B2B Services
Fuel cards look like a simple product with a simple sell. Cheaper fuel, consolidated invoicing, less admin. In practice the category has three separate gates that kill applications after the lead has been paid for, and most campaigns account for none of them. We build acquisition for fuel card issuers and resellers who measure success at active, spending cards rather than applications received.
The first gate is volume. Fuel card economics depend on throughput, and most issuers have a minimum monthly spend below which an account is not worth opening. A sole trader running one van and filling up once a fortnight will happily apply, and there is nothing to be done with the application.
The second gate is credit. Fuel cards are a credit product. The customer is buying fuel now and paying later, which means a credit assessment, and small or young businesses fail it routinely. This surprises a remarkable number of marketing teams who have modelled the category as a savings proposition rather than a lending one.
The third gate is the one nobody talks about, and it is the most avoidable: network coverage. A card offering excellent pence-per-litre savings at sites the fleet never passes is worthless. Drivers will simply use their own cards and claim the expense back, which is precisely the admin problem the customer was trying to solve. A card that does not match the routes is a cancelled account within a quarter.
So the pattern is a campaign generating applications that look reasonable, followed by a decline rate that eats the margin, followed by a churn rate on the accounts that did open.
Split by fleet size, with a meaningful role for both.
Calls work for small and mid-sized fleets. The buyer is often an owner-operator or an office manager handling everything, and the questions are practical: which sites accept the card, what the invoicing looks like, whether the savings are real once the fee is counted. Those are quick to answer on the phone and slow to answer through a form.
IVR qualification is straightforward here because the disqualifiers are numeric. Number of vehicles and approximate monthly fuel spend, asked before an agent is engaged, remove most of the volume that would fail on economics alone.
Forms suit larger fleets. Multi-depot operations with existing card arrangements, procurement processes and integration requirements for expense reporting. These deals need documentation and comparison rather than a conversation.
Because calls bill on connected duration past a buffer, and because the sole-trader end of this market is large and enthusiastic, filtering before the call reaches the floor has a direct effect on channel economics.
Paid search. The strongest intent channel. "Fuel cards for business", "HGV fuel card", "diesel card for vans", "cheapest fuel card". Searches are commercially explicit. The negative work filters out consumer loyalty cards, supermarket fuel points and anyone looking for a personal petrol discount.
Owned comparison properties. We operate comparison and review properties, so fuel card demand can be met on our own estate. Comparison is genuinely how this product is bought, since the buyer is weighing networks, fees and pence-per-litre against each other, which makes a comparison environment a natural fit rather than an interruption.
LinkedIn and B2B paid social. Reaches transport managers, operations directors and finance leads by role. Useful for larger fleets where the buyer is not actively searching but is receptive to a cost-reduction proposition.
Pay-per-call networks. For the SME segment, where spend and fleet-size pre-qualification does the most work.
Content and organic. More valuable here than it looks. VAT reclaim and HMRC fuel documentation, advisory fuel rates, how to compare a network fairly, whether a fixed weekly price beats pump price for a given route profile. Fleet buyers research this, and content that helps them compare honestly builds trust in a category with a reputation for opaque pricing.
Email and consented outbound. Effective against contract renewal timing and around fuel price movements, which reliably prompt buyers to reconsider arrangements.
Network fit deserves more attention than it usually gets. It is the qualifier most likely to be skipped at enquiry and most likely to cause churn later. Two fleets with identical spend and identical credit profiles can have completely different outcomes purely because one runs motorway trunk routes and the other works a dense urban patch. Asking where the vehicles actually go is a better predictor of retention than almost anything else.
Fuel cards are a credit product marketed on savings, which is a combination that requires care.
Savings claims are the main risk. Pence-per-litre advantages vary by site, by network and by week, and headline figures presented as universal are misleading. Where a card carries a monthly fee or per-transaction charges, a saving quoted without reference to those costs does not represent what the customer will experience.
Because this is credit, agreements carry disclosure obligations, and business customers should be clear on payment terms, late payment charges and any personal guarantee requirement. Personal guarantees in particular are frequently glossed over at the point of sale and discovered later, which is a poor way to start a relationship.
Our position: no unqualified savings claims, fees disclosed alongside any pence-per-litre figure, and credit terms stated plainly rather than buried. Fleet buyers compare carefully and talk to each other, and a card sold on a number that does not materialise is a card that gets cancelled.
Applications are the wrong headline, because the decline rate and the churn rate both sit downstream of them.
We report on:
Cost per contacted enquiry. The first honest figure
Cost per qualified application. Contacted, spend above threshold, network fit confirmed, decision-maker reached
Approval rate by source. Since this is a credit product, a source delivering businesses that cannot pass credit is expensive at any price
Cost per activated card. Issued is not the same as used. A card that never transacts is not revenue
Spend per account, and retention at six months. The measures that separate a source delivering real fleets from one delivering optimistic sole traders
Cost per pound of monthly fuel throughput acquired. The figure that actually maps to margin in this category
Approval, activation and spend outcomes are fed back to the platforms rather than form submissions, so campaigns optimise toward fleets that transact rather than toward whoever applies most readily.
It depends on your minimum monthly spend rather than vehicle count, since a single high-mileage HGV can outspend several vans. Setting the threshold on fuel spend rather than fleet size is more accurate.
Fuel cards are a credit product, so declines usually come from adverse credit, insufficient trading history, or a business too new to assess. Capturing trading duration at enquiry predicts this better than anything else.
More important than most campaigns treat it. A card that is not accepted where the fleet actually drives will be abandoned regardless of the rate, which turns an approved account into churn within a quarter.
Calls suit small and mid-sized fleets where one person decides and has practical questions. Forms suit multi-depot fleets with procurement processes and expense integration requirements.
Less useful than cost per activated card, or better still cost per pound of monthly fuel throughput acquired. A cheap application that declines or never transacts has produced nothing.
Yes. Diesel, petrol and increasingly electric charging have different buyers, networks and economics, and mixed-fleet operators have different requirements again. They benefit from separate campaigns.
Pence-per-litre figures are presented with the conditions that apply and alongside any fees, rather than as a universal headline. Savings that do not materialise generate cancellations and complaints.
Yes, and demand is growing steadily as fleets transition. Qualification differs, since network access, charging speed and depot infrastructure matter more than pence-per-litre comparisons.
Monthly fuel spend, vehicle count and type, trading duration, current card provider, and typical operating area. That set predicts approval and retention better than interest alone.
Consumer Genius operates across 11 markets. Fuel networks, tax treatment and credit regulation differ considerably, so campaigns are built per market rather than translated.
Book a growth strategy call and we will map where your applications decline, how much of your book churns on network mismatch, and what to filter earlier.
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