Text marketing helps convenience stores enhance customer engagement through customized offers and easy-to-use technology

Mobivity Holdings Corp. (OTCQB: MFON), a global provider of personalized guest engagement solutions that drive customer frequency and spending, has uncovered leading trends to help transform the convenience store (c-store) industry through emerging text marketing technologies.

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As c-stores manage the digital transformation accelerated by the pandemic’s influence on consumer behavior, text marketing can enhance the customer experience with curbside pickup and touchless payment portal notifications as well as alert customers of in-store incentives and drive pump-to-store sales. As Mobivity’s recent Text Marketing Benchmarks Report shows, text message marketing subscribers visit stores 44% more frequently than non-subscribers. And once a consumer joins a text messaging program, the guest spend increases 23%.

“We are seeing increased interest in text programs among c-store brands as a complement to fuel and loyalty programs that may only reach 15% of a store’s customers,” said Dennis Becker, Mobivity Chairman and CEO. “Text message marketing solves this problem by helping reach the other 85% of customers and offering another channel to connect and engage with the brand.”

Here are four ways text marketing can help c-store marketers attract customers and increase revenue:

Drive Loyalty Sign-Ups and App Downloads
Loyalty programs require a multichannel approach and text marketing is another critical channel to growing a loyalty program by reaching c-store customers who have yet to join and aren’t receiving loyalty emails and push notifications. Also, text messages have a significantly higher open rate (98%) than email messages (20%). Lapsed texting is another form of messaging that targets customers who haven’t visited recently to nudge them back into the store.

Increase Pump-to-Store Visits with CPG Collaborations
C-store growth opportunity lies in incentivizing fuel-only customers into the store. One proven approach is to promote CPG partner brands with timely offers and colorful, on-brand images that consumers already recognize. Stores can connect these text offers to transactions and redemptions for better attribution and greater insight into subscriber engagement.

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Offer a Text Club to Complement Fuel and Loyalty Programs
To start building a subscriber base, stores must have a way to opt-in Text Club members through their loyalty program and app. A strong text marketing implementation strategy should generate 500 subscribers per store within six months. By leveraging a text marketing platform, brands can attribute every redemption to a specific subscriber date, time, location, and transaction (with or without a POS integration).

Drive Food Service Through Daypart Targeting
One of the key uses for text marketing in c-stores is in driving to-go food purchases with special offers created for specific times of the day. Using daypart targeting, c-stores can create unique incentives to increase frequency and spend among returning fuel customers that stop in for a fill-up such as an offer for a free or discounted coffee in the morning or sub in the evening. Personalized offers are redeemed 14 times more frequently and increase guest frequency by 26%.

Text marketing best practices combined with an easy-to-use, trackable technology provides c-stores with the tools necessary to maximize current initiatives like loyalty programs and apps and increase customer frequency and spending.

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