The Convenience Store Conundrum: Personalising the Top-up-shop

The Convenience Store Conundrum: Personalising the Top-up-shop

3 min read

Convenience stores are on the rise globally, providing a lifeline for busy individuals seeking quick and convenient shopping experiences. Their success is undeniable, with annual growth rates defying the trends of the wider grocery market. Yet, beneath the convenience lies a conundrum: how to effectively engage customers whose interactions are often brief and transactional.

The convenience customer

Unlike supermarket shoppers who meticulously plan their weekly grocery hauls, convenience store customers are typically on a mission. Their baskets are smaller, they are short for time and consequently their loyalty cards are often left unused. This poses a unique challenge for marketers accustomed to analysing extensive purchase histories and tailoring promotions based on long-term loyalty data.

Common wisdom, along with a lot of consumer studies, tells us that personalising the customer experience is the way to go. But when data is limited, the ability to identify and personalise the right offer for the right customer becomes limited, as does the pool of recipients for a given offer. And that means that customers don’t get the experience they are looking for and advertising brands whose promotions are being sent do not see the redemption rates they expect.

If the goal is to personalise offers at scale, what steps can convenience retailers take to achieve it? To collect the data required to make personalisation viable, convenience store retailers need to convince customers to scan their loyalty cards at checkout. To do that, the loyalty scheme needs to engage with customers in a way that makes it worthwhile to use the card.

The mechanics and the rewards offered by the scheme are critical to getting customers on board in the first instance, but keeping customers engaged once they’ve signed up is the ongoing challenge faced by all retailers and especially convenience store chains

The answer lies in getting the basics right first.

The Power of Segmentation

Enhanced segmentation emerges as a solution, leveraging both data insights and nuanced brand knowledge to understand the convenience customer on a deeper level. Retailers like Franprix have recognised this, adopting enhanced segmentation to tailor promotions and product assortments based on the unique preferences of their local customer base.

By collaborating with brands, data experts can analyse purchase patterns, demographic information, and even external factors like location and time of day to create highly specific customer segments.

Infinity Advertising runs advertising campaigns for Franprix and deploys relevanC’s campaign creation tools to help it precisely target promotional campaigns for Franprix and its advertising suppliers. The campaigns have three specific objectives: re-engaging with dormant loyalty card holders, customer retention, and recruiting customers for new or different products.

"For Franprix, we focus a lot on reinforcing customer loyalty. Part of that is bringing customers back to brands or products they’ve bought in the past. The most important tool in our toolbox for this is high-quality segmentation."

Elodie Tridon, Head of Personalised Promotions at Infinity Advertising

relevanC’s Solution

Moving beyond classic segmentation relevanC’s segmentation studio allows retailers to leverage the product and customer knowledge of the brands themselves. With this new self-service capability, brands can define highly targeted segments that align precisely with their campaign objectives. relevanC is at the forefront of this evolution, empowering convenience stores with a platform that facilitates enhanced segmentation. "The brands we work for truly appreciate the ability to fine-tune segmentation," says Tridon

The convenience store landscape is evolving, and with it, the strategies for engaging customers. Enhanced segmentation offers a path forward, promoting increased use of loyalty cards that bring data to power personalised promotions, targeted offers, and, ultimately, a more rewarding shopping experience.

Will Brown