By Lauren Shanesy

Convenience retail is an experience business—it’s about building connection with customers, creating an in-store experience and loyalty to the brand that turns your store into a destination. Technology and data analysis are tools to help retailers execute and scale that vision.

PDI Connections Live took place this week, August 24-27, and focused on the strategies retailers could employ to enhance loyalty programs, leverage AI, stay on top of consumer trends and prepare for industry advancements in the future as the retail landscape evolves.

Here are a few takeaways from the event.

Loyalty Is the New Cornerstone

Retailers are going above and beyond to enhance their loyalty apps, adding gamification, new ways to redeem offers, innovative strategies to connect with their customers and be on the forefront of what the next phase of customer personalization will look like.

Based on PDI data by keynote speaker Brittany Hodak:

• It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one.
• Returning customers spend 67% more on average than first time customers.
• Loyalty members spend 30% more than non-loyalty members per visit.

“Loyalty underpins everything that we do as an oil company because of how important it is to consumers now,” said Henry Miller, general manager of Shell mobility marketing North America, during a loyalty panel general session. Jessica Starnes, director of loyalty at Weigel’s and Amber Keen, director of mobile operations at Phillips 66, joined Miller on the panel.

Success metrics that each company uses are different: for Weigel’s its penetration rate, for Shell its active users and for Phillips 66 its frequency of visits.

One strategy is to give customers an offer that gets them to come back multiple times. Shell’s new concept, which it launched four months ago, gives new users sign up deals that increase with frequency on the first, second and third visits. “We’ve seen enrollments go way up, in the double digits, over past three months. But more importantly, we see people coming at a much more consistent rate all the way through the third visit. It’s really important to give the customer a reason to come back, and this seems to resonate with them,” said Miller.

Read more loyalty takeaways from the conference in Strategies for Leveraging Loyalty and Enhancing Engagement.

Everyone Is Using AI

AI is making inroads in the customer personalization arena, said PDI Chief Information Officer Neda Dibai during a discussion with Bill Reich, senior director, product management, AI & Agentforce specialist at Salesforce in “The AI-Powered Retail Experience” session.

AI can help with that hyper personalization by zeroing in on the details, such as knowing when a consumer who often picks up coffee at a certain time is nearby and pushing them a loyalty promotion for their morning cup, Dibai said.

At the event, PDI announced the launch of MyPDI, its new AI-powered platform. The platform allows users to access the PDI ecosystem, with a roadmap of reporting, insights and dashboard capabilities in a centralized platform.

“It’s a consolidated way to view and access your PDI solutions. It provides analytics, a cross-application reporting package with rich data sets and dashboard capabilities and AI tools and chat bots to help you surface meaningful business insights,” said Linnea Geiss, chief operating officer at PDI Technologies during the unveiling.

Geiss also said PDI is implementing AI in various other ways, as well as training its employees to use AI and integrate it into their workflows where applicable.

“It’s everything from using an LLM that we built for our security business that helps sift through the variety of threats that are out there and helps figure out which threats are most relevant to a particular customer and simplify the noisy threat landscape, to taking our fuel pricing application to the next level. We are implementing AI with Pricebook, rebates, all kinds of things that can benefit from better automation,” Geiss told NACS.

Look out for more PDI Connections Live coverage tomorrow.