FuelCents is cracking the fuel discount market wide open, enabling any business – big or small – to use the power of fuel discounts to influence behaviour and drive loyalty among their customers.

For the shopper, FuelCents accumulate across their shopping journey from any participating business or brand, so it’s easy to save 20c per litre on fuel every week.

There are no coupons to collect. It’s not tied to a particular credit card or payment type. They don’t even need to download an app. All you need is a smartphone.

FuelCents’ owner, iMobileMedia will be featured at next week’s ADMA Global Forum Innovation Zone, where they will be demonstrating how FuelCents works.

iMobileMedia will also be announcing a program aimed to present every household in Australia a 20c/L saving every time they fill their car.

The shopper-facing platform to capture and deliver the aggregated FuelCents rewards is called Shping.Me. The campaign to recruit shoppers and businesses will launch on 1 September.

Fuel Discounts are Compelling and Emotive

The cost of fuel is one of the biggest burdens on the household budget, and it’s only going to get worse.

Fuel is a compelling and emotive reward. It is used very effectively by Coles and Woolworths to influence behaviour and drive loyalty across their stores and petrol outlets. Investigations by the ACCC over the past year show that fuel savings has proven credentials to influence market behaviour.

In general, consumers like the potential of rewards, but are frustrated because they can’t collect and keep track of all the different rewards and points wherever they shop. With hundreds of exclusive rewards programs, each one alone is not really enough to influence the shopper’s behaviour.

Save 20 cents per litre on fuel, every week. This is how it works

FuelCents’ owner, iMobileMedia completed a pilot program on the Sunshine Coast in June, to provide a live demonstration of just how rewarding FuelCents can be.

More than 300 stores, 23 brands and 650 different products were listed in the trial. Most of the participating stores offered their customers 4c/L savings on a minimum spend of $20. The individual products mostly offered 2c/L savings per product (capped at 2 claims per brand).

By accumulating FuelCents, shoppers were able to claim more than 100 FuelCents ($1 per litre saving) across a broad basket of household staples and impulse lines from just one store.

Products included Leggo’s pasta and sauces, Birds Eye frozen foods, Tim Tams, Goulburn Valley juices, Dare and Classic flavoured milk, Smiths Chips, Mentos, Mission Foods range and Ferrero Rocher.

Stores included Friendly Grocer, Foodworks, and IGA, among others, as well as a range of petrol stations and general retailers including home electrical, fashion stores, butchers and fruit and veg stores.

FuelCents is a rebate saving that shoppers can redeem on fuel purchases up to 80 litres made at around 2,000 petrol retailers – both major and independent – nationally. The FuelCents rebate is put into the shopper’s bank account once they zap the receipt with their smartphone. Every FuelCent collected turns into a saving on the household budget.

For households, the 20c/L target is both realistic and significant. It’s a potential saving of $16 every time they fill their car, going back into their bank account. With 2,000 petrol retailers across Australia, shoppers are not locked into just one petrol retail brand. They can source the pump price from the cheapest local outlet.

FuelCents is multi-platform and multi-channel – linking the digital to the physical. And the physical to the digital

The innovation in iMobileMedia’s technology is it uses the smartphone device to carry the marketing communications, capture the transaction data and deliver the reward in one application.

Any participating retailer or brand can insert a FuelCents button on any digital ad, website or Facebook page (multi-platform) to deliver the offer to the shopper, and connect the shopper to the sale at the store to claim the reward (multi-channel).

FuelCents is totally retailer-agnostic. It does not discriminate between a national retailer and the local butcher, and can be collected regardless of how the shopper pays.

Shping.Me . . . shoppers invite stores to “come shopping with me”!

iMobileMedia’s 20c/L FuelCents program commences registrations on 1 September. While FuelCents offers can be presented anywhere, to accumulate the 20c/L target, iMobileMedia will launch a new shopping platform that flips loyalty marketing on its head.

Called Shping.Me, short for “come shopping with me”, shoppers use Shping.Me to invite their local stores and favourite brands to join and be a part of their total shopping experience.

Shping.Me is a personal gateway, where shoppers choose to interact and engage with each specific store and business on their terms. A participating business might offer 1c or 2c/L saving, but combined it will leverage a 20c/L influence on purchase decisions. It’s a commercial invitation that’s hard to refuse.

For each user, Shping.Me presents like an aggregated online mall. The shopper creates their retail showrooms from their collection of regular local stores, plus desired and intended purchases, together with their personalised rewards – that link them to the physical stores from their weekly shopping journey.

The shopper can set it up once and just claim their rewards. Or they can curate their program, shopping through stores, brands, and offers on their phone or desktop, social sharing among friends and inviting new stores.

To set up their personal loyalty program, the shopper simply selects from national banner retailers or search from a comprehensive directory, to invite the local stores they shop with each week.

In return, retailers and brands are invited to create a mobile showcase for their products, within the individual loyalty program of each household. Participation presents an opportunity to bridge the digital and physical journey on the path to purchase. It also links the physical to the digital, to secure and maintain post-purchase relationships.

Potential beyond Fuel

Shping.Me need not operate separate from individual store loyalty programs. Shping.Me could also provide shoppers a place to collect and convert their retailer loyalty points. Acting as a clearing house, the aggregated loyalty points could be converted into either FuelCents or a reward currency* that can be spent by shoppers back at the stores that have joined their loyalty program. It is the ultimate in personalised loyalty.

(*PinMoney™ is a digital rewards currency due for release in 2015.)

Join iMobileMedia at ADMA Global Forum Innovation Zone

iMobileMedia will officially announce its 20c/L FuelCents program and the launch of Shping.Me at the ADMA Global Forum Innovation Zone, 28 July to 1 August at the Sydney Hilton. Admission into the Innovation Zone is free. iMobileMedia founder Rob Keogh will be giving a special live presentation in the Zone on Tuesday 29 July at 4pm.