Connecting convenience from the forecourt to the store

PDI delves into the evolving demands of the fuel and convenience industry, highlighting the crucial role of effective connectivity in boosting foot traffic and customer engagement.

The fuel and convenience industry increasingly depends on tighter connectivity and agile transformation across the entire technology ecosystem. What worked yesterday might no longer satisfy the evolving demands of today’s consumers.

The question is, how effectively can you connect with consumers, suppliers, and even your own physical sites? Success depends on how many customers visit your stores and how often they return. So, let’s take a look at five ways you can connect with consumers to increase footfall.

1. Maintain your site’s appearance

Your site’s physical experience directly influences how visitors perceive both your forecourt and in-store environment. Is it easy to find your stores? Do your fuel prices attract new customers? Does your site appear clean and safe? Do you incentivize people paying at the pump to visit your store?

Analysis of site categories rated by consumers on the GasBuddy mobile app reveals that below-average ratings impact footfall more than positive ratings. For instance, a dimly lit exterior at night will likely cause more negative reactions than serving the best coffee in the neighborhood will create a positive impact.

Fortunately, these physical traits are typically areas that you can easily control. To attract visitors and get them into your stores, be sure to perform regular site maintenance, keep your restrooms clean, and incentivize your staff to keep your sites neat and tidy.

2. Align your forecourt and in-store experience

It’s also important to understand how business size can impact your success. In general, brands with 250 to 1000 locations — including some of the highest performing c-store chains — tend to experience more foot traffic on a per-site basis.

Why? They’re small enough to serve unique geographical needs but large enough to enjoy the benefits of strong brand equity. The key to success is elevating the customer experience with critical elements such as competitive fuel pricing to attract shoppers, along with targeted foodservice offerings and more personalized loyalty programs to keep those shoppers coming back.

Your ability to align your forecourt experience with your in-store experience requires integrated technology solutions, such as those that combine flexible POS systems with back-office software to give you richer data and insights about what your customers really want. Doing so can help you deliver a consistently good experience, so shoppers visit your store more often and stay longer.

3. Deliver what shoppers really want — at the right time

Once you do attract shoppers into your stores, it’s important to understand their buying behaviors. Analyzing footfall for both trips to the pump and inside the store reveals some of the most useful consumer data. Here are just a few highlights of correlating footfall at c-stores into dayparts from 2017 to 2022:

Thursday and Friday are the most popular days.
Most in-store trips occur between 10 am and 6 pm.
Fuel trips align closely with high footfall dayparts.

The key to leveraging these trends is understanding how certain product categories skew toward specific dayparts. For example, food and energy drink purchases are more common during the morning, while tobacco and alcohol shoppers tend to show up later in the day.

Knowing these trends gives you an opportunity to align category-specific offers and promotions during the times your customers are in the store. If you can track any shifts in consumer purchasing behavior all the way down to the basket level in real time, you can make faster decisions on pricing, promotions, and offers — gaining insights that could significantly improve your margins and overall store profitability.

4. Offer greater value for cost-conscious consumers

Connecting with brands can give retailers more tools to attract increasingly value-focused consumers. With growing sensitivity to inflation, many consumers are increasingly shopping for value — and they’re willing to change their behaviors to find it.

This presents you with a chance to focus on brand-loyal customers by attracting more CPG/FMCG brand dollars for personalized offers and promotions. In fact, PDI data reveals that loyalty program members add 30% greater value than non-loyalty consumers in terms of average basket price. As a result, both retailers and brands can benefit by engaging with brand-loyal shoppers.

5. Focus on sustainability

It’s clear that the energy transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs) has begun, even if we don’t fully understand the timeline of that transition. Connecting with EV drivers is another potential way to attract new customers.

Consider investing in charge ports at your sites, as long as the consumer demographics in your region point toward a good ROI. But even if you’re not ready to invest in EV charging infrastructure, you can still incorporate more sustainability into your business to connect with eco-conscious customers.

For example, you could offer a loyalty program that features carbon offsets when members make fuel purchases. You can also promote sustainability by introducing inventory management solutions that help you reduce waste in areas such as foodservice.

Fueling innovation through technology and expertise

The key to connecting convenience is technology innovation with cloud-optimized solutions that will meet your needs well into the future. From back-office systems and fuel logistics to customer loyalty programs and cybersecurity, PDI gives businesses like yours a distinct competitive advantage. Discover why more than 200,000 locations worldwide rely on PDI solutions at http://www.pditechnologies.com/