Technology for the Convenience Store of Today
We all realize the importance of making your customers happy, increasing loyalty, and in turn, hopefully getting them to spend more money. I am not here to tell you something you already know. In fact, in an article from Convenience Store News published in January of this year (https://csnews.com/convenience-store-retail-trends-year-review-2019-outlook), the author hits on one of the key trends for 2019 in the convenience store space: loyalty and better utilization of customer data.
“If ‘convenience’ is the most important aspect of convenience retail operations, then ‘loyalty’ may be the second-most important. Loyalty programs are the key to capturing and leveraging customer data. The more a convenience retailer knows about their customers’ habits, activities, and preferences, the better they can market to those customers and keep them coming back. A loyalty program that combines personally identifiable information (PII) with point-of-sale data can create insights that drive personalization, product mix optimization, real-time offers, and many more advantages. And this is crucial, as a 2018 C-store Shopper Profile report indicates that 73 percent of shoppers will shop more frequently (51 percent) or even exclusively (22 percent) at the convenience store where they are a loyalty member, and two out of every five loyalty shoppers will spend more than $10 in the store. Some convenience retailers started down this road in 2018; we expect many more to rethink their data strategies in 2019.”
Let’s face it, there’s a lot of programs and technologies you can utilize to measure and drive loyalty. Many of them can be time-consuming or costly to implement. What you may not realize is you could already have a piece of the puzzle in place to give you a head start. I’m talking about your mobile app. Mobile apps are becoming more popular for customers, but it is difficult to get customers to keep apps on their phone for an extended period. Driving app retention and engagement can be difficult, but not impossible if you have the right options that can connect to your existing loyalty program.
This is where LiveShopper SDK comes into play. If you aren’t familiar with LiveShopper SDK, we offer an all-encompassing SAAS platform that allows you to take our technology and directly “plug it into” your existing mobile app through our software development kit. Once it has been plugged in, you can then crowdsource your actual customers to collect real-time consumer insights and market research data. A lot of our clients use LiveShopper SDK to complement existing programs such as customer satisfaction surveys, mystery shopping, panel research, etc.
As the client using our technology, you control the entire research process, including being able to connect the platform to your current customer loyalty program. By doing this, you can then deliver loyalty/rewards points to your customers for them completing a LiveShopper SDK task/survey. But perhaps even more important, you can gain a better understanding of what your customers are saying about their experience through the data being collected.
With LiveShopper SDK it is easier than ever before to move into the “next-generation” of market research and consumer insights while utilizing the data collected to help drive loyalty. Take advantage of your existing mobile app by plugging in LiveShopper SDK and get started today.