Customer proof on record
How Kahala Brands raised retention rates from 15% to 25% with Spendgo
- Customer on record
- Kahala Brands
- Vendor on record
- Spendgo
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Proofmap summary
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Kahala Brands, a hospitality company, uses Spendgo alongside its customer data platform to identify guests and "increase the match rate" for advertising. By its director of loyalty marketing's account, focusing on inactive guests helped "retention rates rise from about 15% up to 25%." The company says this integrated data approach has "led to a large increase in lifetime value" for its loyalty members.
Approved quotes
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Showing all 19 quotes
- How they use it
Tech Stack Variability
“The tech stack is always different across all the different brands. It's not just loyalty and POS, that includes things like SMS and email. If there is a CDP involved, that could be different also.”
- Background
Acquiring Diverse Tech Stacks
“At Kahala Brands, we're an acquisition brand, which means when we acquire brands, we also acquire their tech stack. My team has seen a number of different tech stacks across the restaurant industry, including different loyalty programs, POSs, email and SMS services, and CDPs. You name it, we've seen it.”
- Before
Integration Across Platforms
“A big challenge we had at Kahala is that we needed to find partners that could integrate across all of the different POS platforms we use at different brands, and all of the different communication services that we use, including CDPs, email, and SMS.”
- Advice
Driving ROI with Data
“A lot of people start a loyalty program and assume that the base level program is what brings in the ROI, but it's really not. That base level functionality is really just a value exchange with the guest. What drives ROI is how you use that data. You can use it to target people through ads, communicate through email or SMS, and give specific offers to specific groups of people to drive specific behaviors. All of that is what actually drives the ROI of loyalty. The higher your adoption rate, the more data points you have to communicate with.”
- Results
Loyalty as a Data Play
“We view adoption rate a little bit differently than other brands who are trying to utilize the loyalty program just as a standalone value-add to guests. We're looking at it as a data play. Having that integrated tech stack allows us to utilize our adoption rate and all the data we're bringing in across different platforms to really drive sales.”
- Results
DataDelivers CDP ROI
“DataDelivers is our customer data platform, or CDP. What it allows us to do is pull in data from a bunch of different sources, marry it all together, and view it in a way that we couldn't do before. They get all of our POS data, our online ordering data, and our Spendgo data for loyalty. It allows us to do a lot better targeting of ads, so our ad ROI skyrockets when we use CDP data. It also allows us to do campaign orchestration and build audiences based off of past behavior in ways we couldn't do before, driving specific offers to different segments of people. It's really allowing us to get the right offer at the right time into the hands of the right guests, and that drives lifetime value.”
- Results
Campaign Orchestration Value
“With our CDP partner DataDelivers, we're able to pull in data from a bunch of different sources, which allows us to do campaign orchestration in ways that we've never done before. That's really led to a large increase in lifetime value for our loyalty members.”
- Results
Increasing Guest Retention
“Most brands have a retention rate of about 15% for guests. The vast majority of guests that walk into a restaurant don't come back for more than a year. With the CDP, we've been able to focus on those inactive guests and bring up our retention rates to closer to 20% or 25%, depending on the brand. That leads to a lot more value from those loyalty members and brings those people back into the store. If you're getting one or two extra visits out of an individual person in a year, that lifetime value really skyrockets.”
- Results
Retention Rate Growth
“With DataDelivers and Spendgo, we've seen our retention rates rise from about 15% up to 25%, where most people in the industry are around 10 to 15%.”
- Results
Identity Resolution and Match Rates
“One thing that DataDelivers does through their CDP is identity resolution. They're tokenizing credit card data and are basically able to identify non-loyalty members in a fashion that allows us to advertise to them. Even with just the phone number for a starter member in Spendgo, we can advertise to that person, but the match rate goes way higher when you have that full identity resolution. When we run that through DataDelivers, we're able to have a higher match rate, those ads are more successful, and we're able to convert more starter members into registered members.”
- Results
Maximizing Data and ROI
“A lot of other brands, when they're forcing people to download an app, are really compromising not only the guest experience, but the amount of data that they have. With DataDelivers and Spendgo together, we get the best of both worlds, and we can convert those people into registered members. Whatever step in the journey they're on, we're able to increase ROI, see a high adoption rate, and ultimately just drive sales.”
- Results
Increasing Ad Match Rates
“When I say match rate, what I mean is if I'm advertising on Facebook, I would download a list of phone numbers and contact information from Spendgo and upload that to Facebook. Facebook will match to some number of those people and we can advertise directly to that group. If we just have a phone number, Facebook can still match to a certain percentage, but DataDelivers can basically fill in the blanks on all that information that Facebook is looking for and increase the match rate. That way, the advertising we're doing is hitting a larger percentage of loyalty members.”
- Results
Powerful Ad Targeting Combination
“When we use Spendgo, even if we just have a phone number, we're able to advertise directly to those members. When we layer in DataDelivers, we're able to increase the match rate on those ads so we can hit even more people. It's really a powerful combination.”
- Advice
Cost of Guest Acquisition
“Loyalty touches every part of your business. What we've seen through the CDP is that we understand the cost of bringing in a guest who hasn't been in before. We know that a large portion of those people are probably not going to come back, because retention rates in the industry are just low. Keeping a guest in Spendgo and getting those known guests to come in is definitely less expensive.”
- Advice
Flexibility and Integrations
“It all comes back to flexibility. You need to be able to meet guests in any way that they need to, handle data in a flexible way, and integrate to all of your partners. That's really what I'm looking for in a loyalty vendor: someone who's flexible, able to integrate with everything I need them to quickly, and makes as few compromises as possible.”
- Advice
The Cost of Poor Integrations
“If you don't have a centralized database, you're going to end up not being able to integrate with something. That hamstrings who you can select to do communication, who you select for your online vendor, and who you select for loyalty. Your team is going to spend hundreds of employee hours building out offers to make sure they work at each individual location, whereas a centralized database would take significantly less time.”
- Advice
Understanding Non-Loyalty Guests
“That's where a CDP helps a lot. The other thing that CDP identity resolution does is it helps you understand your non-loyalty guests. Once you have loyalty, you start to understand your loyalty guests, but you don't necessarily understand the behavior of your non-loyalty guests. That's what the CDP fills in the gap of. If you ask a traditional marketer who their customer is, and then compare that to what the CDP says, it's normally two different things. Traditional marketers tend not to have the data available to really understand who their customer is and how they interact with the brand. Having a CDP informs your decisions on how to structure your loyalty program, because then you know how often your guests actually visit.”
- Advice
Importance of Data Integrations
“It's important for data to move seamlessly between all of your different vendors. You need that data to flow through all these different systems and remain compliant with all relevant U.S. laws. Having those integrations, or being able to quickly build them, is really key to making the loyalty program function on a base level.”
- Advice
Best-in-Class vs All-in-One
“There are certainly large loyalty vendors out there that have all-in-one solutions. They try to do everything and they're not very good at any one of those things. Once you get to a certain level, you're looking at individual services for each function and trying to get the best in class out of each one. That's where data portability comes into play.”