For years, gas station loyalty programs were an add-on. The value proposition was price and, above all, location convenience: people fill up wherever is closest. The pandemic accelerated digitalization and changed that logic. Today the program can live in an app that earns points, handles payment, triggers promotions and personalizes the entire customer experience.
That was the focus of the webinar Qurable and Winclap hosted on Wednesday, October 7. Bernardo Tinti, Growth Strategy & Consulting Sr. Manager at Winclap, explained how they built the engine to acquire, retain and monetize users in the digital program of a leading oil company in the region, a project the two companies worked on as partners. Fernando Andrés, Chief Revenue Officer at Qurable, explained what technology it takes to bring that strategy to every interaction with the driver.
Model first, investment second
The starting point isn't media spend, it's strategy. Together with the oil company's team, Winclap built two growth models that serve as a roadmap for the short and long term.
The first is qualitative. It maps every planned acquisition, retention and monetization initiative and orders them by how they build on one another. In parallel, the team defines the North Star Metric, the metric that measures the program's success. In this case it was the percentage of loyalty-linked liters out of total liters sold. That metric is then broken down into the operating metrics that drive it: new users by channel, retained and reactivated users, average transactions per month, liters per transaction. That way every initiative is tied to the metric it should move, and every team knows what it is accountable for.
The second is quantitative: a mathematical model that expresses the relationships among all those metrics. It lets the team simulate the impact of each initiative along the causal chain, project scenarios and, once in execution, see exactly which metric the program is drifting on so it can correct course in time. For Bernardo, the alternative is much worse: throwing money at an acquisition engine and waiting for whatever results it brings, more or less at random.
The acquisition trilemma
With the model in place, ignition begins: getting the first user base. The strategy was full funnel and had two goals: adding new users and migrating customers from the previous analog program. It was also staged. First, the team optimized for app installs. Once a critical mass was installed, optimization moved down the funnel: sign-up, adding a payment method and first transactions.
Throughout that process, what Bernardo calls the acquisition trilemma comes up. Every team wants three things: high volume, low CAC and high-LTV users. In practice, you can only have two.
- Volume and low CAC: you'll probably attract opportunistic users who use the welcome discount and never come back.
- Volume and high LTV: you have to go to more premium channels, and that drives up CAC.
- High LTV and low CAC: these are organic users, the ones who come on their own. They're valuable, but they run out fast and aren't enough to grow in volume.
We're always going to be somewhere in this trilemma; there's no single, definitive way to solve it.
The key is knowing where to stand at each stage. At first, it makes sense to target organic users, with low CAC and high LTV. When they run out, it's time to push the volume of quality users through more sophisticated channels. And once a solid base is established, you can selectively go after lower-LTV users who have the potential to grow once they're in.
Content is the fuel
In paid media, acquisition depends on content. The strategy was social first: adapting the value proposition to different niches and working with creators and influencers who build a more genuine connection with users. That content ran mainly on Meta, TikTok and Google, with a twofold challenge: entertain and, at the same time, sustain a narrative that ties back to the program's proposition.
The hard part is keeping that creativity going at scale, rotating pieces every week without losing freshness. That's where artificial intelligence comes in, but not to mass-produce generic content. The idea is to use it to speed up editing genuine pieces from the raw footage and ideas the creators bring.
If the acquisition process were an engine, content is the fuel, and we have to keep injecting it constantly so the engine doesn't stall.
Retain without overwhelming
After a few months with a robust user base, the problem changes. With a large base, churn can offset everything that comes in through acquisition, and if that happens, growth stalls.
To retain users, the program ran a CRM strategy on owned channels such as email, WhatsApp and SMS, segmenting users by behavior, frequency and the products they buy. The challenge is relevance. We all know that email we don't even open because we already know the brand always sends the same thing.
When we get to that point, we've overwhelmed the user and made the channel lose its effectiveness.
To avoid that, transactional, demographic and in-app behavioral data is used to profile each user and define what the program wants from them. Someone who never stops by the store might be invited for a coffee. Someone who doesn't buy premium fuel might hear about its benefits. With those goals clear, the team builds agentic flows that deliver relevant communications.
A discount for everyone leaves money on the table
The last challenge was optimizing the program to maximize its impact and profitability. The idea is to move from blanket discounts and benefits to a smart value scheme, where each user gets what they need to keep transacting, based on what they're really worth to the program.
To do that, that value first had to be measured. Winclap developed an AI-powered predictive model that estimates how much value each user will bring over the next 12 months. With that prediction, users are grouped into LTV tiers, and within each tier the team experiments to find the optimal benefit: the minimum discount that keeps the user active without giving away too much.
The logic is simple. Each segment needs a different minimum discount to keep buying. If the discount is the same for everyone, some get much more than they need and others much less, so they don't transact as much as they could. Understanding where that point is for each segment lets you reallocate budget toward those who need it most.
From strategy to a decision every second
If Winclap brings the what, Qurable brings the how. Fernando Andrés presented Qurable as a platform that unifies customer engagement, loyalty, data and payments, and raised the underlying question: how to orchestrate that strategy to maximize customer lifetime value across thousands of stations and interactions, and how to make every dollar invested go further.
The context pushes in that direction. With crude oil volatility and the shifting energy mix, which now includes gas, renewables and electric cars, fuel is becoming a commodity and its margin is no longer the only variable. Forward-looking companies aren't focused on protecting the margin on the fill-up, but on capturing the value of the customer relationship.
Today consumers go to the station three to five times a month, and they spend roughly 8 minutes there. So how do I widen that window and how do I monetize it to take it to the next level?
Three stages of maturity
Globally, Fernando sees three stages in how these programs evolve:
- Stage 1. Since 2010, the classic model: tier-based segmentation, rewards and a physical card with points, tiers and discounts.
- Stage 2. A wallet or app with integrated checkout, where customers store their cards, get more instant benefits and the app starts suggesting them.
- Stage 3. An everyday wallet that goes beyond the visit to the station. It adds partnerships with benefits on food, retail and services, and opens new revenue streams beyond fuel and the convenience store.
Four levers to move the program
Four cross-cutting levers act on those stages:
- Value proposition and benefits. A single brand's benefits are no longer enough. The winner will be an ecosystem of partnerships that gives the user value.
- Gamification. Not just games, but also missions and challenges that keep the relationship alive.
- Hyper-personalization. Users don't want to dig through a benefits catalog. They expect the brand to be proactive and bring them what's useful to them.
- Immediacy. The benefit has to arrive while the customer is interacting, not four hours or a day later.
A company that gives blanket discounts, for example discounts for everyone every Wednesday or the same discount for different audiences, is giving away margin and maybe losing sales.
What it looks like at the station
Qurable is a loyalty, promotions and payments platform with more than 20 million enrolled members and about 13 million monthly active users in seven countries. It can cover the entire process or integrate with points of sale and pump systems to make the decision in microseconds, while the person is filling up.
Fernando walked through a concrete flow. A person signs up, makes their first fill-up and receives a personalized benefit. For example, 50% off a coffee, valid for the four hours after the fill-up. If they don't use it, the benefit expires. Every interaction updates a smart user profile, from which the company builds audiences or micro-audiences and defines its activation rules.
From there, other dynamics open up. Triggering the next consumption opportunity with a push notification or a WhatsApp message based on each customer's fill-up pattern. Recognizing their birthday with points or a benefit. Showing each user the offers from banks, issuers or retail partners that match their preferences. Converting points into miles within the ecosystem. And launching missions, games and challenges from a low-code module that the marketing team runs, without depending on IT.
On top of all that runs an AI agent that optimizes the budget: it seeks to improve customer lifetime value and reduce churn at the lowest acquisition cost, and it suggests to the team what to do.
One of the closing questions was how all this integrates with what the company already has. The answer: Qurable is a modular microservices platform that sits on top of existing systems, without requiring you to replace them. It can deliver the full experience to the user or work only as a data and personalization engine, depending on which levers each company wants to activate.
The decision is to do it
For Fernando, the debate is no longer about timing or architecture. Stations that today compete only on the liter are competing on something that is becoming a commodity. The relationship with the driver, on the other hand, can be built, measured and monetized.
The decision isn't when to do it or with which architecture, but to do it. To build the relationship with the driver beyond the liter or the fill-up.
That is the joint proposal from Qurable and Winclap: from strategy and definition all the way to execution within the platform.
Frequently asked questions
It's the tension among three goals: high volume, low customer acquisition cost (CAC) and high-value users (LTV). In general you can only achieve two at a time, so you have to choose based on the program's stage.
Because each customer segment needs a different incentive to keep buying. With the same discount for everyone, some get more than they need and others less than it would take to activate them.
It's the metric that measures its success. In a gas station program it can be the percentage of loyalty-linked liters out of total liters sold, which is then broken down into operating metrics.
Three: the card with points, tiers and discounts; the app or wallet with integrated checkout and suggested benefits; and the everyday wallet with partnerships and new revenue streams.
No. It's a modular microservices platform that sits on top of what the company already has. It can cover the full process or only the data and personalization layer.
More conversations on loyalty and customer engagement in the Blog
