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The Paytronix Convenient Connections Summer Series is a five-part blog that explores successful loyalty campaigns that convenience stores can use to drive user engagement, win back customers, successfully segment customer groups, and ultimately drive incremental revenue. Look for the Summer Series throughout the months of August and September.

A critical business strategy for most convenience stores lies in vendor funding. While the majority of this funding is used for signage and widely available member pricing – two strategies that have proven to be very successful – there are other means of leveraging this funding that can be mutually beneficial.  

One such way is through a lapsed category campaign. This type of campaign targets customers who made a specific purchase – of, say, a candy bar – within the last six to 12 months, but not within the last 30 or 60 days. The offers that accompany these campaigns typically need to be high-value, which is why they are perfect to leverage with vendor funds; but when planned strategically, the vendor can also benefit by seeing its products reintroduced to its own lapsed buyers.  […]

There’s no question about it: no one likes spam. After all, there’s a reason email inboxes have dedicated spam folders and entire companies exist solely to combat the pesky messages from cluttering up the primary inbox.

As well as these technologies work, every now and then, emails from reputable companies end up in the spam folder. Just consider how often automated messages include the instruction to check the spam folder if an email hasn’t arrived in five minutes.

New e-book: The Art of Deliverability: Getting Emails Where They Need to Go

Spam traps are a key tool in the constant battle against junk mail, but they can also ensnare even reputable companies, so being careful is a key part of email deliverability. Internet Service Providers, or ISPs, create spam traps as a means of identifying IP domains that are sending junk email at high volumes. There are two kinds of spam traps to be aware of. […]

Last week we looked at how restaurants are seeing a renewed recovery, even if the upward trend is smaller than before. 

When it comes to convenience stores, the trend is very different. C-stores had a much shallower drop at the start of the pandemic, which amounted to about half that of restaurants. They were helped by the fact that in most states, c-stores were put in the “essential” category, meaning that they could stay open even as other retail companies had to close up shop. Still, with traditional commuting patterns disrupted, c-stores took a bit of a hit. 

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The Paytronix Convenient Connections Summer Series is a five-part blog that explores successful loyalty campaigns that convenience stores can use to drive user engagement, win back customers, successfully segment customer groups, and ultimately drive incremental revenue. Look for the Summer Series throughout the months of August and September.

Because the concept of convenience stores came about in response to the rise of American driving culture, they were once primarily vendors of fuel, tobacco, and soft drinks. Hence, the c-store phrase “gas, Cokes and smokes.” 

Today, c-stores offer much more, from freshly prepared meals to basic grocery items; but many convenience store brands still see a large subset of customers that only visit the pump or pop into the store looking for tobacco. This leaves the brand with limited options, since gas’ and tobacco’s low margins and legal limitations make these difficult, if not impossible, to promote.  

That’s where clustering comes in. Clustering is a form of segmenting customers based on commonly shared behaviors or characteristics. It’s used to find distinctions among large groups that share a common trait to enable more a more personalized approach to marketing. This can take many forms, but a common use case lies in grouping customers based on items that drive them to visit. […]