Loyalty programs are built to feel like nothing at all. You scan at the pump, an offer lands, and your points move. Megan Fortner, Senior Manager of Loyalty & CRM Marketing at RaceTrac, is here to explain why they're anything but. She pulls back the curtain on the three platforms that have to talk to each other in milliseconds to make a single scan work, and what happens when just one attribute is wrong.
Megan and host Shamir Duverseau dig into the two customers every marketer serves: the member at the pump and the internal "expanded team" of tech, data and product people who make loyalty programs run.
She shares why "making friends with your counterparts" became the most valuable skill of her career, how RaceTrac keeps a 24/7 loyalty operation stable, and why trust, not technology, is the thing she's ultimately protecting.
In this episode:
- What happens across three platforms when a member scans at the pump
- Why one wrong attribute stops the offer from delivering
- What Megan's team does in the first minutes of an outage, and what members hear
- What running loyalty 24/7 across a network of stores takes
- Why a points balance is really a trust balance
- How RaceTrac times messages around when members actually open the app
- What a time-of-day test revealed about morning push notifications
- What to sort out first if you're building a loyalty program from scratch
Jump to:
[
02:58] "I send emails": the job description Megan gives a 10-year-old
[
04:52] What happens the moment you scan the QR code
[
08:37] When something breaks, and what members hear next
[
12:45] Trust is what she's really protecting
[
13:42] Running loyalty 24/7/365
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15:43] Timing the message around when people open the app
[
18:03] The internal customer: make friends with your counterparts
[
20:11] Lean teams and the expanded team
[
21:22] Why nobody has cracked this yet
[
22:38] Where AI gives a lean team leverage
[
24:50] From sign-up to habit: lifecycle and retention
[
28:40] The time-of-day test, and the result that surprised them
[
32:44] Megan's two rules: do your homework, never stop learning
About the Everything Clicks podcast:
Everything Clicks is a podcast about customer experiences that wow consumers while driving profitable growth. Each week, we dissect the strategies and tactics of top B2C marketers at leading Fortune 500 companies.
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📱 Follow Shamir on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shamirduverseau/
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