Keep Alpine IQ loyalty. Upgrade the sending.
You don't have to rip anything out. This integration exists so a store that has years invested in an Alpine IQ loyalty program can move just its email onto dedicated IPs and POS-generated campaigns, while points, members, and opt-out compliance stay perfectly intact. Run both, measure both, and decide with numbers.
Exactly what connects
This is a full client of the Alpine IQ API: audiences, contacts, member creation, OTP sign-in, points, and opt-in/opt-out state. Five streams, each with a job:
| Data stream | What flows | Cadence | Powers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audiences | Your existing AIQ audience list, with live member resolution: the actual people in the audience, not a cached copy. | Resolved at send time, suppression-filtered | Day-one sending to the audiences you already built |
| Contacts & history | Contacts via header-flexible CSV import (email, name, phone), purchase history via the POS feed. | Imported during onboarding | Segments with substance from the first send |
| Loyalty points | Member point balances, read from your AIQ program. | Synced roughly every 8 hours; refreshed on open for Apple Wallet | Live points on Apple & Google Wallet cards |
| Opt-outs | Unsubscribes, flowing in both directions: our unsubs pushed back to AIQ, AIQ opt-outs suppressed on our side. | Automatic, both directions, enforced at send time | Compliance that never drifts between platforms |
| Members & sign-in | Member creation for new signups, plus OTP sign-in (SMS or email) for existing members claiming a wallet card. | Real time, on signup | QR join pages and wallet-card claim flows |
One deliberate detail: audience membership is resolved live at send time and filtered against our suppression list at the moment of sending, not when the audience was built. Stale-audience sends are a class of mistake this integration is designed to make impossible.
Setup: the two-hour clock
The industry treats platform moves like a 30-day project. Coexistence with AIQ takes an afternoon:
- 0:00
Connect Alpine IQ and your POS
API keys in, nothing ripped out. Your loyalty program doesn't notice anything changed.
- 0:30
Contacts and audiences imported
Your AIQ audiences are listed and resolvable; contacts and history land through import plus the POS feed.
- 1:00
Dedicated IPs and domain auth configured
Two dedicated IPs (marketing + transactional), DKIM and reverse-DNS automated, warm-up governor armed.
- 1:30
First ready-to-send campaign in your feed
Drafted from your store's own products and offers, with the “why this email” reason attached.
- 2:00
You press send
To your existing AIQ audiences, suppression-filtered, on your own IPs. The ~2-week engagement-first ratchet starts from here if you decide to cut over fully.
The path: coexist, measure, then decide
Coexist. Connect AIQ and your POS, and you can be sending through us the same afternoon, to the same audiences you'd have mailed from AIQ, on your own dedicated IPs, with an automated warm-up governor pacing volume safely. Your loyalty program doesn't notice anything changed.
Measure. Same store, same audiences, two senders. It's the cleanest A/B test you'll ever run. When we measured it head-to-head on one store over the same 30-day window, Gmail opens were 40.1% on our infrastructure versus 19.7% on Alpine IQ's. Meanwhile POS revenue attribution tells you what each campaign actually rang up at the register.
Decide. If the numbers convince you, the full switch takes about two weeks of engagement-first cutover, not a 30-day migration project. And if they don't, you've lost nothing: opt-outs stayed synced the whole time.
Why this beats an all-or-nothing platform swap
Alpine IQ's loyalty engine is mature, its channel breadth is real, and plenty of stores are rightly attached to it. That's exactly why we integrate instead of demanding you cancel. The pain operators actually report is narrower: per-message email fees, audiences that rematerialize overnight, and reporting their own G2 reviewers call weak. SpringBig's answer to unhappy AIQ stores is a full platform migration onto an SMS-first system whose email is the reported weak half. Ours is surgical: keep the loyalty you like, replace the sending you don't, and compare invoices at the end of the month. The full Alpine IQ comparison covers the whole picture, including where AIQ is still the right choice.
Versus pointing AIQ exports at a generic ESP
Some stores try exporting AIQ lists into Klaviyo or Mailchimp to escape per-message fees. Three problems: cannabis policy risk on platforms that never agreed to serve this industry, one-way CSVs that let unsubscribe state drift out of compliance within weeks, and zero POS intelligence: no product data, no purchase segments, no register-verified revenue. Our integration keeps opt-outs synced both directions automatically and sends on dedicated IPs approved with full cannabis disclosure, so there's no gray area to get shut off over.
Frequently asked questions
Run the head-to-head on your own store
Book a demo and we'll show the coexistence setup live: your AIQ audiences, our sending, and the numbers side by side.