Driving foot traffic to your grocery store

Increasing sales through personalization and profitable acquisition

The first step in increasing sales is getting customers through the door. The idea is simple, but profitable customer acquisition involves a lot of planning and optimization. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. Not only do you have to convince customers to visit your store for the first time — but you also have to ensure that what you spend to get them through your doors is less than how much they’ll spend with you and that they keep coming back for more.

This can seem daunting now as retailers face tremendous downward pressure on net operating margin — thanks to continued supply chain issues, higher labor costs, strained customer spending because of inflation, and revenue paid to third-party delivery services.  

Let’s break down simple ways to create a strong, profitable customer acquisition strategy for your business.

Provide a personalized experience

According to a Twilio Segment report, 60% of consumers are likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience. Moreover, nearly half of the consumers are less likely to purchase a brand that doesn't provide personalized experiences.

Shoppers expect food retailers to adapt to their changing needs, offering personalized value that delivers a seamless experience for themselves and their families.

The problem with segmented programming‍

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Right now, sophisticated retailers create customer segments and predict what type of incentive will motivate them to buy more, send out campaigns, and then measure how they performed afterward with limited data. The problem is that top-line metrics like clicks, sign-ups, or transaction volume growth fail to capture the full bottom-line picture–specifically, the upfront investment in acquiring those customers and whether their behavior changes enough to pay back the initial investment to acquire them. 

Today, the majority of retailers actually lose money on segmented (not personalized) programming.

That’s why nearly 400 grocers—and 45,000 businesses overall—have shifted their mindset and personalized every single shopper’s promotion one-on-one to move the needle on their spending. These retailers see customers visit 2.5 times more often, increasing their basket sizes by 10%.
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Meeting customers where they are

In practice, that looks like meeting customers where they are – on their phones – and then using your own anonymized transaction logs to learn more about each customer’s buying behavior with you over the last 12 months. With that information, you can provide the dynamic, margin-bound promotions they need to get them to either buy from you for the first time or to shift more of their grocery purchases to your store.

Bringing new customers into your loyalty program

While loyalty programs effectively target existing customers, they fall short of attracting new customers who have never visited your store before. The top-performing retailers have succeeded by getting approximately 30% of their existing customers to sign up for loyalty programs, with around 10-15% remaining loyal. However, these programs fail to reach new customers or the 70% of existing customers who choose not to participate.

To enhance the effectiveness of your program, consider implementing additional profitable tools that can expand its reach.

Leveraging the Upside effect

Upside is already used by more than 30 million customers to decide where to buy their groceries. This number continues to grow as major banks and popular apps like Uber, GasBuddy, DoorDash, and Instacart promote Upside offers to their cardholders and drivers. The platform provides dynamic, margin-bound promotions that incentivize customers to change their behavior and direct them to your store. As a result, you reach new customers who might not have initially chosen your store.

Once these new customers enter your doors, you can convert them into loyal patrons through top-notch customer service, clean facilities, and the products they need.

Finding new and profitable ways to attract and retain customers doesn't have to be a painful or expensive process.‍

Get started with Upside and boost your grocery sales

In just a few months, Upside has successfully driven approximately a 1% sales lift for our most engaged retailer partners. And we can help you achieve similar results. The best part is that there's no need for IT integration or upgrades, staff training, or in-store signage.

With Upside, brick-and-mortar grocers can now offer truly personalized experiences, just like shoppers have on Amazon. Our product utilizes the processor data you already pay for and our machine learning algorithms to learn about each customer and personalize their experiences, ultimately helping you earn more profit.

We use a 100% performance-based business model, which means that if Upside can't prove that a customer is new or is buying more than usual, we don't get paid. Instead of taking service fees, we share in the profit.

Need help getting started?‍