Women are increasingly shopping at convenience stores providing a significant opportunity for c-store operators to capture their interest and generate customer loyalty. In fact, the 2018 Convenience Store News Realities of the Aisle customer study found that 44 percent of women say they shop at a c-store two to three times a week.
With this increase in female shoppers, convenience store marketers should be shifting some of their focus from the typical “Bubba” to how they can increase the basket size and number of visits from women. There are various ways to take advantage of this new influx of female shoppers – from loyalty programs to relevant messages engaging these customers before, during, and after they shop.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs can help capture interest and keep customers with your brand and away from the competition down the street. Female shoppers are very interested in participating in loyalty programs, 31 percent say that they would enroll in a program if their usual store offered one. Loyalty programs provide a brand with the ability to communicate with their customers as well as reward them for their loyalty. This essentially creates a two-way street between the brand and customer – customers give the brand their business and the brand provides an incentive to keep the customer shopping with them.
Relevancy
Segmentation is key to being relevant to your customers when sending them messages or offers through a loyalty program. C-stores need to make sure they go beyond simple segmentation and dive into a more persona-driven segmentation method, such as “Susie the Soccer Mom” or “Kristen the Professional.”
Creating personas will only help with being relevant to customers, what their needs are, what they like, and what they don’t like. Having a good idea of who each customer is will only help when crafting messages that are highly relevant to the customer and help them to come into the store more frequently or increase her basket size.
Pull Female Shoppers in from the Pump
Seventy-Four percent of female c-store shoppers go to the store to purchase gasoline leaving a big opportunity to convert some of those visits into in-store sales. There are a variety of promotions that work well to generate pump to store conversions:
These topics and more were recently discussed in a webinar, “Proven Strategies to Attract Female Shoppers to Your C-Store.” Watch the webinar on-demand to learn more about driving new traffic from this growing segment to your store and creating greater customer loyalty.