RaceTrac’s loyalty program and app have come a long way. When Jamie Miller, vice president of marketing, joined the Atlanta-based convenience-store chain five and a half years ago, its app did not have a great user experience, she said.
The technology was slow, points and tiers didn’t expire, and the company wasn’t doing much to promote the program in store, Miller said.
“We kind of had it, but we weren't doing a lot with it to drive incremental value,” she said. “And so that's where we've hired a team, a very small team, of people to manage that and really try to help us get the value out of those investments.”
Now, the chain has made RaceTrac and RaceWay Rewards more personal and created a more frictionless experience for its customers. It’s driven by a shared vision from the marketing and technology teams, the latter of which is lead by Tyler Grubbs, executive director of digital and store technology at RaceTrac.
Grubbs and Miller spoke Monday at CSP’s C-StoreTEC forum in Plano, Texas, alongside moderator, NexChapter CEO and C-StoreTEC Advisory Board Chairman Art Sebastian.
How RaceTrac’s marketing, technology team work together
Hiring a product team on the marketing side that handles the business strategy and goals in partnership with a more development-oriented team under Grubbs helped both the marketing and technology departments prioritize projects.
Miller and Grubbs said it works because they have aligned expectations for their teams. When they are solving for problems, like how to get something done more quickly or how to get a feature launched, “our expectation is that they are collaborating across marketing and IT and coming to us with the best solution or options and a recommendation,” Miller said.
“We fail together; we win together. That’s just how we’ve built the culture between our two teams, and it’s very collaborative,” she said.
- RaceTrac is No. 17 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
Marketing and technology team members must understand both sides of the business, Grubbs said.
“We both had to take on the onus of saying, ‘I've got to understand your business so that I can speak into your language and the things that you care about.’ We always have to be talking back and forth in that way. Outside of that shared kind of common language, it would be impossible to work together,” he said.
Starting small and in a focused area to build trust and empathy helps build a foundation, he said.
That’s not to say there aren’t healthy debates between marketing and technology, Miller said.
“I push Tyler on costs, he pushes me on time. There's all kinds of conversations that happen to get us to the best outcome. But we trust each other in those conversations that we're doing what's best for the project, the organization,” she said.
RaceTrac has more than 800 RaceTrac and RaceWay convenience stores and about 1,200 Gulf-branded locations.
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