For your marketing campaigns to influence loyalty program members to visit and spend more, you should keep in mind three things: format, relevance, and timeliness. How you communicate with customers impacts how customers engage with your brand. Creating a strong marketing strategy with effective messaging is vital to getting noticed. When you send your guests the right message at the right time, it cuts through the clutter and truly resonates.
Using the proper approach to convey the information you want will maximize a message’s impact. Here are some examples of the most effective marketing messages to send to your program members:
Welcome: The welcome message is an opportunity to give your guests comprehensive information about your loyalty program. If they enrolled at the POS, it’s possible that they only got a bare-bones description of what your program offers to avoid holding up the line. Now is the time to tell them all the benefits they receive by being a member. Because this message may be dense, it’s best suited for an email. If you want to welcome members by text message, referring them to an email or linking to a landing page works well.
Almost There: This is a great way to motivate customers to accelerate their visit cadence and come in sooner to earn a reward. After defining what “almost there” means for your brand, you should reach out to guests when they are only one visit away. While the message can be sent via text or through geofencing, it’s especially effective in an email that features images of the reward that will be received. The current point balance should also be included to help prevent guests from falling short of the goal.
We Miss You: When done right, sending a message to your lapsed guests can bring them back for a visit. For maximum effectiveness, you should know each guest’s individual visit cadence. Reaching out too early could result in sending an unnecessary offer, but if you wait too long, they might be gone for good. Guests who are uncertain to return to your locations can’t be relied on to still have your app downloaded on their phone. The best method for winning them back is a progression of emails with tiered offers.
To see the full list of messages that can be used to achieve a successful loyalty program, watch our on-demand webinar, “11 Effective Messages You Should Send Your Guests.”
What if most stores – and even Amazon – are getting frictionless shopping wrong? What would it mean for brands that are trying to do things differently?
Kim Otocki, a member of the Paytronix marketing team, recently had the opportunity to sit down with Gus Olympidis, the president and CEO of Family Express. His c-store brand has firmly established itself as a leader in the frictionless experience, and Olympidis had a lot of wisdom to offer other c-store owners who are trying to follow suit.
“We’re beginning to see a movement away from demographics, toward psychographics,” said Olympidis, pointing out that the cookie-cutter approach of segmenting by generations doesn’t work nearly as well as it used to. A group like the millennials, he points out, is far too large and diverse to use as a guide for consumer wants, needs, and behaviors.
The key to serving consumers best, says Olympidis, is doing everything a c-store can to understand them, independent of their demographic. In order to accomplish this, c-stores need the kind of data insights that will let them treat their customers as individuals instead of members of a broad group.
Some of these insights can be provided by digital loyalty programs and digital customer relationship management. But according to Olympidis, one of the biggest mistakes brands are making right now is assuming that technology equates to a frictionless customer experience.
In fact, he believes that “bad technology creates friction.” Anything that makes it more difficult for consumers to get what they want increases friction, and that can absolutely include technology. […]
It’s not news to any c-store owner that competition for customers and spend is higher than ever. In addition to the many direct competitors in the industry, convenience stores have to contend with fast-food restaurants, big-box retailers like Walmart and Target, and even online giants like Amazon.
The c-stores that continue to thrive despite these challengers will be the ones that best adapt their businesses to meet new consumer trends, wants, and needs.
In addition to offering reward programs, one of the biggest requests by customers is online ordering and delivery. In the past, c-stores might have thought implementing an online ordering system wouldn’t apply to their business – but times have changed and this is only the beginning.
Here are a few eye-opening statistics that should catch any c-store owner’s attention:
- 60% of U.S. consumers order delivery or takeout once per week.
- 34% of consumers spend at least $50 per online food order.
- 20% of consumers say they spend more on off-premises orders than on dine-in/on-premises purchases.
- The increase in digital ordering and delivery has been 300% greater than that of dine-in traffic since 2014.
- 52% of millennials indicate that they would purchase more often from c-stores if delivery were offered.
It couldn’t be clearer that in order to effectively compete for the consumer dollar, convenience stores need to incorporate online ordering (and if at all possible, delivery) into their strategies.
But how does a c-store implement a proper plan? Which elements are essential and which ones can be skipped? What kind of customer data needs to be captured, and how should that data be used? Most importantly, how do convenience stores choose the right online ordering platform?
We’ve put together a free, on-demand webinar to answer all of these questions and many others.
Titled “Why C-Stores Need Online Ordering,” the session will provide even more statistics and facts to prove just how critical online ordering is to the success of convenience stores. It will also give you an action plan to begin mapping out an online ordering system for your c-store.
Click here to watch this free, half-hour webinar now.
Online ordering is a significant part of restaurant success. Getting in the game and scoring big depends on implementing the right restaurant online ordering system. According to a National Restaurant Association study, 37 percent of restaurants now offer online ordering and the same percentage of them consider customer ordering to be the most important area of technology development over the next five years. Online and mobile ordering is especially popular with millennial and Gen Z customers, who are predicted to account for 70% of delivery orders by 2020. What’s the best game plan for providing the convenience, speed, and accuracy that your guests want? Achieving the following seven objectives will help put your ordering and delivery strategy in the end zone.
- Easy Order Flow
Making the ordering experience as easy as possible for your customers increases the likelihood that they will order from you again. Guests should be able to indicate whether their order is for delivery or pickup at the beginning of the process, rather than at the end, especially if some items are not available via one method. It’s also helpful if your online ordering platform auto-adjust for different browsers and devices. Addresses and payment methods should be stored to save the time of reentering information, and guests should be able to select a past order so they don’t have to call an audible. An easy-to-use online ordering system enhances customer loyalty all while driving more sales.
- Intelligent Cross-Selling
A common way to boost sales is through cross-selling. While it’s easy to suggest a beverage or a dessert if there’s not already one in the customer’s cart, you can score big with recommendations backed by machine learning. Rather than offering suggestions that broadly apply to everyone, your online ordering platform can learn over time which items are frequently purchased together or by an individual guest. For instance, customers may typically order a side of guacamole with a burrito, or a particular guest might like to get bruschetta when ordering an entrée.
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