Margins are incredibly tight on fuel sales, making every purchase from your store essential to your bottom-line profitability.  Attracting customers into your store and then motivating them to buy more products from you will go a long way to achieving the goals you’ve set for your business.  By implementing a few quick c-store tips, you can get more customers into your front doors and increase your average sales per customer.

Ways to Attract More Customers Into Your Store

Before you can increase your sales, you need to get customers from their cars into your store.  Here are a few tips to help motivate your customers to explore your convenience store.

1. Keep it clean.  When people stop to fill up their tanks, they assess the quality and safety of the facility based on what they see outside the store.  Customers will be far more likely to enter the store when the exterior area is well-lit, organized, swept clean, and maintained.  Don’t forget details like brushing off cobwebs from lights and repairing vandalism quickly.
2. Use signage.  Attractive signage that matches your branding will help invite customers into your store.  Make sure customers can learn about key promotions from their vehicles.  At the same time, signage must be clean and simple.  Too much signage will look cluttered and disorganized.  Replace blown-out bulbs in lit signs immediately, and remove faded or damaged paper signs.
3. Implement points programs.  When customers earn points for fuel purchased at the pump that can be redeemed for discounts in your convenience store, they are motivated to come in to shop.  Customers often feel that points not redeemed is money wasted, so these programs tend to be very effective in compelling customers to shop.

Promotions to Increase Products per Sale

Once customers are in your convenience store, you’ll need effective promotions to expand their purchase from the one thing they came in for to a handful of products.  

1. B1G1.  Buy-one-get-one-free promotions are popular with customers.  There’s nothing like the feeling of getting something for nothing.  One way to maximize B1G1 promotions is to focus on products you want to introduce to customers to get further sales down the road.   B1G1 can also entice customers to enter the store for an already popular product at a perceived tremendous value.
2. Pairing Products.  Some products naturally go together, and creating promotions around pairs of items attracts customers’ attention.  When the pair of items is purchased, the customer gets a discount on the combined price.  For example, pairing the purchase of chips with soda or milk with a loaf of bread.  Creating promotional pairs and rotating them routinely is a fun way to increase sales.
3. Limited-time Promotions.  Most customers have a hard time passing up a tremendous deal.  Offering a significant discount on an item for a limited time heightens the FOMO emotions in customers resulting in more purchases.  Complement this tactic by training cashiers to cross-sell related products.
4. Threshold Promotions.  A threshold promotion offers a free product or discount when a specific purchase threshold is reached.  For example, you might offer a free 6-pack of soda when a customer spends $25 in your store.  Customers are motivated to purchase additional items to meet the threshold and receive the free product.

Are you looking for more quick c-store tips to increase your profitability?

GP Energy can help.  We work with convenience store owners daily to help them understand the needs of their local customers and implement product lines and services to increase their bottom-line profitability.  By partnering with GP Energy, we can help your business unlock its potential with new opportunities and achieve unimaginable success.  Contact us today, and let’s get started.