Legacy Loyalty Platforms Are Out.
2023 is BEST-OF-BREED
Technology is always innovating, growing with the needs of the people that use it. As our needs get more complex, our need for better, more up-to-date software increases. Such is the case with restaurant loyalty platforms.
Before 2010, card-based providers were arguably the popular choice. They were all-in-one platforms serving as Loyalty, Messaging, Mobile app, and in the case of a few, even payments were included. This all began to shift toward the end of the decade the all-in-one platforms were not able to keep up with innovation on multiple fronts.
Open API infrastructure gave the flexibility required to connect to other platforms but it came with a price tag and a vendor management layer that very few organizations could really, manage, execute or even afford.
Most all-in-one providers doubled down on more products to sell, increasing the amount of revenue they could pull out of each restaurant location. But rather than getting more value from having one provider, brands found themselves paying a premium but not getting a best-in-class platform. In a competitive landscape as restaurants with limited margins, this became a painful problem that some are still living through.
Macro environmental forces like COVID-19, inflation, labor shortages, supply chain issues provided additional fuel for the software industry to innovate and adapt to the needs of restaurant brands. The Best-of-Breed loyalty providers have built powerful and proven partner stacks while keeping the management and pricing under one roof.
It’s this hybrid model that allows brands with limited marketing and IT resources to truly realize a Best-of-Breed model to keep up with innovation on a multitude of martech products: Loyalty, Messaging, Mobile applications, Mobile Passes, CDP, NFTs, and more. The Jack-of-ALL-Trades days are coming to an end, while 2023 is BEST-OF-BREED.
When your loyalty solution goes wrong …
So if you choose the wrong loyalty program, or worse, the wrong loyalty provider, you will crash into a wall and get counterproductive results.
Many legacy platforms are glitchy, expensive, and have ineffective integrations. So, however long they’ve been on the market and their size, all-in-one providers tend to have two sets of issues:
Jack of all trades, master of none
We said it already, but can’t emphasize enough: legacy providers offer software that is supposed to be all-in-one but in reality, it doesn't live up to its promises. They end up with mediocre products that are not core to their offering.
These types of solutions have very complex pricing structures, and this means that for every additional product you want to use/implement, you have to buy, so it’s not really a comprehensive platform that will solve your needs.
Their products end up being subpar, like analytics and email solutions, which can’t keep up with modern API structures, and not only do you miss out on integrating with other much-needed high-performing 3rd-party tools, but you end up paying significantly more.
Out of date & Out of Touch
To worsen things (yes, it gets worse) there are legacy providers with horrible and practically unresponsive customer service, buggy software, templated out-of-date apps, restrictive email/messaging conditions, unusable reporting, and what really makes it bad, its extremely expensive.
We’re not talking about hundreds or a few thousand dollars, if you have one of these solutions, you know it's costing your brand tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars! They take 6 months or a year to deploy and drain you out of your marketing budget while you’re still not getting any return - sounds bad right?
That’s only one part of it. Imagine that after all this, you get null support, can’t run store-level campaigns, and can’t even send batch emails (in the millions), because there’s no loyalty trigger mechanism between email providers and their platform, meaning there’s double the work.
So what is an ideal loyalty solution??
A great loyalty program increases the lifetime value of each guest while also increasing brand advocacy.
We can all agree, a great loyalty solution should be one that truly increases spend and brings your customers back to order more, again and again..
To accomplish this, there are three industry metrics that you should be watching out for:
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Sign-ups
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Adoption
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Rate of rewards redeemed.
Industry-wide these metrics average 1000 to 2000 sign-ups per store location, per year, a 10-15% adoption rate and 40 - 50% of rewards are redeemed. If these results are inconsistent with your current program, reconsider sticking with your current provider.
How easy should your solution be to use?
An easy to use to loyalty solution should allow guests to quickly create their account, earn points and redeem rewards, while brands seamlessly run and manage automated campaigns.
Once users are signed-up, brands should be able to easily enable the following process:
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Campaign: Outreach to customers with an offer campaign
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Identify: Customer uses phone or email at check-out
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Redeem: Select from a list of offers (No more coupon codes!)
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Pay: Customer pay with the method they want
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Re-engage: Use a loyalty program & messaging to drive visits
A good solution can run straightforward and powerful programs like a points banking system, where every dollar spent equals one point, and customers can get up to $10 off once they reach 100 points.
Seems easy enough right? Only if you pick the right vendor!
Why do restaurant brands love Spendgo?
Restaurant brands rely on Spendgo to provide the most comprehensive loyalty solution to maximize ROI for all stakeholders involved: our brands, partners, and end-consumers.
At Spendgo we do things differently:
We don’t build a bunch of mediocre products just to say we have it all, but rather, we partner with best-of-breed technology solutions and bring together an entire integrated tech-stack ecosystem to bring the best of the best to our brands and create an unmatched experience for shoppers.
We have open and flexible APIs that allow for fast and easy integrations with all types of leading solutions like Online Ordering, POS, Messaging & ESPs, User Feedback, CDPs, Premium Developer Agencies, and many others. With these seamless integrations, much-need functionalities like segmentation, customer journeys, granular data analytics, and custom-branded apps amongst others, actually WORK, and in the best of all ways.
Not only do we offer fast omnichannel support for our brands and partners, but also level-1 guest support for your loyalty program and customer experience. Pretty neat right?
There’s a lot of talk about the best way to go about go-to-market in legacy platforms, but at Spendgo we mean speed-to-market. With our platform, a brand can launch a top-notch program in weeks and not quarters, semesters, or years (sadly it happens). And what’s even better, is that we’re a flexible and modular platform, which means we accommodate to your needs as you scale.
Talking about all the wonderful things Spendgo can do for you might get you thinking about pricing right? Well, it should! Thanks to our model, we’re by far more price competitive and flexible than legacy solutions, with a transparent and straightforward pricing structure.
By the way, did we say we have killer local-store marketing*? Or Apple/Google Wallet Mobile Passes? Just something to think about.
*Yes, franchisees can now engage with members who have their store(s) selected as favorite stores through targeted messaging.
Why is that better?
How do we demonstrate our superiority in customer experience and with actual hard results? Well, remember the three key metrics we mentioned above? Here are our [unmatched] numbers:
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Sign-ups: 5,000 per store, or 12x more sign-ups
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Loyalty Program Adoption Rate: an average of 20% of sales go through members and up to 65% in our best-performing customers (that could be you!)
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Rewards Redeemed: 90% average of all rewards are redeemed
Here’s a quick example of what we did for a Mexican-food nationwide QSR brand:
Objective: Increase spend from loyalty members.
Promotion: Any subscribed member who spent at least $15 during a 2-week promotional period would receive a $5 reward.
Method: Communication via SMS & emails marketing the promotion.
Results: 78% increase in member average order value to $24 spent per member. Furthermore, 1 out of 5 guests spent 2x the min. amount.
