People are watching their spending more closely than they have in years. Grocery bills are still stretched thin, monthly budgets are tight, and more households are choosing sale items over brand loyalty when the two don't line up. In that kind of environment, a business can't count on repeat customers showing up out of habit alone. They're being more deliberate about where they spend, and that means the businesses who earn their loyalty (and keep it) are the ones actively giving them a reason to come back.
We've pulled together the numbers, trends, and practical tips worth knowing about gift card and loyalty programs as we move into 2027, everything from repeat purchase behaviour to restaurant benchmarks, birthday rewards, and what kind of return you should actually expect.
If you only have 60 seconds, these are the numbers to know:
The rest of this article unpacks where these numbers come from and, more importantly, what to do with them.
Gift cards are an all-rounder: they bring in cash upfront, they attract brand-new customers, and they typically drive spending well beyond their face value. But for a tool that does this much, it's often underutilized as a revenue generator.
The exception is breakage, the industry term for gift card value that never gets redeemed at all. Around 14% of gift card value goes unspent. It's tempting to write that off as free money, but the smarter play is re-engagement: a redemption visit is worth more than a forgotten balance sitting on the books, because it's the start of a relationship rather than the end of a transaction. We've mapped out that playbook in our guide to turning gift card recipients into loyal customers.
The economics of repeat business are lopsided in the best way. You have a 60% to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, compared to a 5% to 20% chance with a brand-new prospect. Your regulars have already decided they trust you; every visit after the first is cheaper to earn than the one before it.
Loyalty programs formalize that advantage. 72% of consumers say a loyalty program makes them more likely to spend with their preferred brand, and 56% say they actively increase their spending because of it.
But while boosting enrolment numbers are great, the business goal is for that to convert into engagement. Out of the 22 loyalty programs the average Canadian consumer is enrolled in, you want to be part of the core nine that they’re actively using. Programs win when rewards are easy to understand, quick to earn, and genuinely worth redeeming.
Restaurants are where loyalty data gets dramatic. According to Circana, loyalty members account for 39% of all restaurant visits which is up from less than 20% just five years ago. And in 2024, while overall restaurant traffic dipped 2%, loyalty visits grew 5%. When discretionary spending softens, members keep showing up.
What does this mean?
It means loyalty members are becoming the customer base restaurants can actually count on. Non-members are the ones pulling back when money gets tight, cutting the occasional impulse visit or trying a cheaper option down the street. Members don't behave the same way, because they've already got a reason tied to your restaurant specifically, whether that's points sitting in their account or a reward they're close to earning.
In a spending environment where discretionary categories are under pressure, that gap between member and non-member behaviour is exactly the kind of stability a restaurant wants on its side.
But a loyalty program only produces that effect if it's actually working, which is where benchmarks come in. Redemption rates in food and beverage typically land between 30% and 50%, and healthy programs enroll roughly 25% to 40% of their customer base. Falling well short of those numbers usually points to a program that's easy to join but not worth using.
💡Here’s an extra thinking point: Loyalty program design plays a more influential role than you might think. Research shows programs requiring more than ten visits to reach a first reward see engagement drop by about half. So while having steady enrollment rates is a good thing, the lesson isn't member acquisition. It's to make the first reward fast enough to reach that people actually stick around to earn it.
We’ve covered birthday rewards at length (for good reason), but we’ll say it again for emphasis. Birthday rewards are one of the most reliably profitable levers in any loyalty program, and the data backs it up:
Why exactly do birthday rewards perform so well? Simple, people are more inclined to open messages about themselves.
A once-a-year freebie compounds into a measurably more valuable customer. We've broken down the full economics in our deep dive on the revenue impact of birthday rewards, including why the psychology of a time-limited, personal offer outperforms generic promotions.
💡But be strategic with your birthday rewards: A poorly designed birthday rewards program could be costly. Think about the costs of your birthday rewards, the barriers to reward redemption, and the desired results of such a birthday rewards program. Typically, the goal is to keep the reward pointed at genuine customers rather than once-a-year freebie hunters to protect your margins without dampening the goodwill.
Here's the question businesses actually care about: does the program pay for itself?
The evidence says yes, decisively. Roughly 90% of companies report a positive ROI from their loyalty programs, with returns averaging around 4.8 to 5.2 times the investment. Top-performing programs boost revenue from redeeming customers by 15% to 25% annually, driven by more frequent visits and larger basket sizes.
The retention math explains why. With acquisition costing 5 to 25 times more than retention and a 5% retention improvement lifting profits by 25% to 95%, a loyalty program is essentially a machine for shifting spend from the expensive side of the ledger to the cheap one. Most business revenue already comes from existing customers. By having a loyalty program, you're deliberately growing the part of your business that was always doing the heavy lifting.
Numbers are only useful if they change what you do on Monday. Here's the short version: launch a program if you don't have one, make the first reward fast to reach, automate birthday offers, sell gift cards year-round, and measure redemption (we know you’ll be tracking enrollment anyway).
The operational challenge is doing all of that without adding work for your staff, and that's exactly the problem DataCandy was built to solve. The platform combines gift cards and loyalty in one program, automates birthday and winback offers, and gives you the dashboard to track redemption, visit frequency, and member spend against the benchmarks above. More than 15,000 business locations run on DataCandy, and setup takes under ten days. So the gap between reading these stats and acting on them is smaller than you'd think.
One of our own customers is proof of what the compounding looks like: a loyalty program that grew to 118,000 members over five years, with loyalty member sales growing 18x to $23.5 million. That’s what happens when a program is set up well and given time to work.