To get the most value out of a loyalty program, you need your members to not just sign up, but to actually behave loyally for the long term. 

QT Pay is an exciting new program generating real customer interest, but we know how hard it is to drive long-term, sustained behavior change. Maintaining long-term engagement is a common challenge — our analysis of billions of retail transactions shows that 50% of loyalty sign-ups churn after only one year of membership.

This is the gap we aim to close with our partners. Upside works together with 100,000 businesses across multiple retail categories to bolster customer loyalty and support program success. Our partnership with Giant Eagle and GetGo, for example, has resulted in 4x more frequent trips from new and non-loyalty customers. Plus, 62% of those customers went on to join the retailer’s myPerks loyalty program. Existing loyalty members transact more often, too — myPerks members that started using Upside began making an additional monthly transaction after our partnership launched.

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Here, we’ll provide context and offer insights to help ensure that QT Pay maintains its early momentum.

Understanding the challenges with loyalty programs

Loyalty programs have long been a cornerstone of customer engagement, but as consumer expectations evolve, the next phase of loyalty requires more than the standard approach to stay effective. Here’s why:

1. Customers have come to expect loyalty. In that way, loyalty programs have almost become table stakes. Upside data shows that the average fuel loyalty member belongs to 2.5 programs in this category alone — and 19 programs overall. Differentiating your brand with a loyalty program is getting harder and harder to do.

2. Many programs lack personalization. Segmented or one-size-fits-all discounts often don’t overcome the individual customer’s friction. If they do, they’re likely cannibalizing margin from drivers who would choose you anyway.

So it’s true that loyalty programming is important, and retailers are right to invest in it. But when loyalty offers don’t overcome customer friction at the individual level, it can result in churn, which in turn reduces the impact of your key profit centers (like QT Kitchens). 

Customer churn is not a unique problem. It can occur because of changes in pricing, product preferences, geographic location, or a variety of other reasons. Back to QT Kitchens: let’s zero in on the impact that member churn could have on that area of the business. Here, we have a customer spend analysis from one of Upside’s existing QSR partners. 

Over one million customers transacted at this business over a five-month period. But over the following five months, those same customers show a dramatic dropoff. By August, customer spend was about 40% lower than it was in March.

Individual consumer friction is a tough code to crack—loyalty programs are great at sparking short-term engagement, but keeping that momentum over the long term is a real challenge. This happens because many programs struggle to stand out—while they might boost shopping frequency at first, the benefits don’t always resonate deeply enough to create lasting behavior change.

Partner with Upside to make the most of Year Two

Since we know many loyal customers have a propensity to churn, planning for Year Two is an essential next step for QT Pay. As customers join the platform and start to build new habits, QuikTrip needs a strong retention strategy. At the same time, QuikTrip needs to keep filling its pipeline with new and infrequent customers to push the business forward. 

Across the customer lifecycle, Upside offers an exclusive opportunity to capture incremental gallons from competitors. Our digital marketplace connects QuikTrip with nearby new and infrequent customers via personalized promotions. These promotions influence customers to visit QT stations more often and spend more dollars there. 

Because Upside partners with only 30% of the market in any given region, partnering with us secures exclusive access to customers who would otherwise fuel elsewhere — turning a challenging segment into loyal QT buyers. And with our data-driven approach, QuikTrip would only pay for truly incremental gallons.

To visualize that impact, let’s revisit the chart showing the natural drop-off of customer spend. Around the time that visits from this segment of customers began falling, the retailer partnered with Upside. Plotting the spend of the customers that Upside delivered to the business on the same chart illustrates Upside’s influence.

First, we see that Upside delivered net-new customers to the business, and those customers transact at higher levels than their peers. But also, existing customers who were already transacting at this retailer were less likely to churn than customers that did not use Upside. Improved acquisition and retention drives more value to QT Pay and to QuikTrip's other key profit centers, as well.

QT Pay is off to a strong start. Keep it up with Upside.     

Get in touch with our team of fuel experts to learn more.