A Shell sells gas at $4.19. A Liberty is at $3.92 and a BP is at $4.10. About a block up the road sits a Harris Teeter, a Safeway, and a 7-Eleven with no pumps.
I want a two-liter of Coke, a healthy snack and perhaps a few other things.
Price is the obvious differentiator, and the data backs it up. Three in four c-store shoppers plan their visits in advance based on cost savings, according to the NACS 2026 Consumer Survey. But price on gas is not the whole answer. NACS research also found that one in three c-store shoppers choose their store based on its loyalty program.
The industry has noticed. In a NACS Convenience Voices survey, 85% of retailers rated personalizing the consumer experience as "extremely" or "very" important, and CSP’s Outlook Report ranks loyalty and personalization as the number two factor most likely to drive growth for c-store operators. Yet just 16% see deals from c-stores “very often,” according to the NACS State of the Industry report, and they see more in competing channels like grocery and QSR. These are now real competitors.
That gap is the opportunity. At C-StoreTEC in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, I held this very discussion with three c-store leaders who are closing that gap through best-in-class loyalty programs: Lanna O'Conner, Director of Loyalty and Digital Marketing at RaceTrac; Nick Triantafellou, Director of Merchandising and Marketing at Weigel's; and David Jackson, Director of Loyalty and Marketing at Kwik Trip.
They shared a working blueprint for personalization at scale, discussing how to move from segmentation to true one-to-one offers, and how to execute them in real time across every channel, including in store.
Ask one question of your current program. When you want to reward a customer, do you pick the best offer for them from an existing list, or do you create the right offer for that individual from scratch?
Almost all of retail does the first. It is an improvement on the mass offer, but it is still "people like you." Segmentation used to be the best anyone could do. Throwing people into a bucket and aiming for that bucket simply isn’t good enough anymore. I prefer the very technical term of "Bucketization"!
Eagle Eye's built-for-retail AI does the second, true 1:1 personalization that is right for the customer, the retailer and the brands. It generates incentives that are created, not curated, which is why personalized offers drive 3x the engagement of mass offers, across the 1.7bn+ transactions + we execute every week.
Triantafellou sees the same shift at Weigel's.
"AI is going to get us much faster (at) hyper-personalization, regardless of team size or anything else," he told the room. That is the difference between one-to-one marketing and a smarter list. One treats customers as a group. The other treats them as individuals.
Before the partnership with Eagle Eye, Jackson said, "it would take our team a week to build out that single challenge." One challenge, built by hand, for one group at a time.
Today, Kwik Trip runs AI-personalized Challenges on the Eagle Eye platform. Each guest sees different visit targets, different spend thresholds and different products. The results so far:
The brand economics matter as much as the shopper experience.
"The vendor is not paying for anything unless the guest is paying more for their products," Jackson said. Supplier funding follows incremental behavior, which he called a very easy sell.
Kwik Trip also used the moment to modernize. The legacy punch card did not fit its data goals or an ROI it could measure, so it was retired. Jackson expected customer backlash, but the reality was the opposite.
"We had maybe two guests reach out to us about punch cards going away," he said, highlighting that fulfilling expectations is key: as long as the technology upholds its promise of value to the shopper, old programs are easier to let go of.
Many retailers choose to launch Challenges in different ways. Some will look to prove out and then go to brands to get supplier funding. Others kick off from the start with supplier funding.
100-plus brands were involved in the first month we launched challenges. The vendor isn’t paying for anything unless the guest buys more of their products. That’s complete incrementality.
David Jackson, Director of Loyalty and Marketing, Kwik Trip
You are only as smart as your ability to execute. The best data science and the best AI are worthless if you cannot put them in front of a customer at the moment it matters.
Often, that moment is at the register. According to the ACSI Convenience Store Study, 65% of rewards members visit their primary store weekly. They are already there. The question is whether your personalization is waiting for them when they arrive.
"There’s people that are just never going to want to download your app, but they do want to participate in the program," she said. Her team is exploring how those members can see and redeem points at the point of sale, or at another point on the lot, rather than pushing them toward an app they do not want.
This is something that many of us in the industry have been trying to correct for a long time. Different offers for different purchasing channels are not the way to build loyal customers or a seamless customer experience. Every retailer must ensure a true omnichannel personalization strategy: the same offers and the same experience for every member, in the app, on the web, at the pump or in the store.
It is the primary reason why Eagle Eye originally built our AIR platform for real-time transactions and to acquire, interact with and retain customers through real-time personalization at every touchpoint, with sub-150ms execution at the point of sale. Speed to value follows.
When approaching user-experience, complexity compounds as confusion. Every feature added, every instruction written and every email sent makes a program harder for a guest to understand.
O'Conner's team found that RaceTrac’s welcome emails had become a wall of instructions. They rebuilt the journey around one goal for a member’s first 30 days, redeeming a reward, and now test every message with a single question: "would your grandmother understand this email?"
Jackson agreed with the sentiment.
“If you have to add arrows within your marketing to help communicate any sort of message, it’s too many steps for them," he said. Efficient loyalty programs are better for the customer, simpler for your team, and cheaper to run.
The most common objection from operators is resources. Personalization takes data scientists and marketers and that takes a hefty budget. In this situation, AI is the true equalizer.
How does a small team do it? Triantafellou's answer is partnership: “finding the vendor partners for us to play where the big ones play.”
Jackson spelled out how Eagle Eye’s AI specifically helped: "One challenge that we can spend a week building and launching is great, but it touches about 5% of your audiences. In the first month (launching Eagle Eye Challenges) we had 150,000 iterations of challenges going out to guests. Those were unique guests with unique challenges."
AI does not remove people from the process. It removes the manual work. The promotions that go out are still checked by humans, and that is what makes it a tool retailers can trust.
Fuel is where price pressure is most visible, and the panel was practical about it. At RaceTrac, O'Conner said, "our fuel discount has always been the most redeemed item in our catalog by far," and some of that saving is now being spent inside the store.
Triantafellou ran 25 cents off a gallon every Sunday for a summer, on purpose. Sunday is Weigel’s slowest day, so the promotion was built to change behavior, not subsidize it. Weigel’s proved it drove traffic before using spot promotions elsewhere.
Jackson added the caution. A fuel benefit, once launched, is hard to withdraw: "it's very hard to go backwards from that." And a discount a competitor can copy across the road is a race to the bottom. Targeted, personal rewards are harder to match.
The next shopper may not be a person standing at the pump. As AI shopping agents begin to browse and buy on a customer’s behalf, an agent acting for one specific person needs a true one-to-one profile and decision to act on, not a cohort average. Every customer is an individual, whether they shop for themselves or delegate to an agent. Operators who build that foundation now will be ready. Those still relying on segments will not.
Convenience retailers already have the locations, the density and the traffic. What they need now is the ability to make every one of those interactions personal, at scale. That is how you build a habit to ensure your loyal customer drives past your competitor for that 2 liter of Coke!
The full session covers more: how these operators bring IT and marketing together, motivate store teams, and fund personalization with suppliers. Listen to the full panel or read the transcript. To see how personalization at scale could work in your program, explore our AIR Platform or contact us.