Convenience Retail Giants Drive App Adoption in Bid for Incremental Sales

The world’s largest convenience store chains are leveraging their apps to drive traffic and personalize their marketing to consumers’ individual habits and preferences.

For instance, Casey’s General Stores shared in an investor presentation Monday (Dec. 11) accompanying its second-quarter fiscal 2024 financial results that its loyalty program membership has increased to 7.3 million, up from 5.8 million last year and 7 million the previous quarter.

The company noted that the program yields “higher transaction value” and “more frequent visits,” as well as enabling the retailer to deploy “personalized marketing to influence guest behavior.”

Meanwhile, convenience store giant Couche-Tard is seeing promising early results from its Circle K brand’s emerging loyalty program, Inner Circle, which first launched in June.

“Five months in, we’ve got 8 million people signed up. Florida was our first market,” Couche-Tard CEO Brian Hannasch told analysts on the company’s earnings call late last month. “Looking at results there, we’re balancing the activities of rolling out sites quickly to learning, and doing both at the same time is hard but we are clearly seeing growing fuel volume versus non-Inner Circle sites, growing merch traffic and growing basket versus non-Inner Circle sites.”

Additionally, Hannasch explained that Circle K is “learning how to best personalize our offers to increase traffic” based on this early data.

Meanwhile, convenience retail behemoth 7-Eleven is turning to its proprietary delivery app, 7NOW, to drive digital engagement, creating incremental sales opportunities, as Ryuichi Isaka, president and representative director of the chain’s parent company Seven & I Holdings Co., told analysts on the company’s most recent earnings call in October.

In-store purchase levels remain almost the same, with the amount spent on 7NOW added on top of that, indicating that users have different use cases for in-store and 7NOW purchases,” Isaka said. “We believe … that 7NOW is viewed by consumers as serving both the needs of people looking for food delivery services and stocking up on products, and this represents a use case completely different from the types of e-commerce seen so far.”

As such, it seems delivery options enable convenience stores to gain share from restaurants and grocery stores.

Indeed, digital is coming to play a growing role in the convenience store space. According to the study “Big Retail’s Innovation Mandate: Convenience And Personalization,” a PYMNTS Intelligence study and ACI Worldwide collaboration, which draws from a survey of 300 large U.S. and U.K. retailers, 72% of convenience retailers and pharmacies believe that consumers would be very or extremely likely to switch merchants if not provided mobile apps. Plus, 70% said the same of digital coupons and rewards.

Moreover, consumers are increasingly making these kinds of purchases online. According to the survey “Consumer Interest in an Everyday App,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal collaboration, which draws on responses from more than 2,200 U.S. consumers, 72% of those who had purchased non-grocery retail items in the previous month did so via connected devices at least some of the time. Plus, 60% of those who purchased food from a restaurant did the same, as did 61% of those who shopped for groceries.