Over the past few years, quick-service restaurants have come to rely on loyalty programs to incentivize repeat visits, serve up offers to boost sales, and collect data that helps them plan for the future. The only catch: Loyalty programs are only useful if they keep users engaged.
Tom Byrnes, vice president of marketing for Quisitive LedgerPay, says that even if a loyalty app only causes five percent of customers to return to a brand, they can drive a 50–90 percent increase in revenue over time. However, he notes that these results don’t always last.
“If 15 percent of customers download your app,” Byrnes says, “and—as a recent study by Deloitte reports—you lose 95 percent of users in the next three months, and 50 percent of the remaining customers stop using within the next year, you really only have visibility into about 2–3 percent of your customers. That’s a huge blind spot for quick-service restaurants.”
LedgerPay’s unique technology helps restaurants eliminate this blind spot by helping them create individualized customer profiles through data from the payment system.
“If I go to a restaurant and order lunch, LedgerPay sees the card I paid with and everything I ordered and puts that information in a secure, cloud-based locker,” Byrnes says. “Then, the next time I order, the system matches that card to the database of information it’s built about me without needing any other identifiers from an app or loyalty card, though if a brand has that information from someone that has enrolled, it can help build out the profile.”
LedgerPay leverages that purchase history data to make personalized recommendations in real time at the ordering kiosk, on a receipt, or even at the POS terminal. Additionally, rather than offering a standard 10 percent off or buy-one-get-one promotion, LedgerPay’s AI-based segmentation and analytics tools can create customized offers that are more likely to incentivize guest behaviors, and it can make offers that align with the brand’s goals and help drive revenue.
“Marrying promotions with payments creates direct access to purchase data: who is buying what, and when and where are they buying it,” Byrnes says. “This creates the opportunity to drive an entirely new level of personalized customer engagement.”
For example, James Becker, vice president of business development at LedgerPay, suggests that while a coffee chain may want to increase visits, but not necessarily at 8:00 am, they can leverage “Day-Part” promotions to incentivize customers come back in the afternoon.
The customer insights data that LedgerPay can provide can also be useful not only to enhance the customer experience and drive behavior, but also to track the exact ROI of each individual promotion in real time.
“We’re doing for brick-and-mortar what Amazon did for online commerce,” Becker says. “Not only do we help restaurants target the right offers to the right customers, but we also give their marketing departments complete granular visibility into their customers’ preferences, enabling segmentation and insight capabilities that have been previously impossible at physical locations.”
And best of all, LedgerPay’s solution is entirely platform agnostic, so restaurants can continue using their existing POS, payment processors, and loyalty programs in addition to the platform.
Learn more about how LedgerPay can help you increase engagement, loyalty, and revenue, visit ledgerpay.com.
By Peggy Carouthers
