Loyalty Truth

The January 13, 2014 issue of Oil Express carried the highlights of an interview with LoyaltyTruth.com Editor Bill Hanifin on the topic of how small and medium size businesses can have success with email marketing.

Bill pointed out the importance of creating effective subject line copy, while making clearly understood offers with a firm call to action. He also pointed out the challenge for small to medium business goes beyond “how” to create effective email copy and begins with the need to collect emails from as many customers as possible.

Many retailers have a POS or even paper based system for entering email addresses. Fuel and convenience retailers will find these methods challenging as most customers have little time for conversation at the register nor want to expose their personal information in these settings.

To scale this obstacle, Bill suggested that fuel and convenience retailers are well advised to consider a customer loyalty program, and many are doing just that. 7-Eleven is testing Belly across more than 200 of its stores and has launched a new mobile app to further engage customers. Sheetz has an effective loyalty program and Kickback Rewards is now operating across more than 1,500 locations in the US.

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