Top 5 Customer Experience Trends for Convenience Stores

Your customer’s experience can make or break their relationship with your brand. Making sure their experience is the best it can be, should be a top priority for every convenience store marketer. In this blog post, we will help you understand what a winning “customer experience” means in the dynamic c-store marketplace — and how to achieve it.

1. Omnichannel Marketing is Key to Driving Sales

87% of brand agree that an omnichannel marketing strategy is critical or very important to their success (ResearchLive). Your customers are everywhere, interacting with your brand face-to-face in your store, at the pump, redeeming a coupon through their mobile app, leaving feedback and reviews on social media, etc. As a marketer, you need to meet your customers where they are, in-person and online.

2. Data Driven Customer Experience Initiatives

Data is imperative for c-stores to understand their current and prospective customers. Being able to harness and utilize transaction data, demographic data, location data, marketing campaign data and more, your brand will be able to stand out. With the power of data, you can tailor and personalize customer experiences, creating stronger customer relationships and developing deeper loyalty. Data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result (McKinsey).

3. C-Stores Will Need to Cater to More than One Customer Journey

While a typical U.S. household is enrolled in 19 to 29 different loyalty programs, it only actively uses five to 12 of them (Nasdaq). So how do you ensure that your loyalty program is one that is used? It is more important than ever for c-store marketers to understand that their customer acquisition and loyalty programs need to accommodate the customer journey, and that there is more than one customer journey. C-store marketers can capture customer data to better understand their customers’ journeys and create a premier loyalty experience for each individual.

4. Highly Personalized Marketing Offers

The way to impact customer behavior today is through timely, relevant, and dynamic offers that speak to the individual customer. In order to create a truly personalized consumer experience, your acquisition and loyalty program campaigns should be based on a customer profile which includes demographic, psychographic, at the pump, in-store, mobile and digital behavior information. Based on these characteristics, customer segments of all different types can be designed and targeted with specific campaigns to drive more traffic to the store, increase sales and visit frequency.

5. One Digital Platform for Customer Acquisition, Loyalty, and Marketing

Businesses are going to rely on platforms that provide all the tools they need to identify customers, collect data, predict behaviors, and automate the process of generating and sending offers. A CRM with analytics and marketing automation is key for c-store marketers to easily get the data they need and run dynamic campaigns to create loyal customers.

The Punchh customer platform converts customers from unknown and anonymous to loyalists by providing you with the tools you need to deliver a personalized, seamless customer experience.

To learn more about how to create delightful experiences for your customers, download your free copy of our whitepaper ‘Top 5 Customer Experience Trends for Convenience Stores’.