Case Study: Segment of One in Food & Beverage

The food and beverage industry offers very high-impact opportunities for n=1 personalization (aka. hyper-personalization, aka. Segment of One).

One restaurant brand we worked with uses our technology to show context-aware recommended items, based on time of day, foot traffic and menu-item popularity. This resulted in 6-20% incremental average order size, depending on the geographic location. (All incremental results were quantified vs. control groups.)

Another brand achieved more than a 10% increase in average order size and 2.8x higher conversion rates as compared to previous targeting methods.

Another program achieved more than a 40% click-through rate, leading to more than a 23% incremental transaction rate, as a result of AI-driven rich-media app push notifications.

Another chain achieved more than a 21% increase in revenue as a result of AI-driven personalization across channels, as compared to previous targeting methods. And another well-known brand attained more than 60% higher click-through rates, and more than 25% growth in loyalty membership as a result of AI-driven personalization efforts.

The technology that fuels all this is SOLUS.ai which was a first mover, and is currently a market leader in the AI-First category of customer engagement software. Notably, SOLUS has been able to implement the aspirational goal of Segment of One – acting as a system of intelligence that sits between users’ existing data sources and their existing engagement channels, generating individual customer-level nudges that combine recommendations, propensity scores, and stacked models, rather than broad segments or static rules.

In the food and beverage industry, the response boost from smarter messaging is 25-40% higher offer redemption or upsell vs. segment-led efforts. And visit frequency is 15-25% higher, even for brands with very sophisticated technology in place already. And the combination of all this drives 20 to 35x ROI (incremental revenue vs. cost of SOLUS), so the solution pays for itself in the first 30-60 days.

Restaurant brands that use SOLUS in various parts of the world include Domino’s, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and Subway. Brands that have adopted SOLUS range in size from 50,000 to over 100 million customers. In each case, SOLUS acts as the core intelligence system, driving all CRM and loyalty efforts, enabled by downstream integrations to each brand’s preferred systems that orchestrate email, SMS, app, website, drive-through and kiosk.

One key use case for Segment of One in food and beverage is to identify customers who are likely to visit, and to nudge them with personalized offers and menu recommendations, with the timing and channel of messages optimized, in order to increase transaction frequency. Another important use is customer lifecycle management – automated always-on nudges from onboarding, to repeat visit frequency, to cross selling menu items, to churn prevention, to win-back. SOLUS can also be used to drive foot traffic to specific locations, or to intelligently promote high-margin items to customers most likely to respond, replacing other types of methods that underperform vs. Segment of One.

So if you’re responsible for CRM or loyalty in food and beverage industry, including quick-service restaurants, then feel free to get in touch, and let’s do a test!

AI Master Group is a B2B channel partner for SOLUS. Full implementation takes one week.