Return on Loyalty®

Is your loyalty program working?

loyalty programs don’t work as well as they should. Worse still, most brands don’t even know this is the case.

Despite billions of dollars invested globally, loyalty performance is still measured using outdated metrics, such as “members spend more than non-members” or “our members are responsible for most of our revenue.” These vanity metrics might sound reassuring, but they’re misleading as they exaggerate the impact of the program and how much you are simply rewarding behaviour that would have happened anyway.

It’s not that loyalty “doesn’t work”, it’s that most loyalty programs are built and run without the measurement clarity needed to drive meaningful, incremental value. Without clarity, money is wasted, opportunities for improvement are missed, and complacency increases business risk.

In too many organisations, loyalty is a cost line running on autopilot. Teams have plenty of data, but they struggle to unify it, make sense of it, and link it back to commercial outcomes. This isn’t just inefficient, it’s expensive.

Return on Loyalty® is a smart, always-on measurement platform that finally answers the most important question in loyalty: “Is my program actually working?” and tells you how you can make it work better.

What makes Return on Loyalty® different?

Traditional measurement approaches tell you what happened (long after the fact), Return on Loyalty® delivers live, precise insight into:

• Incremental program value: not inflated non-member comparisons

• Real-time drivers of engagement: across sales, service and marketing

• High-impact actions: prioritised by Customer Science®, not guesswork

• Predictive outcomes:  Return on Loyalty® integrates and orchestrates powerful predictive data products, including the Loyalty Simulator®, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV Pulse™), and the Loyalty Liability Optimiser™.

How it works

The integrating framework is Ellipsis Loyalty Mission Control®. The data ‘circuit board’ that integrates and orchestrates the powerful, Return on Loyalty® data products designed to run your loyalty program as a growth engine.

It draws from a sophisticated data foundation, incorporating internal systems and external inputs, such as bank transactions and location data, via the Ellipsis Data Marketplace. All of it flows into Ellipsis Loyalty Mission Control®, where AI-powered components deliver real-time answers to the questions loyalty teams care about: is your program making money, keeping the right customers, and driving market share grow

The data products of Ellipsis Return on Loyalty®

The Data Products within Return on Loyalty® apply our proprietary analytics tools to measure, predict, and optimise specific levers of customer loyalty performance. These Data Products can be used independently or together to grow customer value, all from a single, unified platform. The Ellipsis team of Loyalty Experts® determines the appropriate Data Products for each client’s specific loyalty situation and challenge. As an example, Engagement Score™ with Know Your Members™ will show which rewards and promotions lead to the highest return, which campaigns are the most effective at re-activating dormant members, which customers are disengaging from the program and are at risk. Below we provide a brief overview, please contact is for more about each product.

• Engagement Scoring™: Ellipsis uses a proprietary method of Engagement Scoring™ to assess how effectively your program drives participation and activity, creating a unified measure of how customers are truly engaging with your program, and how that evolves over time. Customer engagement factors range from transaction patterns to interactions with communications. They are an objective measure of how actively and vigorously customers interact with the loyalty program.

• Loyalty Attribution™  answers the question every CFO eventually asks: "Is the loyalty program actually making us extra money, or would customers have spent that money anyway?“. Loyalty Attribution ™ isolates and quantifies the incremental revenue and profit created by loyalty program participation. It uses robust statistical matching to separate genuine uplift from what your best customers would have done anyway (such as spending more, regardless of the program, a classic self-selection bias and vanity metric!).

• At Ellipsis, Know Your Members™ is the foundational intelligence layer of Return on Loyalty®, helping our clients to transform raw customer data into actionable member intelligence, going far beyond traditional RFM analysis. KYM consolidates data from every touchpoint, including transactions, digital engagement, demographics, communications, and external enrichment, into a single, continuously updated view of each member. Know Your Members™ also provides visibility into key program metrics, including points redemption rates, breakage levels, and program rewards and benefits take-up.

• Expected Performance™ is Ellipsis’ benchmarking and prediction layer, our “what good looks like” for loyalty. It combines benchmarks from 200+ programs with category, channel and customer norms. We adjust for the things that make every program different: mix, mechanics, maturity, season, and who is in the base. Instead of a single target, you get an expected range for each KPI. Each important measure shows an expected range that indicates if you are on plan or exceeding expectations.

• CLV Pulse™: Customer Lifetime Value is a critical measure of marketing success, loyalty impact, and customer-centric business planning. CLV Pulse™ is forward-looking, dynamic, and integrated with the customer’s commercial strategy. Ellipsis's CLV Pulse™ is a critical data product in Ellipsis Return on Loyalty®. It is a predictive tool that values future cash flows from the existing customer base at a point in time. It provides brands with a dynamic and rigorous view of the customer asset and the strategic visibility to manage it alongside other asset lines on the balance sheet.

• Loyalty Simulator® is the predictive modelling and scenario-testing engine that lets loyalty managers test program changes before implementation. By creating digital twins of your customer base, the Simulator forecasts how members (and program profitability) will respond to adjustments in earning rates, redemption thresholds, tier structures, reward choices and privileges, showing expected outcomes in KPIs, engagement shifts, and Balance Sheet impact before you commit resources. In an environment where every program change is a gamble, Loyalty Simulator™ lets you see the cards before they’re played.

• The Loyalty Liability Optimiser™ is a precision tool for striking the optimal balance between value creation and financial responsibility. It helps brands maximise the loyalty impact of their unredeemed rewards by identifying which liabilities deliver the greatest customer value per dollar when redeemed. It also guides the design of smarter expiry rules to reduce liability overhang without harming customer relationships, ensuring each point costs less on the books while remaining valuable to the customer.

Better loyalty outcomes start with better visibility and smarter measurement, which then drives smart, active data products. When brands adopt advice extracted by best-practice attribution and analytics, loyalty moves from being a cost to a real competitive edge.

Return on Loyalty® provides insights needed to uncover hidden value, optimise program performance, and drive measurable growth. To learn more about how the Return on Loyalty® data products can help your brand unlock hidden profit, reach out to our team. We’d be happy to share, talk, and help.

Find out how well your loyalty program can really work with Return on Loyalty®. Talk to Ellipsis.