Building and Retaining Loyal Customers Through Bundled Services
Every brand dreams of having a deep and loyal fan base. When it comes down to it, creating loyal fans is similar to creating loyal friends - it requires investment, honesty, patience and care.
Like any real-life relationship, context is key. In real life, we remember past conversations about family and friends, and apply them to future conversations. For companies and brands looking to deepen their relationships with customers, leveraging data will help create context and paint a more rounded picture of your customer, including their desires, and when and where they tend to consume goods and services. When you take time to understand your customer and create products that appeal to them, value and revenue follows.
How GasBuddy Created a New Product for its Loyal Users
Arrive’s partner GasBuddy has a large and loyal fan base within a single platform. The users are attracted to the app because they drive a lot and enjoy savings - in this case, discounted gas. The GasBuddy team understands this about their customer base and hypothesized that their fans’ loyalty could extend to discounted products beyond gas. Additionally, the teams knew that parking and fueling were the most frequent vehicle purchases.
As a result, Arrive and GasBuddy launched “Park with GasBuddy,” extending the brand’s core promise of savings by helping drivers find, book and pay for discounted parking across the United States. As an added benefit, GasBuddy also gave participating users GasBack - rebates in the form of free gasoline - when they “Park with GasBuddy.”
Offering combined services with rewards - without having to create multiple accounts and re-enter credit card information - was immediately well received by GasBuddy users. Initial results were strong, with app retention for users who began using parking quickly becoming a top cohort for GasBuddy. These parkers also had 15% more bookings per user and a 12% higher repeat rate than those who book parking via a standalone app.
The Way People Interact with Mobile Apps is Changing
Not only did GasBuddy and Arrive’s partnership provide the GasBuddy users with a new relevant product that met their needs and desires in one single interface, but it allowed the two companies to build on their respective APIs to power a single parking and fuel solution that automakers, fleets, navigation and other mobility partners can tap into.
Fueling and parking are widely acknowledged as the keys to begin monetizing any connected car service. They are the two most frequent transactions in any vehicle and the parking industry alone is a $35 billion market in the U.S. Building integrated services like parking and fueling into dashboards and digital assistants can establish a transactional relationship for other services with a card on file and create trust and loyalty with their consumers.
If you’re interested in learning how you can offer more value to your customers through bundled mobility services like GasBuddy’s, please contact me at droarty@arrive.com.