A company has launched what it claims is the first fuel-brand agnostic loyalty scheme for petrol purchases.
The founder of Noumi, an app that allows retailers to provide customers with digital receipts and promotions, says the initiative is about to go live with two filling station operators.
Victoria Forecourts’ petrol station in Morley, West Yorkshire, and a Nowell Forecourts’ site in Sheffield will be the first to offer the deal, giving motorists who sign up 2p per litre off their fuel purchases.
After that, drivers are given a 3p per litre reduction after the fifth fill-up, 4p off per litre following the 10th purchase, and 5p off per litre after the 15th. The scheme then reverts to zero and starts again.
Noumi’s Shakir Lincoln says that, unlike fuel loyalty programmes run by the oil giants, his programme enables individual sites to benefit from increased traffic, rather than every location with a particular fuel brand.
And sites can run the Noumi scheme alongside any offers that their fuel suppliers might be running, says Lincoln.
“These savings are in addition to any rewards offered by fuel brands themselves, creating a unique dual benefit experience for customers,” he says.
Forecourt operators who sign up pay Noumi 0.003p for every digital receipt produced, which Lincoln says is a similar cost to printing a receipt. And for each time loyalty points are redeemed there is a charge to the operator of 4p.
On top of this, for every notification that the company sends to a customer about an instore promotion for example set up by the operator there is an additional 2p charged.
Lincoln says that the margin lost on fuel and its charges will far be outweighed by the increased business the scheme will bring to participating forecourts.
“Fuel margins are decent at the moment and if you can increase volume by 5-10% it more than makes up for giving away margin,” he says.
Currently the Noumi in-store tap-and-go device is only calibrated to work with two electronic point of sale systems: Madic UK’s evoPos and TSG Solutions’ Prizma, but others might be added, says Lincoln.
Four forecourt operators – Gardner Garages, Nowell Forecourts, Victoria Forecourts, and Speed Petroleum – are the first to take Noumi, with between them 11,584 users across the seven participating sites.
At the end of this month Lincoln plans to release technology that will enable retailers to introduce bespoke promotions for individual customers using the app based on their purchasing history.
Lincoln has a background in retail and entrepreneurship. After leaving university with a degree in computer science in 2005, he ran two newsagent stores. He then set up a designer perfume air freshener business.
