Browse All Articles

We’re in the midst of one of the dining sector’s most important times of year; but far from the festive period being the “most wonderful,” for many brands it can be a time of unease.

After allocating large amounts of their budgets towards holiday season marketing strategies, brands are eager to see results. But even if gains are made over Christmas, historically it’s tricky to hold onto new customers into the new year, even with January’s sales and promotions.

Customer attrition is a significant problem for retailers. This is particularly true of casual dining, where the post-holiday blues, and the associated diet and gym fads, leave restaurants feeling the pinch as consumers rein in after the festive excesses.

Coming at a time when casual dining chains are already struggling to stand out, this is a problem.

The post-holiday blues

It’s common sense and common knowledge that the Christmas season is a boom time for consumer spending. Generally, you might associate this with retail spending, or perhaps the spending that happens at pubs and bars. But casual diners also head out en masse over the festive period, with a higher total spend in December 2017 than in all but one of the preceding months.

However, our data shows that this trend suffers a sharp drop-off in the new year, both in the number of trips and the total spend. From December 2017 to January 2018, spending fell by 16 percent, while the number of transactions dropped by 11 percent.

This is a repeated problem for restaurants, who struggle to keep consumers engaged once the holiday season is over. This comes at a time when the casual dining category is already suffering, with average spend dipping 10 percent since 2015, according to a Cardlytics’ restaurant spotlight earlier this year.

Casual dining and customer attrition

Unfortunately, the issue of customer retention for casual dining in the UK is not unique to the post-Christmas period. Non-seasonal struggles in retaining customers persist for the high street’s restaurants whatever the weather. In fact, 55 percent of casual dining customers do not make a repeat purchase at the same retail brand within six months. This is known as the “leaky bucket” effect – where brands on-board customers at a high rate but lapse non-returning customers at the same rate. The “leaky bucket” slows business’ growth and is trending behind in the casual dining category.

There are three strategies that restaurants can implement to arrest this trend and keep the customers they earn, whether it’s during the January slump or after any other big event where volumes drop-off.

1. Win back dormant customers by providing offers or rewards for their business and prevent active customers from lapsing by ensuring your offer is competitive and appeals against other peers in the market.
2. Implement strategies that will lock new guests in for a second visit by giving them a reason to return in the near future, such as a bounce-back offer within seven days of their first purchase.
3. Work with providers like Cardlytics, who can keep customers engaged by automatically triggering offers for customers who may have lapsed.

Post-Christmas can be a tough time for the high street’s restaurants, however it need not be if you can effectively build on the success during the festive period. By working with a platform which can keep customers engaged, casual dining can make the new year just as merry.

Marketers: is customer acquisition on your holiday wish list this year?

Good news, there is a big opportunity to influence new customers as they rush to wrap up their holiday shopping these next few weeks. As shoppers branch out of their typical routines to find gifts for their loved ones, they are more likely to try a new retailer or category for the first time. While many marketers place emphasis on acquiring new customers, Cardlytics’ holiday purchase insights show that not all acquisition is created equal. Here are the top three things marketers need to know about customers who expand their shopping horizons during the busiest retail season:

1. Gifting categories see the biggest benefit from adventurous holiday shoppers

In 2017, Cardlytics’ purchase insights showed that gifting categories such as children’s apparel & toys, department stores, and sporting goods saw the highest percentage of new customers for the holidays. Meanwhile, new customers for personal purchase categories (think auto services, home décor, and beauty) account for a much smaller portion of total holiday customers.

For gifting categories, customers acquired during the holidays also account for a significant portion of total customers throughout the entire year. Retailers specializing in these categories should make the most of this opportunity by targeting their marketing broadly to drive more purchases from new customers.

2. New shoppers emerge in the eleventh hour

While there is opportunity for customer acquisition throughout the holiday season, retailers should expect the most traction later in the season as customers increasingly venture beyond their familiar go-to stores to check off the last items on their lists. Of all the holiday shopper types we analyzed, Procrastinators spent the most at new brands, averaging $500 per customer. In fact, the biggest category for customer acquisition during the holidays—children’s apparel & toys—saw its most significant spike in new shoppers the week before Christmas.

Marketers looking to attract new customers for the holidays should ramp up their marketing efforts in the final weeks of the holiday season. Appeal to last-minute shoppers by highlighting extended store hours, inventory assurance tools, and gift guides.

3. Don’t lose sight of building loyalty

Regardless of how new holiday customers impact your retail category, it’s important to remember that the majority of holiday sales are driven by customers who already purchased from the same retailers the previous year. Last year, the majority – almost 60% – of holiday sales were from repeat customers.

Personal purchase categories that see less of an impact from new holiday customers should especially focus their marketing efforts on increasing spend and purchases among loyal customers. This will help build consistent shopping habits for success going into 2019.

At Cardlytics, we use Purchase Intelligence™ to target likely buyers (both existing and new) and prove the impact of campaigns so marketers have confidence that their budgets are driving actual incremental sales. With no complex integration or training required, we can help you reach those last-minute shoppers as soon as 10 days. Let’s work together now to win more customers and ramp up your holiday sales in these critical last few weeks. After all, there is still a lot of shopping left to be done.

Want more actionable holiday purchase insights? Download our 2018 Holiday Spend Trends Report today.

As a marketer, some of the things I love most about my job include learning something new every day, telling stories, and working at the intersection of art and science to help our partners win. So it was a great pleasure to discuss these very topics with Renegade, LLC's Founder and CEO Drew Neisser during my recent trip to New York.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, so I wanted to share my two biggest takeaways:

1. Creativity and data are not enemies

With so much data available to marketers, knowing how to make insights actionable can often feel overwhelming. Over the course of my career, I’ve learned that creativity and data are not at odds with one another. Instead, inspired marketers use their data to inform their creativity as they figure out what content would be the most compelling to the audience they want to influence.

At Cardlytics, we use machine learning and advanced algorithms, but we leverage these to figure out how to help our clients reach likely buyers. We pour a lot of creative energy into using our insights in innovative ways—whether it’s building an engaging targeting strategy or telling data-driven stories that help advertisers better understand their own businesses and opportunities.

For example, in our 2018 Holiday Spend Report, we found that traditional brick & mortar stores were able to slow their loss of seasonal share to e-commerce competitors by driving sales online. So how can marketers engage customers who value the convenience of online channels but are still paying attention to traditional retailers known for their holiday deals? One of our actionable tips from the report is to emphasize the respective convenience factors for both online and in-store channels in your holiday messaging. For online, focus on price matching, gift guides, or free shipping. For physical stores, play up the hands-on experience, verifiable quality, and easy gift returns.

2. Don’t limit yourself by defining “loyalty” too narrowly

Many brands understand their customers through robust CRM systems, but a lot of marketers only know their customers when they are shopping inside their four walls. To avoid leaving money on the table, we need to be thinking about loyalty on a broader, whole-wallet level. Ask yourself: where are my customers spending when they’re not spending with me?

One of our clients—a major auto parts retailer—assumed that customers who purchased multiple times a year were loyal to their brand. In fact, many of these “loyal” customers were actually heavy category shoppers. Using our Purchase Intelligence, Cardlytics was able to see that a full 40 percent of these frequent buyers spent more than half of their category spend with competitors. The retailer had a lot of headroom they hadn't been realizing. To grow market share, they opened up their whole media plan and began to target this “loyal” group. This campaign improved actual loyalty and drove an additional $6M in incremental sales.

When used the right way, data doesn’t have to be daunting. As long as marketers stay clear on the goals they want to achieve and the audience they want to address, data should help them feel empowered to try something new and push boundaries. Reach out to Cardlytics to learn how our Purchase Intelligence can help you make smarter marketing decisions.

Our full conversation is available on episode 104 of the Renegade Thinkers Unite! podcast—an amazing series of thought-provoking conversations with some incredibly inspiring CMOs.

Each year, Time Magazine selects a “Person of the Year” to be profiled in its end-of-year issue. This person, group, idea, or object is one that has done the most to influence that year’s events. If last month’s Advertising Week in New York was any indication, the 2019 “Person of the Year” will be “The Consumer,” because consumer personalization and consumer experience dominated the conversation as the top areas to focus when building your 2019 marketing plan.Studies show that today’s consumer is presented with roughly 5,000 advertising messages every day. As a marketer, how can you cut through the noise and gain the attention you need to drive return on your investment….? By personalizing your product offering and delivering it through a native channel that provides a seamless consumer experience.With the continuous growth of technology, consumers have the world at their fingertips. But given our “always on” society, they don’t have the time or the desire to search for the products most relevant to them. They want those products, with any additional savings or rewards, to come directly to them through their normal everyday interactions. That’s why native advertising channels can be so effective, especially when they’re part and parcel of consumers everyday interactions, and the ads are personalized to the consumer.At Cardlytics, our direct partnership with banks gives us a secure view into where, when, and how much consumers are already spending. Using these insights, we can help develop advertising promotional campaigns that are personalized based on past purchase transaction behavior.These personalized ads are delivered as promotion offer content within a native banking channel, which includes mobile and online banking. When consumers log into their bank account, they will see these relevant cash back promotion offers, which enable them to save money when they make future purchases.It’s a seamless experience for the consumer, because with one click, every time they shop at the activated reward location, they save a portion of their spend. That money saved will be directly deposited into their bank account with no additional effort or attention needed. It’s quick and easy for the consumer, ensuring relevancy and boosting engagement.And for advertisers, it’s a real boon because the average incremental return on ad spend is about $5:1. The return is so high because of the personalized purchase behavior-based targeting, and the pristine behind the firewall environment, which increases consumer engagement with the offers – there are no bots, no fraud, no viewability issues, and no objectionable content for marketers to worry about.So how can we support your 2019 marketing plan by cutting through the clutter and targeting the demands of that “Person of the Year” through a seamless, personalized experience? Contact us to learn more.

Pumpkin spice is wafting through the air, and you know what that means:The holidays are officially upon us.As more customers take their holiday shopping online and skip the Black Friday lines, it’s critical for marketers to keep a pulse on where, when, and how shoppers will tackle their gift lists this year. By analyzing $1.5 trillion in purchase data from our 2,000 bank partners, Cardlytics is able to identify key trends in holiday spend behavior. While we put these insights to action every day for our advertiser partners through our native bank channel, we’ve developed a special 2018 Holiday Spend Trends Report for all marketers to leverage leading into this busy shopping season.Here are four purchase trends every marketer needs to know to capture the most spend all season long:Brick & Mortar stores slow loss of share by driving sales online With more customers turning to e-commerce retailers like Amazon, traditional Brick & Mortars saw a decrease of nearly 2% in their share of holiday spend at physical stores. Interestingly, their online and mobile properties held steady against further share shift to purely online competitors—indicating that online shoppers are still paying attention to traditional retailers well known for their holiday deals.Black Friday and Cyber Monday are only one (less important) piece of the pieIn the last few years, spend across the season has shifted to both well before—and well after—Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As a result, the mid-season spike in spend that you would expect to see around the retail event was less significant than in years past.Holiday shoppers fall into four distinct timing segmentsWhat’s the most cohesive way to segment and understand holiday shoppers? By looking at when people do the bulk of their holiday spending. We identified four distinct timing segments: Early Birds, Black Friday Warriors, Procrastinators, and Steady Shoppers. Steady Shoppers account for 40% of all holiday spend, so it is critical for marketers to stay top of mind with ongoing marketing campaigns throughout the season.‘Tis the season to acquire new customersAs customers shop for loved ones, they are more likely to try a new retailer or category for the first time. In 2017, gifting categories such as children’s apparel & toys, department stores, and sporting goods saw the highest percentage of new customers for the holidays.Learn about these trends in more depth and get actionable tips to capture spend throughout the holiday season in our full report.

Last week, Cardlytics hit the main stage at Advertising Week in New York with some of the top retail and marketing brands in the U.S. Rachel Sonenshine (VP, Ad Partnerships, Retail East), Randall Beard (Group President, Advertisers) and Dani Cushion (Chief Marketing Officer) each had the opportunity to participate in a panel, sharing Cardlytics’ unique view into how marketers across a variety of verticals are using data-driven marketing to drive incremental sales.More specifically, on Monday morning Rachel Sonenshine spoke about The New Retail Game. Joining her was Jeff Fagel, SVP and head of marketing for Epsilon and Conversant; Suz Lampert, VP of ad sales for GasBuddy; and Dallas Lawrence, chief communications and brand officer for OpenX. Moderated by Lydia Belanger, associate editor for Entrepreneur.com, Rachel talked to the audience about translating online presence to offline purchase, the importance of listening through consumer data then applying key lessons learned through personalization, and how Cardlytics can help retailers remove any transactional blind spots.That afternoon, Dani Cushion moderated a brand panel with Joshua Stein from Hilton Hotels, Julie Sukosd from UnderArmour, and Kevin Keith from Orangetheory. During this Loyalty Across Verticals panel, Dani expertly guided the speakers through topics that included degrees of loyalty, relevance, using tech for good versus evil, and measuring incrementality while building brand love.Finally, on Thursday Randall Beard was a Future Teller with Aimee Irwin, VP of strategy for Experian and Rohini Sen, data sciences client lead for Wavemaker. In this data insights and opportunities panel, Randall discussed data as a value exchange and ensured that the audience understood how the data Cardlytics sees is real, based on actual purchase data through credit and debit card spending. He also made sure the retailers in the audience knew how important it is to be able to see when their clients are shopping elsewhere so they can target them with rewards to bring them back.Keep following the Cardlytics blog and watch for a second Advertising Week post to come soon, highlighting the key advertising and marketing trends learned throughout the week.

Back-to-school (B2S) shopping season is ending. Hopefully, you leveraged Cardlytics’ 2018 Back-to-School Spend Report to understand key B2S spend trends and boost sales this season. But, now, marketers concluding B2S may be wondering, “What’s next?”After the B2S season ends, it may be tempting to hold on another big marketing push until the winter holidays. However, it’s critical to keep the momentum going during the fall to stay top-of-mind leading into the heavy winter holiday shopping season. In fact, Cardlytics’ purchase insights show that last year the majority – almost 60% – of holiday sales were from repeat customers in 2017. Additionally, customers acquired during the fall spend 7% more during the winter holidays than newly acquired customers. These purchase insights show that fall is a key timeto acquire customers who will really move the needle during the winter holidays, A.K.A THE BIGGEST SHOPPING SEASON OF THE YEAR.Below are a few tips for acquiring new customers this fall.Leverage Real Purchase BehaviorIn this new era of data abundance, it can be hard to choose the data sets that will help you identify the right customers. While other data can offer glimpses of a person’s needs and wants, the best predictor of what someone will purchase in the future is what they’ve purchased in the past. When serving advertisements, leveraging actual purchase data ensures your ads are reaching relevant audiences. After all, a 31-year-old man who is single with no children will not want the same advertising as a 31-year-old man who is married with two children.Make it Easy to Cash-in on OffersWhile consumers are more cost savvy, they do not want/have the time to cut coupons. Cash-back offers that are served digitally, like the rewards program from Cardlytics, allow consumers to select an offer easily online or on their phone. Specifically, Cardlytics’ rewards are served through a consumer’s banking channels, so no additional app or login is required. And, once the customer selects the offer, he/she can easily redeem the rewards by shopping with the brand (online or in-store) using the bank card associated with that account.Evaluate and Make ChangesBrands should deploy marketing campaigns that allow them to measure both the online and in-store impact. While online is growing year over year, 92% of sales still take place at a physical location. Because of this, it is key that marketers be able to close the loop between online advertising and in-store sales. Once fall concludes, marketers should look at how their campaigns drove actual online and in-store sales, not just eyeballs and clicks. Then, make the necessary adjustments for a fruitful winter shopping season.The key to acquiring fall customers is deploying marketing strategies that marry both quantity and quality. Instead of throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, marketers should aim to reach actual likely buyers, at scale – meaning a large quantity of the right consumers. Keeping the sales momentum from B2S into the fall will make for a more abundant winter holiday sales season and an overall better return for the year.

Although football may not have “come home” for England, this summer’s headline sporting event, the World Cup in Russia created unprecedented levels of national excitement in the UK in a way that only football seems able to do.

This sense of anticipation was not just contained to people’s living rooms, as the British High Street quickly became one of the big beneficiaries of the World Cup effect, with pubs and bars emerging as clear winners.

According to Cardlytics UK purchase insights, which is based on more than half a million football fans, the initial knockout stages were the busiest week in British consumer spending, when compared to the rest of the tournament.

During the week that England took on Colombia and Sweden in the round of 16, all categories experienced double-digit growth compared to the week before. Specifically, sports outlets, such as Sports Direct, Nike, Asics and Under Armour, experienced the highest increase.

The spending figures also reveal favourable levels of spending compared to England’s last major international football tournament: the first two weeks of the World Cup saw five out of six High Street categories increase, resulting in a 9% sales uptick compared to Euros 2016.

Knockout week the real game-changer

The first week of knockout-round fixtures provided the biggest retail boost across all categories.

As the tournament headed towards its latter stages, the fashion and sports outlets saw the biggest increases, of 21.3% and 25.7% respectively.

Grocery chains (+15%) and pubs/bars (+14.7%) also benefitted, as fans gathered in pubs and homes to watch England’s crucial R16 and quarter-final fixtures.

In total, all categories experienced a 15.3% increase compared to the previous week.

Playing it safe with pizza

Opting for the dining equivalent of ‘Route One Football’, pizza was the most popular food option during the tournament.

Spending with pizza delivery brands such as Domino’s and Papa John’s increased in the first two weeks of the World Cup, compared to the prior two weeks. Major brands, like those, also outperformed traditional delivery services by nearly three times during the initial knockout week.

Big spending for the big occasions

What this particular data shows marketers is that football fans have become a huge consumer group, and their spending can be particularly powerful during big-ticket events such as the World Cup.

Marketers should stay on top of how spending habits are affected by headline events, as it helps them to understand their target audience even better during these crucial moments. Furthermore, enhancing the understanding of these patterns with clear data presents an open goal for brands and retailers – missing it will leave them on the sidelines.

The back-to-school (B2S) season is one of the most critical periods for retailers to reach sales goals. And, with major shopping events like Amazon Prime Day and the continued growth of online channels, the way consumers are buying for B2S is changing. However, even with the growth of digital channels, we see that in-store still wins the most share for B2S, over 73%.What does this mean? Retailers that want to capture the most share need to have a lock-step approach that leverages digital channels and drives in-store sales.With a view into +$1.5 trillion in spend across credit, debit, ACH, and bill pay, Cardlytics recently released The 2018 Back-to-School Spend Report. The report explores the spend trends that marketers need to know to capture the most share this season.B2S Spend is GrowingIn 2017, B2S spend grew nearly 3% year-over-year. This was driven by an increase in spend per purchase, with spend per purchase growing nearly 1% year-over-year. Interestingly, we see that the number of purchases decreased, indicating that consumers are making fewer, yet more impactful shopping trips.Online-Only Capturing Bigger PurchasesThe increase in spend per purchase was most evident in online-only channels. In 2017, online-only spend per purchase grew by 7.2%.Brick & Mortar.coms (B&M.coms) Catching on to Prime Day Amazon Prime Day continues to pull spend forward. However, we see that B&M.coms are catching on to this earlier spend. While in 2016, B&M.coms decreased in share, they stayed flat in 2017.Prime Day Shoppers More ValuableWe see that customers who shopped during the week of Amazon Prime Day spend more in every channel during the B2S season than customers who did not shop during the week of Prime Day. Additionally, customers who shop at any online channel the week of Prime Day spend more online the week following Prime Day.With digital channels changing how consumers shop, but in-store continuing to dominate channel share, retailers need to execute marketing campaigns that reach consumers online and drive in-store spend.

• Cardlytics Direct allows retailers to reach consumers with relevant ads directly within their online and mobile banking. These ads also encourage in-store spend as the rewards are linked to the consumer’s bank card, so they can easily save while shopping in-store.
• Retailers should consider B2S ship-to-store deals. Often, once the consumer is in the store to pick up their online order, they do additional shopping.
• During the first week of school re-opening, retailers should consider offering additional deals, which allow parents to pick up last-minute items.

For more back-to-school spend trends, download The 2018 Back-to-School Spend Report.