How Upside’s personalized promotions are generated
Personalization drives behavior change
Every consumer that visits your business is unique, and so are the promotions that motivate them to make purchases. It doesn’t make sense to treat every consumer the same, which is why Upside's promotions are personalized for every user on every transaction at every location. Upside uses machine learning to serve personalized cash-back incentives to shoppers, driving new customers in-store and existing customers to spend more, more often.
Our promotions are designed to drive consumers to consolidate their purchases to your business — instead of your competitors — while also maximizing your net profit and Upside ROI. Finding the right promotion amount for every customer is what enables us to drive long-term changes in customer behavior, which is how we drive profitable growth for your business.
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Upside’s personalized promotions optimize over time to ensure you give each consumer just enough to ensure they keep purchasing more than they otherwise would |
How are Upside’s promotions generated?
Upside has developed a unique pricing algorithm that leverages huge amounts of data and predictive analytics to find the right promotion amount for each individual consumer. Machine learning allows Upside’s algorithm to pattern-match and make real-time predictions about customer behavior.
Here are the core inputs that go into our offer generation:
Data sources: Upside develops a baseline understanding of each customer’s behavior over the past 12-18 months at your business using your anonymized transaction data. Because we only use the first six & last four digits of credit & debit cards, no personally identifiable information is collected or used by Upside.
Personalization factors: Upside uses as many as 24 factors when developing promotions, including:
- Your current margin
- Competitor pricing
- User’s distance from your location(s)
- User’s past purchase behavior at your location(s)
- Likelihood of user accepting offer based on past behavior
Upside is always testing new versions of our offer generation algorithm with the goal of maximizing efficiency and profitability in our promotions. Remember, the lower the promotion amount that a consumer accepts, the more profit there is for both of us to share!
| Remember, Upside’s promotions are always within your available margin. For more information on how Upside factors margin into promotions, read "How Upside protects your profit as margins shift" |
Promotions vary by customer segment
As we learn more about each user’s purchase behavior at your business, we’re able to fine-tune our promotions, giving away just the right amount needed to incentivize a purchase while maximizing your incremental profit.
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Promotions are lower for more frequent customers. |
The graphic above illustrates this point. On average, new Upside users require the highest promotions; this makes sense - we need to incentivize them to try something new. As the user becomes a more frequent customer, average promotion amounts decrease — loyal customers typically require lower incentives!
You can monitor how Upside’s personalized promotions vary across customer segments at your business on the Promotions page of your merchant dashboard.
Upside’s algorithm optimizes over time to give away as little margin as possible
Our pricing algorithm is constantly improving, optimizing to maximize the new transaction volume we deliver to your business while giving away as little as your margin as possible.
As the chart above illustrates, over the past few years, the percent of available margin paid in Upside promotions has declined by 50%. As our algorithm continues to be more efficient with promotions offered, we are able to drive more profit to you. Reducing offer amounts (without sacrificing transaction volume) is in your best interest — and also in ours; the more profit you earn, the more we earn.
And by the way - we reinvest much of our profit-sharing fees into marketing to acquire new users and bring you even more volume.
