Calculating the ROI of a loyalty program

First, let's agree that our loyalty program costs about ₽70,800 a year on average. Of course, you can choose cheaper plans with fewer features, or more expensive ones with special features and reports. But if you want to use all the tools fully, this plan is the best fit. So all our calculations are based on this price.

How many of your guests can join the loyalty program?

At the first stage, we sign up as many of your guests as possible for the loyalty program. Then you can talk to them, send them different notifications and work with them well in the future.

For example, take a restaurant with 1,000 transactions a month. If you actively invite guests to join the loyalty program, you can expect to add 100-200 people to your guest database each month. You can also start working with them right away and invite them to different events.

Overall, after 3 months you'll have about 500 guests in your database. Of course, we don't recommend stopping there: keep signing up new guests regularly. But after just 3 months, you can start working on improving your metrics.

Which metrics we recommend using in daily work, and what you can gain

The main ways to work with a loyalty program:

• growing the average check

• raising purchase frequency

• winning guests back

Below, we look at each of them.

How growing the average check helps the loyalty program pay for itself

Statistics show that guests who come back to your venue spend more than they did the first time.

They already know you, and if they came a second time, they clearly liked it. The first time in a new place is often a little stressful, because we're not sure if we'll like the dish. The second time, guests are much more relaxed. They have a favorite dish, but they also want to try something else. So simply launching a loyalty program and tracking the average check will show that a one-time guest spends less than a member of your program.

But there are also key things you can do with the built-in tools.

To grow the average check, we recommend planning promotions and offering gifts (for example, a dessert with orders from ₽2,700, or extra points when guests spend an amount you set). To tell guests about such a promotion, you can use push notifications or email campaigns.

In our example, we have a guest database of 500 people who visit the restaurant once a month on average, and we start working on the average check. The average check was ₽2,500, and we want to bring it to ₽2,700.

Raising the average check by ₽200 across the whole database gives you 500 * ₽200 = ₽100,000 more turnover in just one month.

This is only one possible tool, calculated for a fairly small database. You can keep growing your guest database, and then changes like this will be even more noticeable.

Raising purchase frequency

In this example, guests come to the restaurant once a month on average. If we work to get guests to come more often, bring them in with different events and use the automations in the Loona.ai loyalty program, we can realistically raise this to 1.2 times a month. That equals 600 guest visits (compared to 500 before the changes).

Even with the same average check, turnover grows by 100 (the difference in guest visits) * ₽2,500 = ₽250,000.

Winning guests back

Another very interesting thing our loyalty program lets you do is win back guests who came to you and may not come back.

By looking at the sales funnel and splitting all guests in your database into groups, you can see how many people come often and how many didn't come back after, say, their second visit. With filters, you can send campaigns to exactly this group of guests and offer them special points.

To fully understand how much each guest can bring to your business, there is a metric called LTV (Lifetime Value). It shows how much a guest is worth over the whole time they stay with you.

In Loona.ai, you can see it from day one, but in the first months it won't be much different from the average check. But once your database fills up, you'll be able to see how much money one guest brings over the whole time they stay with your business.

But even if we count a guest's return as just one visit, we can use the average check we already know.

In the funnel in the picture, there are 2,769 people in the database in total. 2,334 people (84.3%) came to the restaurant a second time, and only 1,331 (48.1%) a third time. If we work with those who came twice but didn't come back a third time and offer them points or higher cashback, then winning back just 3%, which is 83 people, gives us 83 * ₽2,500 = ₽207,500 more turnover!

As you can see, Loona.ai gives you many ways to grow your business's turnover.

You can start using the loyalty program and work on improving at least one of these metrics.

As our examples show, this kind of focused, planned and regular work will surely pay back everything you put into our program and help you earn more.

As the examples above show, if you actively build your guest database during the first three months and then start using the built-in tools, after just 4 months the loyalty program can fully pay for itself. In the remaining 8 months, you can keep working on the same metrics so the loyalty program gives you the most value possible.