Dive Brief:
- Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores has partnered with retail technology company Upside at nearly 300 Love’s stores across the U.S., according to an emailed announcement.
- Upside’s software identifies nearby customers who haven’t visited a specific c-store or gas station and offers cash-back promotions via its mobile app to entice them to visit that location.
- Love’s joins a sizable group of c-store retailers already working with Upside, including BP, RaceTrac, Casey’s General Stores, Circle K, Speedway and more.
Dive Insight:
Upside’s platform puts a c-store in front of people who use its mobile app, combining people’s purchase history and anonymized processor data to find new customers or those who only shop at that store occasionally. Upside then generates cash-back promotions in its mobile app for those people.
Working with Upside will allow Love’s to provide competitive prices to its customers, Francie Koop, senior manager of customer and brand strategy for Love’s, said in the announcement. The partnership with Upside comes about a week after Love’s opened its 600th store, meaning Upside’s platform will be rolling across roughly half of its store network.
Love’s will also have access to a personal dashboard, where it can keep track of Upside transactions in real time, as well as other information such as which customers are new and which are regular, the additional gallons sold and profit generated, and their overall return on investment.
Upside closely monitors fuel margins by grade in real time and only operates within those margins so those additional gallons remain profitable, according to the company’s website. Its machine learning algorithms let retailers have one-on-one personalization so they can incentivize customers to buy more and more often.
Besides c-stores and gas stations, Upside also works with grocery stores and restaurants. It has 50,000 businesses in its network.
