As Pleasanton, California-based ExtraMile Convenience Stores was beginning its joint venture with Jackson’s Food Stores in 2018, it offered its first loyalty program.
Now a 1,070-store chain exclusively at Chevron and Texaco fuel locations, it upgraded its loyalty app by migrating with Chevron’s fuel rewards program. The goal was to provide a full-site experience that allows customers to “earn and burn” on both fuel and in-store purchases.
“By marrying a top tier brand, Chevron and Texaco fuel, and our top tier convenience brand [ExtraMile], we can create one seamless, frictionless experience for customers that we think is leading the industry in terms of providing value for our customers,” said Camden Meyers, loyalty program manager at ExtraMile.
ExtraMile is eager to further develop its new loyalty program so that it can use the data it collects, such as insights into shopping habits, said Rob Falciani, director of marketing at ExtraMile.
The chain is specifically interested in understanding benchmarks such as scan rates, the speed at which a system can read a barcode and collect data; market basket, a group of products that are commonly purchased by a specific group of people and can be used to track what products customers buy together; transactions; and customer accounts.
“It's about making people feel as though you value that relationship with them.” —Donnie Fairbanks, Paytronix
After gathering this data, ExtraMile will be better equipped to enable one-to-one marketing by building offers that resonate with customers in partnership with Chevron, said Falciani.
The chain, which has more than 5 million loyalty members with Chevron, saw about 99% of its customer base move over to the new platform.
Personalization is all about habits, said Donnie Fairbanks, senior loyalty strategist at Paytronix, a loyalty provider based in Newton, Massachusetts.
High risk accounts, for example, are detected when a change in a customer’s usual routine suggests they are lapsing off the brand. Sending them a deal might influence them to reestablish the habit. Fairbanks gives the example of someone who previously visited the store every morning to buy a cup of coffee but hasn’t been back in a while.
“We have the recognition of how these segments within a program are behaving,” he said. “We know that there are big group of fuel customers who are coming to you for all their fuel needs, and there's a big group of coffee people who are habitually coming to you for the coffee or for their cigarettes, for their packaged beverages, for their Monster drinks. We can isolate those groups, and we can target them and understand their value within the program. We can set up strategies to make sure they stay engaged and that they come as frequently or more frequently than they already are.”
“It's not like you ever stop doing these types of things to enhance that experience for the customer.” —Rob Falciani, ExtraMile
Personalization can either inform the brand with data, or it can improve the consumer experience.
Loyalty can often be reduced to a discount program, with deals such as savings on fuel, discounts on consumer products, half-off offers, or BOGOs, but those offers only work as long as they’re relevant or most valuable, Fairbanks said.
More than half of consumers, 54%, expect the cost of their typical grocery purchases to increase in 2025, according to data from the 2025 Commerce Experience Report from NCR Voyix, an Atlanta-based digital commerce solution company for the retail and restaurant industries. Compared to 46% last year, 56% of consumers are making a concerted effort to shop where they can find the best deals and looking at rewards programs to save, the survey found.
“It’s tried and true, but businesses really do win when they focus on customer experience,” said David Wilkinson, chief executive officer at NCR Voyix. “Our data shows consumers want more technology present to simplify checkout, greater personalization, and loyalty rewards.”
There are motivators beyond discounts that drive that affinity with loyalty members, though. The brands that are personalizing offers and connecting with customers tend to float to the top, Fairbanks said. The best way to connect to a customer is to know them.
“The use of personalization in that context is important because brands, especially in the c-store world, need to [communicate] one-to-one with consumers in relevant terms,” said Fairbanks. “That is the priority.”
There was a time when it was just about brands putting out a value proposition that appealed to the members of the program, he said.
“Now, it's about making people feel as though you value that relationship with them,” said Fairbanks.
When customers feel valued, business volumes from loyalty programs don’t fluctuate much during challenges like COVID or inflation, Fairbanks said. Loyalty members who feel valued are the most profitable customers.
“We looked at inflation over two years, and it did cause people to change their behaviors and to cut their spending, down spend, buy cheaper alternatives, buy less and to combine their shopping trips,” said Fairbanks. “You don't see that as much with loyalty. It retained itself because those brands target on a one-to-one basis and use the learnings that they have from in store, [they don’t] just give [customers] another offer to sell them to the next thing.”
When c-store chains’ products are comparable in cost, the chain with the better customer relationship is going to win, Fairbanks said.
Falciani agrees, saying that loyalty “is an outcome of creating a solid experience and a business that consumers react to and have a personal connection to so that they become loyal.”
bp is another convenience-store chain that has combined its fuel and in-store rewards.
bp’s new earnify app, which replaced its BPme Rewards program in October, will offer customers chain-specific deals for its bp, TravelCenters of America, Thorntons and ampm locations.
“We’re finding that stores that have already moved into the earnify world are already seeing 1.7 times the reception by the consumers of the new app compared to the stores that still have the old app,” said Mukta Tandon, vice president of U.S. mobility marketing, marketing and convenience Americas at bp. “The appetite from the consumers who have a more updated, savvier app which allows them flexibility is certainly there.”
The 1,540-store chain based in Chicago also plans to add a stacking capability, she said, and with more data, personalization will play a role in customer offers.
“Once we start understanding the actions of how they spend their money, we’ll be able to work with our vendors to make sure we’ve got the right kind of offers for them that personalizes and customizes,” said Tandon.
bp is No. 7 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count. ExtraMile is No. 8.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving to make personalization more effortless.
AI will have the capability to actively pull out significant actionable tactics and strategies from large data sets, said Fairbanks.
“Right now, AI as a language tool is amazing,” he said. “It does huge data sets and makes them accessible to even me, as a consumer. But from a technology side, the challenge is you still have to guide it to look at the data in a certain way to find the relevant or those compelling insights.”
There will be more sophistication to come, he said.
“You're going to be able to set, I think, a monitoring level through AI that looks at customer behaviors, and when they change, they alert you in real time so that we can go back in and modify program structure, communications or even campaigns that are targeting that audience because we do see shifts,” said Fairbanks.
ExtraMile has not experimented with AI in regard to loyalty but is not counting it out. The chain is in the phase of learning about how AI can enable the business, Falciani said. It’s critical to assess where it can provide more efficiency.
“If businesses are not leveraging AI, then they're going to be left behind. This is definitely going to be an enhancement to our business, our people and obviously our franchisees,” he said.
He is interested in leveraging it for store operations, analyzing data and for recommendations on strategies.
In the next year, Falciani’s goal is to double ExtraMile’s loyalty program efforts in terms of engaging the customer and meeting them where they’re at.
“I feel pretty passionate about the program that we had previously, but to be able to partner with Chevron through this relationship and development of the app is ultimately something that I'm very proud of,” he said.
The road to achieve better customer experience never ends, Falciani said.
“It's not like you ever stop doing these types of things to enhance that experience for the customer,” he said. “Customers’ behavior changes dramatically year over year, and we have to really earn their business. And so just like you would with category management, where you introduce new items and obviously new strategies to meet the customer where they're at, the same thing happens within our loyalty program.”
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