How to Increase Sales at Petrol Pump Business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have noticed that petrol prices in India have increased steeply. Currently priced at approx Rs 100/liter and rising, it seems unlikely that petrol rates will come down in the foreseeable future. Consequently, petrol pump business owners must buckle up and form strategies to survive this steep spike.

As petrol and diesel price increases and the general population fumes, your petrol pump business has the most to lose. Obviously, people won’t stop using their vehicles due to price hike, but they are looking at cheaper commute alternatives. The people who’re opting to pay for petrol and commute by their own vehicles are already on the edge due to price hike. If price keeps on rising, it could be disastrous for your fuel station as daily turnover would take a hit.

Ways A Petrol Pump Business Can Ensure Repeat Customers

In this article, we’ll suggest a few things to ensure that customer repeatability is high during such a tremulous time. Don’t worry, we won’t suggest you reduce prices but instead focus more on customer delight, for long-lasting results.

Make Their Visit Count

A customer coming to your petrol pump business is already feeling the heat of rising prices and the dread of paying huge sums for petrol. What you can do to help them feel better is making their visit experience count.

How do you do that? Well, light camera & action!

Make their visit a spectacle. Offer to clean their vehicle free of charge. Have a two-wheeler & four-wheeler specialist at your pump, who can hand out free vehicle maintenance tips to customers. Hand out free water bottles and protein bars to visitors in line. Install a Wi-Fi network for customers to access the internet for free, while they wait in line.

Sounds pricey? It is but completely worth it.

Most petrol pumps offer nothing to their customers when they roll in. If you were to break the norm and offer something completely different, it’s bound to get customers interested. Even if it’s a cost to bear initially, you can rest assured that it will lead to more customers in the long run. Most of whom will stick around even when petrol price normalises in the future and you discontinue the freebies.

Offer a Reward Plan

The plan is essentially about rewarding your customers for their fuel purchases made at your petrol pump. You can either make your own reward card or tie-up with a bank to offer rewards when customers purchase fuel at your petrol pump, using the bank’s card.

Reward programmes are great for customer retention. If you were to offer one liter of free petrol for every Rs 1500 spent at your pump, there’s bound to be some interest among the general masses. It also creates a constant purchase loop for your dealership, ensuring repeatability and profitability in the long run.

Leverage Technology for Maximum Efficiency

Okay, so this one isn’t so much for the customers as it’s for your petrol pump employees. Modern-day solutions like petrol pump management software helps you in streamlining your filling station’s different verticals and ease the management process. With petrol pump software, you can effectively reduce your employee workload as important functions like bookkeeping and inventory management are by and large automated.

This opens your employee’s time, who simply have to administrate the numbers and ensure that the records displayed by petrol pump management software are correct. Consequently, your employees can spend more time on delivering unparalleled customer experience than toiling away in an office, crunching numbers manually.

Adopt the Latest Marketing Strategies for Petrol Pump Business

Aside from employees, petrol pump management software also helps you in improving customer relationships. A petrol pump management software like Cogxim’s Petro Genius allows you to consolidate customer information (name, age, address, phone number, email, birthday, etc.) at a single dashboard.

You can use Petro Genius for sending promotional messages and pursuing customers to make a purchase. Additionally, you can also wish customers on holidays and special days, offering them special purchase discounts. Basically, Petro Genius allows you to forge a meaningful relationship with your customers, ensuring repeatability.

Petro Genius is also useful to make your petrol pump operate smoother. It has dedicated modules for sales, accounting, inventory and customer management. You can track sales numbers, view reports, perform predictive analysis and maintain correct financial records, with Petro Genius.

With rising fuel prices, your petrol pump business’s sale doesn’t have to go down. Apply the tips mentioned above and you’ll certainly get customers clamouring to your pumps. And if you think that we missed out on certain points above, do let us know. We love hearing from our readers.