How a restaurant chain grew its sales with a loyalty program and Loona.ai CRM

Bazar Family is a restaurant group. It includes the wine bar chain "Vinny Bazar", the bar "Tantsy. food & people", the gastrobar "Igristy", the pizzeria "CROSTA pizza bar", the restaurant "Pasta Queen" and the restaurant "Kochevniki. Vino i Ogon". Before they came to us, the company had worked with another loyalty program for several years. One of their main requests at the start was this: do not lose the database of active guests they had been building for 5 years. The main problem with the old loyalty system was that guests had to download an app to join. This stops a lot of people and lowers the share of people who install it. Also, the old program had few options to automate work with guests who were already members of the loyalty program. We offered to move the whole database of more than 7,000 users to the new loyalty program. A project manager supported the whole move, and all our work with the client. Moving the database and putting the new loyalty program to work took 5 months. Even for us, this is quite a long time. One reason is that, at the same time as the loyalty system, our client was also changing its whole restaurant management system. To help them use all the features, after the launch we trained the team and gave them materials they can go back to at any time. We explained in detail what the program can do and did the first setup to launch the chosen loyalty model and turn on automations. To start, we set up points for joining the program and a birthday gift.

Results so far

• We moved a database of more than 7,000 guests to the new loyalty program.
• We set up an integration with iiko. Thanks to it, the client sees transactions, check amounts and even the dishes on each check.
• We launched a points system: guests collect points and can pay up to 25% of the check with them.
• We made it easier for guests to add loyalty cards and made it possible to track how well the staff work. We did this with UTM tags. Thanks to them, the client gets a monthly report on how many cards were added and from which sources.
• We launched automations that run on their own and encourage guests to come more often.

Results after one year with the loyalty program:

1. On top of the cards moved from the old program, 10,200 loyalty cards were added in total, and more than 50% of these guests come back to the "Bazar Family" restaurants.

The next plan is to raise this % with automations, or with push notifications set up by hand for separate groups of guests. 2. They started to track LTV (Lifetime Value) regularly. What is more, over the last 2 months this important number grew by more than 5%.

LTV is a key number. It shows how much money, on average, a guest spends at the restaurant over the whole time from their first visit to their latest one.

Besides the number of new cards added, you also need to watch LTV growth. In this case, growth shows that guests come back and like the restaurant. 3. Regular work with loyal guests through campaigns, a smart points system and good service helped raise how often guests visit the restaurants by 34% over the last six months. 4. We analyzed the cost of attracting a guest and found that the real cost, according to the statistics, fully matches the terms of the loyalty program: 5% cashback. The program mechanics take into account that a guest can either spend or save points. To collect and spend points, a guest has to spend 20 times more money at the restaurant than the value of those points. 5. We added location-based push notifications. We set them to go out when a guest from the loyalty program database is in certain places near the restaurant. 6. We set up a system to regularly count how many loyalty cards are added from different sources, including through each server's link. This helped to see which source works best, and also to track the work of servers in each restaurant of the group. 7. Over the year, we compared the growth in the number of cards, the growth of LTV and the growth of restaurant sales.

We found a pattern: in all projects, when the number of loyal guests grows, sales, LTV and other numbers grow too.

Our next plans

Next, the plan is to work on raising the % of guests who come back and turning as many guests as possible into loyal ones. For this, "Bazar Family" is building its own automated notifications, and is also working hard to improve service in its restaurants. As you can see, just one year after the launch, the restaurant group got results that are not only good for the business, but also show how important loyalty programs are and how well they pay off. In this case, the loyalty program was launched with the existing database kept in full. So if you need to move your databases, contact our team. We know exactly how to do it. Loona.ai is your business's companion! Follow our Telegram channel, where we share tips on launching different tools to get more out of CRM software.