Loyalty is important but has its limitations

Loyalty programs are a valuable tool, but also come with their own challenges and limitations. Upside complements and enhances the investments you’re making in loyalty to make sure you get the most out of your most profitable segment. 

Upside supports your loyalty program by:

Extend your loyalty program's reach

Upside extends your loyalty program’s reach by targeting a different customer segment. 

Your loyalty program targets customers that are loyal to your brand, customers that visit your business occasionally or habitually, and customers for whom your locations are already convenient. For this group, Upside’s offerings are less attractive because for whatever reason they have already decided to visit your locations. They are less likely to need a personalized promotion to incentivize them to transact at your locations. 

Upside, on the other hand, largely targets customers who are infrequent visitors at your locations and consumers in your market who have not been your customers previously. Additionally, because Upside has multiple spend categories, including: fuel, c-store, restaurant, & grocery, our app is uniquely attractive to consumers looking for multiple categories of savings. We are also able to attract consumers that are looking for savings in our partners apps. For one reason or another, these consumers are either not aware of your location or need a personalized promotion to incentivize them to transact at your site instead of a competitor. They are not likely active users of your loyalty program today. 

Your new loyalty acquisition channel 

By targeting consumers that your marketing efforts don’t typically reach, Upside is extremely effective at expanding your business’ reach and bringing you new customers and transactions. Best of all? Once those customers are on-site, you now have the opportunity to convert them into your own loyalty program - and our data shows that Upside is extremely effective at driving new loyalty sign-ups in a cost-effective way. 

Traditional marketing channels charge you for impressions, clicks, or actions (such as a purchase), but the actual conversion into your loyalty program that these programs drive is very low - and difficult to measure. In fact, according to ApptWeak, only 4% of consumers who see your app in the app store actually download it - and that’s assuming they clicked into the app store in the first place! This is an area where Upside excels; to prove it, we recently conducted a study for a large regional fuel & convenience retailer to understand Upside’s impact on their loyalty program. We found that almost 10% of Upside users who transacted at the retailer’s sites later joined their loyalty program. 10% loyalty conversion? That’s the Upside effect. 

In an analysis of 2 major loyalty programs with a significant number of branded sites on the program, we found that Upside users are 2-3x more likely to join a location’s loyalty program in the first 90 days compared to customers with similar purchasing habits who are not using Upside.

Remember, these customers driven by Upside are either not aware of your location or need a personalized promotion to incentivize them to transact at your site instead of a competitor. Once they are on-site, you have the opportunity to convert them to your loyalty program. 

Drive more “loyalty” from your existing members 

Even among the people who've already signed up for your program - your "loyal" customers, are they really acting loyal to your business? Often not.

In an analysis of a major Midwest loyalty program with almost 2,000 sites on Upside, we found that even the most frequent loyalty program members almost doubled their visits after joining Upside. Additionally, 31% of loyalty program members had never transacted at the pumps before, despite signing up for the program. After joining Upside, these inactive loyalty members began visiting almost monthly.  

Upside also drove new loyalty sign ups for this retailer! Within the first 6 months of launching the program, almost 10% of Upside users joined the loyalty program.

Proof that Upside + loyalty together is even better 

Upside and your loyalty serve complementary purposes, and in fact they're best together. Customers who use Upside & a loyalty program combined actually transact the most compared to Upside-only or loyalty-only customers! 

We see this when we look at the impact of Upside vs. typical loyalty programs on customer behavior - Upside is more effective than loyalty programs alone in driving increased visit frequency. That said, when both programs are paired together we see the highest purchase frequency from customers.

Never pay for double discounts with Upside - even if your customers are using Upside and loyalty! We factor double discounts into your margin on every transaction.