What does receipt scanning have to do with digital marketing?

Are you looking for a creative way to supercharge your marketing campaigns?

What you might not see is that receipts are an extremely powerful digital marketing tool to add to your arsenal. Whether that’s through increasing customer loyalty or gaining consumer insights, the potential boost to your business is exponential.

In the Information Age that we live, accessing this data can help your business take note of trends and become more efficient.

Receipt marketing campaigns are also a great way to implement a customer loyalty programme. A rewards tally can provide a significant boost for your business, allowing you to maximise customer lifetime value and drive repeat business.

There are very few things in the marketing world that are more important than understanding consumers.

Who are they?
What do they want?
What are they buying?
When are they buying?
How much are they buying?
Where are they buying?
What else are they buying?

Life would be pretty easy if we could just get the answers directly from the consumers by just asking them, but that’s not very realistic. Luckily for us, the information needed to answer those questions can be found on consumers’ receipts. This is where an OCR Receipt Scanning API comes in.

But what exactly does a receipt OCR API do?

Receipt OCR allows you to take the valuable information from a consumer’s receipt and transform it into usable, meaningful, computer-readable data rather than just words on paper.

Let me explain how this technology can help answer those very important marketing questions through:

Gathering and Using Customer Data
Increasing Customer Loyalty

1. Gathering Customer Data

We don’t really need to know their name, but we do need to know what, where, when, how much, and what else they are buying.

This information is all kept on their receipts and can help you build a picture of your consumer and what it is they really want.

Once you know who your consumer is, you’ll have a much better idea of how to target them in your campaigns and what products to target them with.

Receipt scanning API is a tool that allows you to make use of the valuable information existing on consumer receipts.

Collating consumer purchasing information can help you identify patterns throughout your customer base of what, when, and how much your consumers are buying as well as indicating what other products they buy that might compliment your own.

Leveraging customer data at the transaction level to help understanding what makes your consumers tick means you can target them with more personalised campaigns that they will actually engage with.

Data-driven insights for customer preferences.

It is very important to know what consumer likes to buy, how often they like to buy it, if they have preferred stores to buy from, and if they buy any competitor products.

These are their preferences, and they are incredibly important.

A consumer’s receipt is full of valuable consumer preference data and making use of it can help you personalise and target campaigns for specific consumer segments.

Using the data on consumers receipts can help you sell your customers what they want, when they want it.

How is the receipt data used in Digital Marketing?

A marketing campaign is the most successful when it targets the right audience in the right way at the right time.

To put it very simply, the information and data needed to shape a successful digital campaign can be found on consumers’ receipts.

If you understand who your consumers are and what their preferences are, you can create more personalised, targeted campaigns that actually engage your consumers.

Using receipt data allows you to not only target consumers with what they want, but also get a much better prediction of what they are going to want in the future.

Receipt-driven marketing campaigns can also help with customer retention.

If a marketing campaign is shaped by consumer preferences and actually caters to what the consumer wants, they are more likely to keep coming back to your brand and increase their loyalty to it.

Long-lasting customer relationships are vital and there is no better way to achieve these relationships than through targeted campaigns on websites, through emails, or on social media.

As a consumer, being bombarded with ads for products and services you don’t care about online is downright annoying. A lot of the time it can actually leave a consumer with a negative impression of the brand.

So, targeting consumers with products they are actually interested in – as proven by their receipts, will encourage them to come back to your brand.

And, with the insights gained from their receipts, you will have a much better idea of what other products you can target them with that they will actually be interested in.

2. Increasing Customer Loyalty

Another great way of implementing a Receipt OCR API is the ability to develop a robust customer loyalty programme. Finding ways to retain customers for the long run is the key to success in retail. It’s “five times easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one” – by focusing on existing customers, you can maximise each individual’s customer lifetime value (CLV).

Furthermore, loyal customers “spend 67% more on products and services than new customers”. The power of loyal customers lies in the numbers. For businesses, 20% of your customers can make up 80% of your business’s overall revenue – therefore it’s key to create incentives that keep them coming back to you. Driving repeat business to your store alleviates the costs that would otherwise be put towards marketing, lead generation etc – finding cost-effective methods is great for

What you might not also recognise is the influence of loyal customers behind the scene. For instance, loyal customers that keep coming back will spread brand awareness through word-of-mouth, and will likely tell friends and families if they’ve had a positive experience.

Capitalising on loyal customers can also defend against the competition. It’s important to recognise that every dollar spent with you is a dollar not spent with your competitor. This can ensure that you aren’t swallowed up by other competitors and are subject to less revenue volatility.

Implementation of loyalty programs

So you might be thinking? What are some ways my business can implement a receipt based customer loyalty programme?

If you’re in the coffee business, a great way to implement this is simply for your customers to take a picture of their receipt and upload it to the campaign website, where they will then receive an incentive, say a free coffee after every five drinks. With every purchase, you’re incentivising customers to come back and accumulate rewards – driving repeat customers back to your business.

Another way for loyalty programmes to work is if many different establishments are involved. For example, the City of Melbourne wanted to motivate Melburnians to dine within the city, contributing directly to the local businesses. They teamed up with Waivpay to build an intelligent redemption campaign where local diners could take a picture of their receipt, upload it to the campaign website and receive a 20% redemption.

The digital marketing space is, and always will be an ever-changing environment. A campaign that worked a treat 2 years ago could be an absolute flop next year.

Consumers’ wants, needs, and preferences are constantly changing and adapting to fit their lifestyles and situations and consequently their purchasing behaviours are too.

In such a volatile environment, digital marketing campaigns need to adapt and react to changes frequently in order to target consumers successfully.