During the 2025 Food On Demand Conference, held May 5-7 in Las Vegas, marketing leaders from a trio of franchise brands shared new and ongoing strategies for their loyalty programs. For all three, loyalty programs have become tied to digital sales and provide advertising potential thanks to customer data.
Of the customers who visit Blaze Pizza’s 300 locations, just 15 percent use the brand’s loyalty program.
Casey Terrell, Blaze Pizza’s vice president of marketing, admitted having a loyalty program is not the end-all, be-all answer to generating traffic. It is, however, still an important and useful tool in driving sales.
During a panel at last week’s Food On Demand Conference in Las Vegas, Terrell explained that in the digital age, loyalty programs don’t just build a consistent consumer base, but also provide insight.
“Loyalty, for us, is more of a proxy,” Terrell said. “We realize it’s only 15 percent of our customers, so we look at it in the sense of how we can use what we know about those customers to attract other people.”
Casey Terrell is the vice president of marketing at Blaze Pizza.
To ensure the brand’s program is operating as effectively as possible, Blaze Pizza partnered with Thanx Loyalty to improve its digital approach.
“We have the challenge of having a lot of data and needing to make it actionable,” Terrell said. “Right now, it sort of just sits in a spreadsheet. So, we’ve been coming up with new tools with Thanx to take that data and do something with it. It’s good for us to acknowledge that loyalty isn’t going to be a silver bullet. However, we think we can get some points, and as marketers, if you can increase percentages here and there, it’s a good thing.”
Related: Blaze Pizza Franchisee Group Signs 25-Unit Deal in Southern California
Terrell was joined on the panel by Julie Wade, senior director of marketing at Taziki’s Mediterranean Café, and Courtney Maxedon, vice president of digital strategy at Kahala Brands. The session was moderated by Abhinav Kapur, CEO of customer data platform company Bikky, who dug into the connection between digital sales, data and modern loyalty programs.
At Kahala, a company with 28 brands, including Cold Stone Creamery, Pinkberry and Planet Smoothie, about 25 percent of sales are digital, up from 2 to 3 percent before the pandemic. Maxedon said adding a customer data platform to look into those digital sales allowed them to learn more about their guests.
“We went down the path of using a customer data platform because we wanted to understand those unknown customers,” Maxedon said. “Our loyalty usage is upwards of around 30 percent, and our goal is identifying those who we don’t talk to.”
Courtney Maxedon is the vice president of marketing and digital strategy at Kahala Brands.
“I think you have to start with loyalty, that’s your foundation as a brand to get that first-party data, and build upon that with a CDP,” said Maxedon. “We use it for a lot of segmenting. Our loyalty program and CDP systems are integrated, and we can build upon deeper segments and more personalization with that.”
At Cold Stone, which Maxedon also leads the marketing for, a two-tier loyalty program has been implemented for easier sign-up and engagement. The loyalty program has a starter tier, which adds a customer to the platform with just a phone number, followed by the full-membership tier, which requires registration.
“When a customer comes in, we have our customer-facing display where they can enter their phone number and they are added as a starter,” Maxedon said. “They can earn points then, but can’t redeem points. So, we have a lot of initiatives to get those members to be fully registered, where they select a favorite store, opt in to emails, run ads to them and bring them into SMS communications.”
Those SMS, or text message, campaigns have been particularly successful, Maxedon said, with Coldstone generating a lot of interest with their texts for specific events like National Ice Cream Day in July.
“We also have a big POS initiative with our crew members to have them guide customers on registration if they’re a starter member,” Maxedon said. “It’s ultimately more frictionless. We know there are a lot of programs that are more app-based, but for a snack brand, it doesn’t make sense for us. The frequency isn’t as high since we’re more impulse driven.”
Julie Wade is the senior director of marketing at Taziki’s Mediterranean Café.
At Taziki’s, Wade said the Mediterranean concept’s rewards program is directly tied to its point-of-sale system, developed by Square. Wade said members can be added by phone number or online, and once included, the system can recognize a customer’s credit card to automatically add reward points.
“It’s a passive system and it’s a great benefit to us,” Wade said. “At the same time, it can be a double-edged sword because sometimes a guest may not know they’re in the program. Another drawback is that because it’s in the POS platform, I, on the marketing side, am not talking to our POS representatives most of the time. That’s the tech side of the business, and marketing is not what they’re usually thinking about. There’s a give-and-take.”
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