Breaking the Marketing Mold: West Paschal Of Alpine IQ On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing…

Breaking the Marketing Mold: West Paschal Of Alpine IQ On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before

An Interview With Chad Silverstein

Rewards programs based on types of purchases. This is about figuring out what kind of product a customer likes to buy, then giving them rewards based on those specific types of purchases.

Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing West Paschal.

West Paschal is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer at Alpine IQ, a customer data, loyalty, marketing, and analytics platform.

With a growth rate of over 16,000%, AIQ has been crowned the 10th fastest growing company in Inc’s 2024 Top 5,000. It was also hailed as the 2nd fastest growing software company on the list. Its revenue grew to $26 million in 2023, up from $150,000 in 2020. Since publicly launching, Alpine IQ has partnered with over 4,000 storefronts to level up their business. AIQ is staffed with more than 90 people and is hungrier than ever to continue its pace of innovation.

Alpine IQ has also been certified by Great Place To Work.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?

My entire career has been focused on business development — beginning with a sales background and slowly gaining expertise in marketing through experience.

Sales and marketing work hand-in-hand, so it was a natural progression for me, as I was seeking to learn more and grow my professional skill set.

The company that I co-founded is entirely focused on providing incredible marketing tools to retailers that are looking to create unique customer experiences.

What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?

The era of the app is upon us.

When Apple’s App Store dropped in 2008, you saw a reluctance by businesses to embrace launching their own apps.

Over the past 16 years, many businesses have felt that “customers don’t want any more apps” or that “apps won’t actually create more revenue.”

But AIQ’s experience in this field challenges that notion.

When compared with mobile web, our clients experienced a twenty-one-fold increase in campaign return on investment with native apps, a 14% average push notification conversion rate, and a threefold average increase in customer retention.

Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?

Customers crave new experiences — even from their most regularly-visited businesses.

As they keep visiting, they want to see their favorite businesses improve.

One easy way to do this is to use new tools that allow consumer data to benefit the customer. It increases both retention and customer satisfaction.

Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?

I started AIQ with my co-founders because we saw most retailers didn’t have the means to use customer data to better serve them.

The tech platforms available to smaller retailers usually keep consumer data for themselves and sell it down the line to the highest bidder.

So, for example, when a customer pays the bill at a restaurant, the point-of-sale service sometimes takes the information of the person paying the bill. But restaurants don’t have access to the data that’s generated from that activity.

Really large operators like McDonald’s or Nike are able to afford costly tools that give them the audience segmentation they need to create unique customer experiences digitally, but most mom-and-pop operators have been unable to do the same.

AIQ allows these smaller operators to collect and access highly specific customer data that can help them target their audiences the same way Fortune 500 companies do.

Customer data is the north star that can guide marketers to create customer experiences that keep people coming back and wanting more.

What specific results did you see after implementing this change?

Customers that have utilized our data ops and marketing solutions have realized, on average, a 15% increase in average ticket size.

Clients have also seen 20% increases in loyalty member purchase frequency, 84% upticks in loyalty member enrollment, and a 49% bump in revenue generated by loyalty members.

How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?

Using data is the foundation for making sure that every form of marketing your audience receives is catered specifically to them.

Predictive AI models are able to easily crunch that data to produce more personalized marketing campaigns. This substantially increases the likelihood that messages will resonate with their target recipients.

Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?

One of the first things we coded into the platform was the ability for marketers to send standard winback campaigns after a customer fails to shop after a certain period of time.

Let’s use 15, 30, 60, and 75 days as an example, here.

Many marketers will set this up as soon as they begin direct-to-customer outreach.

We found that even with personalized marketing within the email content, it did not lead to as significant of a boost to retention as we originally expected.

We then coded a new option for marketers to set the winback campaigns’ timing against the specific purchase frequency habits of each customer. This led to a massive boost in customer retention — around double the conversions of previous campaigns.

Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?

1. Rewards programs based on types of purchases. This is about figuring out what kind of product a customer likes to buy, then giving them rewards based on those specific types of purchases.

For example, if I’m someone who regularly purchases guacamole on my bowls at Chipotle, Chipotle should give me more special rewards for guacamole than someone who does not or has never added it to theirs.

There are other interesting variations of this. One that comes to mind is Amazon’s Prime Rewards Visa. This gives different amounts of points depending on the category, such as groceries, gas and travel. The end result is that Prime members spend an average of $1,400 per year, compared with non-Prime members, who spend $600.

2. Community-driven marketing. Happy customers are the best sales agents. One way to get the ball rolling is to use loyalty programs in creative ways.

We’ve found that rewarding existing customers with loyalty points every time they refer a friend has been a solid way to increase traffic.

In working with over 4,000 retail clients, we’ve found that customers are up to 4 times more likely to make a purchase if they’ve been referred by a friend.

It’s no surprise, given that 92 percent of people trust word of mouth over any other form of marketing.

Here’s one example. Before opening a physical retail location, one of our clients had 700 customers on their loyalty program list. Refer-a-friend programs were able to get them 95 additional signups.

3. Rewarding customers’ website interactions. Take into account how customers are interacting with your website. For instance, when you post a blog or create a video explaining a product, you can track that customer data and implement follow-up campaigns.

Some furniture makers, for example, post videos on how to assemble products ordered on their site. If you can see which customers watched that video, you can send a follow-up survey asking how easy it was to assemble.

If they find it easy, you can encourage them to leave a review. This creates a multi-layered journey, allowing interaction based on their engagement with your content.

4. Omni-channel direct-to-customer marketing prioritization. When it comes to omni-channel, direct-to-consumer marketing, there are various channels available: email, direct mail, phone calls, text messages, and apps with push notifications.

Many businesses focus on only one or two channels — usually SMS text and email.

However, there are opportunities in apps and multimedia messaging as well. It’s crucial to prioritize channels based on customer preferences. Some people prefer email, others like text messages, and some may engage better through apps. A great marketer can connect with all these individuals in the way that resonates with them.

5. Feedback-driven marketing. Surveys matter. Feedback matters. You should send out surveys. You should also look at the feedback you get from customers off platforms like Google reviews and Yelp.

Take that feedback and layer it with marketing strategies that specifically address the insights gained.

Ensure that you’re taking surveys and incorporating that data into future campaigns.

Sometimes it’s simple, like asking whether someone is a veteran and then adding them to a Veteran’s Day mailing list. Surveys can provide a wealth of information if used effectively and rewarded appropriately. In situations where a company can offer a product in exchange for feedback, that’s a great approach.

What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?

Transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies takes time and resources.

One of the biggest challenges can be a lack of bandwidth.

Some teams are often just keeping their heads above water, so it’s hard for them to devote the extra time necessary to create new strategies.

They have to weigh the options. Do they spend their limited manpower on a new method that may not work, or continue with a suboptimal strategy that at least works to some degree?

It’s a tough call. Many teams often feel they don’t have the resources to develop outside-the-box strategies.

Any new marketing method or initiative requires time, planning, and effort.

It’s essential to have a team willing to make uncomfortable decisions and to give them the freedom to try new things to achieve success.

This includes ensuring there are enough people on the team. It also means giving them the autonomy to explore innovative and riskier strategies, rather than just sticking with the status quo.

How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?

We’ve been monitoring how these strategies perform, and the results speak for themselves when you look at the numbers.

As I mentioned before, mobile marketing can be a big boon to retailers. Especially when you give smaller businesses the chance to create their own apps just like Fortune 500-tier companies.

When it comes to harnessing consumer information, clients that have utilized our data ops and marketing solutions have realized on average a 20% increase in loyalty member purchase frequencies, 84% loyalty enrollment growth, 15% average ticket size increase, and a 49% increase in revenue generated by loyalty members.

Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?

I’m very excited to see how AI will change marketing tech stacks.

I don’t believe there will ever be a day when AI fully replaces marketers, but I think it can free up valuable time and resources. This will give marketers the space to think outside of the box more often.

That’s because AI can help streamline day-to-day tasks.This includes things like image creation and editing.

But from my perspective, one of the most important applications of AI is audience segmentation — choosing the right audiences for specific campaigns or product advertisements.

AI’s going to help a lot here. We’ve already been using it to give our clients predictive analytics services, and we’ve seen campaigns double their conversion rates as a result.

It may take longer than people expect to become truly useful, but a timeline of five to ten years seems achievable.

What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?

I like to say that you shouldn’t necessarily move away from traditional marketing. Invest in new ways without throwing out the old.

You can have your cake and eat it, too.

You can combine traditional methods with new strategies. Both new and old methods can work together, because that’s what customers prefer.

Some enjoy app-focused experiences, while others prefer email-driven ones.

Innovative tools available to marketers can distinguish between these preferences and support the design and deployment of both.

Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?

We’re exploring the new possibilities that AI opens up.

It’s going to make coding easier. From a data perspective, it’s opening up new frontiers.

And that’s absolutely one of the biggest things that we plan to work on in the coming years.

One example is using AI to improve how our clients can target their customers.

We have hundreds of criteria that you can use to segment audiences, so hundreds of data points for any given customer.

We can drop them into an audience or a segment or a group of customers that share that trait.

In the past, you had to literally go through our platform and keep scrolling to find what you wanted, based on the tiers and the tree of categories.

Now we just have a box where you type in the audience segment you’re trying to create, and it’ll just generate it.

That’s one minor example. Creating 5 or 6 audience segments might have taken 20 or 30 minutes.

Now it can be done in about seven or eight minutes. So I’d say that’s just one example of the efficiencies we’re creating using language models and data models to better understand customer behavior and improve marketing.

How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?

You can follow me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/west-paschal-9542b5114/

And, of course, you can follow our company’s work at https://aiq.com/

This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.

About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur and Thought Leader with over 25 years of business experience. He has founded, operated, and exited multiple companies and now builds into a handful of high impact CEOs. Chad has launched multiple online communities, including a recent leadership development platform, and also serves as a strategic advisor for Authority Magazine’s thought-leader incubator program.

To learn more and connect with Chad visit: chadsilverstein.io

Breaking the Marketing Mold: West Paschal Of Alpine IQ On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.