See what your loyalty program costs, and where it's wasted.
A loyalty program quietly spends margin on points and rewards, and the cost is easy to lose track of. Decifer reads your program data and shows what each tier and reward costs, what’s actually redeemed, who’s nudgeable, and how much sits dormant as breakage.
The cost of loyalty is the easiest thing to lose track of.
Points and rewards are margin given away, but the cost is scattered across tiers, redemptions and expiries, and the headline redemption rate is measured on the members who were always going to redeem. So a program can quietly bleed margin while the dashboard looks healthy.
Decifer’s job here is to make the give-away visible: what each reward costs, what is actually redeemed, who is close to moving up a tier, and how much reward liability is sitting dormant. The honest picture of the spend, not a flattering one.
What we won't do
- Claim the program causes extra spend, that's a causal question we don't pretend to answer.
- Treat unredeemed points as success rather than dormant liability.
- Bury the reward cost behind a flattering headline redemption rate.
What the module measures.
Three honest views of a loyalty program, what it costs, who's moving, and what is sitting idle.
Reward economics
What you give away, and what's redeemed
Every point and reward is margin spent. We set the cost of each tier and reward against what members actually redeem, so the give-away side of loyalty is finally visible instead of buried in a headline redemption rate.
What we measure
The margin cost of rewards, and how much of it is actually redeemed.
Tier movement
Who's nudgeable, who's stuck
Members close to a threshold a small nudge could advance, and members stalling out, ranked by the value of acting. This needs member-level program data, so it lights up once a loyalty-platform connector is wired, unlike the reward economics, which compute today from your entered figures.
What we measure
Who is worth a nudge toward the next tier, and who is stalling, once member-level program data is connected.
Breakage & dormancy
Points that will never be redeemed
Unredeemed points aging past their window are both a balance-sheet liability and a disengagement signal. We surface the breakage and the members going quiet behind it.
What we measure
How much reward liability is dormant, and which members are disengaging.
How it works, step by step.
Loyalty read the way a careful analyst would, cost and breakage on the table, not buried.
Read the program data
Membership, tiers, points earned and redeemed, linked to the orders behind them, read-only, or entered by hand while the loyalty connectors are built.
Cost the rewards against redemption
The margin cost of each tier and reward is set against what members actually redeem, surfacing rewards that are mostly unredeemed give-away.
Map tier movement
Members near a threshold and members stalling are identified and ranked by the value of a nudge, instead of treated as one undifferentiated base, once member-level program data is connected (the reward economics above compute today from your entered figures).
Surface breakage and dormancy
Points aging toward expiry and the members holding them are flagged as both liability and a sign of disengagement.
Issue the decision
Where the reward spend is landing, where it's wasted, and who to nudge, read from your own program data, with the figures attached.
One decision, reasoned end to end.
A measured signal, what it really means, and the move. The numbers below are illustrative.
Most of your reward budget sits in points that won't be redeemed.
Signal
62% of points issued this year are unredeemed and aging past your typical six-month window, roughly $48kin reward liability, concentrated in members who haven’t ordered in 90+ days.
What changed
The headline redemption rate looked fine because it is measured on active members. Across everyone, most issued points are aging out, reward budget spent on people who have already gone quiet, sitting on the books as liability.
The move
- Target the dormant members holding aging points with a redemption nudge before they lapse.
- Reprice point issuance to what is actually redeemed, not what is issued.
- Track breakage as a liability line, not a footnote.
Seeing reward liability and breakage plainly is how you stop spending margin on points nobody redeems, and find the dormant members worth waking up.
What the module reads.
Enter your program data by hand today; the loyalty-platform connectors are on the way, like the module itself. Every figure is computed, never invented.
Incrementality is live: the honest test of a reward is whether it changes behaviour at all. Decifer shows measured lift now; the rigorous proof is a holdout, rewarded members vs a held-back group, run over a window, so the program isn’t credited for members who’d have spent anyway, with a confidence interval and an honest “inconclusive” when underpowered.
See where your reward budget goes.
Connect your sources, and the reward cost, breakage and dormant points, with the money attached, appear the same day.