Offers & Gifts
A gift is earned. An offer is given.
Most loyalty tools store a coupon as a line of text and hope the counter reads it correctly. LoyaltyJuice treats an offer as a structured object: it knows when it is valid, where it applies, who qualifies and how often it can be redeemed — and the till enforces every one of those before anything is given away.
Two different things, kept apart on purpose
Operators conflate the two constantly, and the moment they do they lose the ability to answer the only question that matters: how much are we paying to keep guests, and how much are we paying for visits we would have had anyway.
A gift
The guest earns it by doing what the programme asks — the tenth coffee, the third stay, five hundred points. It is recognition, and it is the programme working as designed.
An offer
You give it, for your own reason — a quiet Sunday, a new dish, a guest you want back this month. It is an intervention, and it costs you margin on purpose.
What an offer actually carries
Validity
A start and an end. An expired offer stops working at the counter rather than lingering on a screenshot.
Participating locations
A Sunday dinner offer can run at two branches and not the other four.
Eligibility
Who it is for — every guest, or a defined group such as guests who have not visited recently.
Redemption limits
How many times in total and how many times per guest. Goodwill is not an open door.
Enforced at the till, not on trust
The Loyalty Desk checks the offer against the guest before it is applied: is it live, is this location taking part, does this guest qualify, have they already used it. A staff member cannot accidentally honour an offer that ended last week, and a guest cannot redeem the same one twice by showing an old screen.
Every redemption is recorded against the guest, the offer and the staff member who applied it, which is what makes the spend auditable afterwards.
Protecting margin on a small ticket
A percentage off a small bill is mostly margin. A complimentary item is usually worth more to the guest and costs you less, which is why the system is built around issuing a defined thing rather than a blanket discount. What you give is your decision; the point is that it is a decision, made once, with limits, rather than a verbal promise repeated differently by four staff members.
Where offers meet everything else
Service recovery
A recovery benefit is an offer issued to one guest for a stated reason, with the same validity and audit trail.
Campaigns
An offer is the thing a win-back campaign is offering. The message carries it; the offer defines it.
Wallet
It appears on the guest’s wallet card without an app, so they see it without having to be told twice.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I run an offer at some branches only?
- Yes. Participating locations are part of the offer, so a promotion can run where you want the traffic and nowhere else.
- What stops one guest using an offer repeatedly?
- Per-guest and total redemption limits, checked at the counter before the offer is applied and recorded after it is.
- Can I target only guests who stopped coming?
- Eligibility can be set to a defined group rather than everyone, which is the usual shape of a win-back. Who is in that group comes from their actual visit history.
- Do guests need an app to see an offer?
- No. It reaches the wallet card they already have on their phone.
- Is a gift the same as a discount?
- No, and the distinction is the point. A gift is earned and is part of the programme’s cost of recognition; a discount is a margin decision you make deliberately.