Diners want Amazon-level personalized loyalty experiences. In fact, a full 91% of diners value a personalized customer loyalty program with 50% of them saying it’s very or extremely valuable, according to a recent national independent research study of consumers and executives conducted by Wakefield Research and commissioned by PayiQ.
Restaurants are making a serious investment to try and meet these consumer needs, allocating an average of 10% of their company’s total budget to installing and operating their loyalty program. Despite this outlay of cash, restaurant executives report that only 23% of their customers actively use their loyalty program with 51% reporting that their program’s inability to personalize rewards is limiting active customer enrollment growth.
The challenge of creating a personalized loyalty experience is a serious threat to loyalty success. Especially when you consider that successful loyalty programs can lead to improved retention, increased spend per visit and higher visit frequency.
Understanding the difficulty of gaining new loyalty users
With 84% of consumers currently enrolled in an average of five loyalty programs, it may seem like an easy task to make the cut. But the truth is that diners are not afraid to ditch loyalty programs that don’t offer immediate value. Some 69% of loyalty users have left or become inactive because the program wasn’t perceived as being valuable to them, while 49% say they will leave if they’re not rewarded quickly enough. Diners want to be surprised with immediate personalized offers from their loyalty program. The Problem of Personalizing Offers Restaurant executives realize the growing importance of providing personalized experiences with 87% concerned that their restaurants will lose members if they don’t provide personalized experiences. In fact, 33% say they are already losing members due to a lack of personalized and relevant rewards.
This lack of personalization is not for a lack of trying. A full 89% of executives expressed concern that their current technologies, platforms and databases are simply not providing them the alignment and data-driven power they need to design personal loyalty offers.
The loyalty technology market is in serious need of disruption. Luckily, there is hope on the horizon.
New payments-based loyalty solution promises access to untapped customer data
According to the Wakefield study, 63% of executives say they are relying on first-party data more now than two years ago. But accessing this kind of data has proved a difficult hurdle for many to overcome. That’s where the power of capturing everyday payment transaction data comes into play.
Every time a card is swiped in your store, there’s an opportunity to capture data. In the past, the only way to obtain transaction data on customers was to get diners to sign up for your loyalty program. But now, PayiQ has introduced Payments Intelligence®, a solution capable of securely capturing and building customer data profiles based on the user’s payment card as an anonymous but unique identifier.
With the card as a basis for capturing consumer purchase data, it’s now possible to build detailed menu preferences and consumer behavior profiles around a single source of first-party data. This capability means you’ll not only see data from 100% of your card-paying customers but also be able to capture that data without requiring diners to enroll in your loyalty program.
Everything happens in the background while you reap the data rewards. And, of course, with tons of new first-party data comes the capability of offering personalized loyalty rewards.
Now you can offer Amazon-level personalization
Loyalty rewards built around your diners’ cards open the door for engagement offers at the point of sale. Your customer purchases a meal, and a reward is offered based on their previous behaviors and menu choices, delighting and surprising them with a deeply personalized loyalty experience without requiring any extra effort on the part of the customer or your employees.
When you consider the fact that 71% of diners would share their personal information with a loyalty program if it meant getting a more personalized experience, the value of building a card-based loyalty system becomes obvious.
Payments Intelligence® allows restaurants to send their current transaction data to be converted into secure and actionable consumer profiles. This technology patches the data gap between online stores and brick-and-mortar restaurants.
It’s a real disruption that’s primed to bring restaurant loyalty into the modern world in a big way—by meeting the loyalty expectations of customers who have come to demand the level of personalization only offered previously by digitally native merchants.
