Boba Guys is a popular milk tea chain known for its high-quality ingredients and commitment to authenticity with 20+ locations across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.
In partnership with Crossmint and Hang, Boba Guys launched the Boba Guys Passport, an onchain loyalty program that gamifies commerce and has supercharged their revenue.
- 3.5x increase in spending by loyalty members compared to non-members
- 244% increase in visit frequency
- 15,000+ customers onboarded in less than three months
Challenge
Traditional loyalty programs rely on outdated tactics like punch cards and discounts for repeat customers, which provide basic incentives but don’t move the needle.
Additionally, Boba Guys had the following challenges:
- They had no way to communicate with customers outside the store
- They weren’t collecting customer data and customers weren’t incentivized to provide it
- The purchase experience wasn’t gamified
- They wanted to offer rewards with third-parties but couldn’t afford coordinating custom integrations
How they solved it
Boba Guys launched the Boba Guys Passport—a new loyalty program powered by Crossmint and Hang—which solved all of the above.
The Passport is a Progressive Web App (PWA). That is, a website that looks like an app on the phone’s home screen but requires no downloads, works offline, loads fast, and enables push notifications (for example, when the user is walking by a store).
Customers can sign up using their phone number or email and are instantly onboarded into the app which includes the following:
- Quests, like trying every drink on the menu or visiting every store location in the city
- Push notifications with special offers when they’re walking by the store
- Badges for completing milestones like drinking 50 teas or going everyday for a week
- Mystery boxes after every purchase that grant special prizes
- Engagement at all times, even when users aren’t in the store
- Online ordering, allowing users to buy online, bypassing the delivery apps
- Referral program, granting rewards when people bring their friends to Boba
- Merch store for fans to buy brand merchandise
Everything is onchain. Every user has a unique wallet and a passport, which is a dynamic NFT that represents their loyalty status with Boba Guys. Users can present an in-app QR code to redeem the rewards, both when visiting the store and with Boba’s external partners. Additionally, they can connect their Boba Passport to any third-party website with a wallet connect button to prove their loyalty status or individual achievements, to unlock further rewards.
Results
The launch of the Boba Guys Passport yielded impressive outcomes:
- 15,000+ members joined the program in less than 3 months.
- 244%+ increase in store visits from loyalty members vs non-members.
- 3.5x higher spending from loyalty members vs non-members.
Overall, the Boba Guys Passport is more than a rewards program. It is a platform for customer engagement with a significant impact on the bottomline. And this is just the beginning.
What’s coming
Blockchains are transforming commerce. In addition to improving loyalty and rewards, there are multiple areas with clear product market fit that are taking off across hospitality and retail.
First, blockchains allow merchants to eliminate the 2.9% + 30c standard payment processor fee. Considering the average profit margin in hospitality is around 3-4%, stablecoin payments allow retailers to almost double their profits, with no impact on user experience other than lower fees.
Second, retailers of all sizes can now launch rewards programs similar to Starbucks’, without requiring regulatory licensing or complex backends. What’s more important, they can yield a ~4% interest rate from deposits held in those accounts, creating a new revenue stream that can meaningfully impact their bottom lines.
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