikes in traffic effectively and give every customer the same experience is superb.”  

By using experimentation to improve the placement of “Buy Now” and “Add to Basket” buttons on their site, The Royal Mint saw a 20% increase in conversions. They also increased purchases of their subscription products by more than 50%, using A/B and multivariate testing.  

What’s Next?

The Royal Mint team isn’t stopping there. Next they will implement Optimizely Data Platform to take advantage of more cross-platform integrations and enable more customized experiences for every customer.  

The Royal Mint offers a broad array of products and services, from commemorative and historical coins, to precious metals, to services for self, family, and business. They know visitors to their site are often looking for different content and products. The team looks forward to being able to tailor experiences based on previous customer behavior like purchase history, product interaction, and browsing behavior.

“So being able to truly understand the customer, how they interact with the Optimizely One platform, and then grow that understanding is what implementing ODP is all about, and we’re really excited about using that in the future,” says Hobbs.  

Another area of exploration includes using Optimizely Data Platform segments to trigger cross-sell opportunities between product and service offerings, applying trends and patterns in behavior to elevate the services they offer.

They’re also in the process of upgrading to CMS 12, the latest version of the Optimizely CMS, to continue to drive site efficiencies and improve their already strong performance.  

“We’re going to be able to leverage the entire Optimizely One platform and really drive our strategy forward,” says Hobbs.