Most convenience-store customers are arriving with a plan: 72% say they make quick trips to purchase something specific, according to Acosta Group research. For retailers, that creates a difficult loyalty challenge. How do you persuade a customer to add another item, visit more frequently, or try something new without discounting purchases that would have happened anyway?
Electrum analyzed more than 1,200 campaigns conducted over the past year to identify how retailers can turn affordability for customers into profitability for their businesses.
“Turning our data into actionable insights for retailers showed us that using affordability as a strategy for profitability starts with segmentation,” said Ed Craig, president of Electrum Loyalty. “If the entire program is built around giving the same fuel discount to everyone, that is giving away the kitchen sink. Start with the behavior you want to create, then determine the promotion or campaign to drive it.”
Pump texts drive immediate conversion, bounce-back offers encourage another visit, waterfalls build frequency through progressive rewards and choose-your-own-reward campaigns give customers a personalized reason to complete the progression. Vendor-funded offers and gaming partnerships can also encourage trial and engagement while reducing the retailer’s promotional expense.
For successful retailers in 2026, tobacco incentives create the financial foundation for their loyalty program and it's paramount to have a loyalty provider that qualifies retailers for the highest possible tiers in tobacco rebates and funding.
Tobacco customers are among the industry’s most price-conscious shoppers, and effectively serving them is paramount. Segmented waterfall campaigns can use meaningful manufacturer-funded value to generate participation and encourage repeat behavior.
In one tiered oral-tobacco campaign, all age-verified loyalty members who had purchased within the category during the previous 90 days were eligible to receive the initial offer through SMS, email and app notifications. Redemption automatically unlocked the next offer, and 39% of redeemers advanced into later reward tiers. Because manufacturer funding covered 100% of the discounts, the campaign created repeated purchase opportunities and companion sales without requiring the retailer to absorb the promotional expense. Affordability for the consumer became profitable through segmentation, automation, and vendor funding.
One of the strongest opportunities for incremental growth comes from foodservice, particularly when retailers combine segmentation with progressive reward paths.
In a foodservice campaign segmented by purchase history and frequency, selected customers received a modest discount on sandwiches that could be redeemed across multiple visits. Compared with an equal-length period before the campaign, not only did promoted-item sales increase, associated sales increased 60% and basket counts increased 57%.
But the most important requirement for profitable loyalty? Ease of redemption.
“I can’t tell you how many times I have abandoned a promotion because I had to click around and go through multiple pages to find the barcode or complete too many hidden steps,” said Charlie Porter, quality assurance specialist at Electrum Loyalty. “The future of loyalty increasingly depends on sophisticated data and automation, but customers will continue to judge their experience through two simple questions: Was the value relevant to me, and was it easy to receive?”
Retailers can combine the visibility of physical signage with the precision of segmented offers through QR codes at the pump and prompts at the POS. A QR code can open an app-like loyalty feed personalized according to location, time of day, shopping frequency and purchase history to every customer.
The offers shown to one customer at the pump 2 may be entirely different from those shown to another customer at pump 6 based on what they buy, the time of day, and their location.
In one retailer’s A/B testing, signage leading directly to a live, personalized loyalty feed generated 39% more offer-page views than signage directing customers to an app-download page.
Like improvisation, the answer is “yes, and.” Yes, offer app-exclusive discounts that reward customers who choose the deepest level of digital engagement. But do not place every promotion behind an app download. Across the data analyzed by one retailer, 68.9% of their best customers (high spend/high frequency) did not have their app.
QR-code signage and targeted campaigns can connect to those best customers based on purchase history, visit frequency, location and time of day.
The technology deciding what each customer sees is remarkably sophisticated while the experience presented to the customer is remarkably straightforward and frictionless.
“If I were creating a loyalty cheat sheet for retailers, I would start with the behavior—enrollment, trial, frequency, basket growth or retention,” said Rebecca Burch, executive vice president of client services. “Then identify whose behavior has room to change, match the category and campaign structure to that objective, and find the discount floor: the smallest meaningful incentive capable of producing the desired action. Make the offer visible and easy to redeem, measure whether the behavior changed, and repeat.”
The goal is not to give every customer the same discount. It is to give each customer the right incentive to create the next profitable behavior. That is how affordability for customers becomes profitability for retailers.
This post is sponsored by Electrum Loyalty