MEASURING YOUR BOUNCE BACK
When the dreaded C-word pandemic began in March we were so sad to see so many of our businesses close their doors. Since then we've been working our socks off to build new features to help you through it.
Things are now looking a little rosier and we've been so excited to see how so many of you have begun to bounce back from the chaos of the past few months. We realise that the rebuild is a gradual process for many businesses so we wanted to give you a feature to measure your return to normality.
Introducing.. the 'Bounce-back-o-meter'.
The bounce-back-o-meter allows you to track your recovery after a downturn in customer visits. It compares your visits over the last 7 days to your average number of visits before a decline. Based on your progress a recovery rate is calculated and used to predict a recovery date.
Parts of the bounce-back-o-meter:
Target: a baseline determined by pre Covid activity. This is what we're aiming to bounce back to.
Progress: the proportion of the target already recovered
Recovery date: estimated using your rate of recovery in visits per day so far
Recovery rate: the amount of additional visits per day
3 STEPS TO BOUNCE BACK QUICKLY
1 ) Define your target
Before we start it's important to take a minute to assess where you're at now. Login to Magic Portal and head to insights set the dates from early March till now. Take a look at pre-Covid numbers - that's our bounce-back target.
2) Shout out your customers
Once you do re-open your doors, it's important that you let your customers know about it. You've probably posted across social media and sent emails, but did you know you can use Magic Stamp to tempt them back? Just head to Campaigns via the Magic Portal, set your audience, pick your treat and schedule. We'll approve and notify your customers via the app and they'll visit to enjoy their treat in store.
3) Deliver The Magic
Most of our businesses have at least considered delivery or click and collect service during lockdown. Magic Delivery works alongside any delivery service or online shop to reward your customers ordering from home. Simply head to Delivery via the Portal, generate a batch of unique Magic Codes and drop one in each delivery package. Your customers redeem codes via the app to receive stamps on their stamp card just like they do in-store, encouraging them to spend more, more often.
How the Bounce-back-o-meter works?
Typical effect of COVID-19 on visits (W10 is week commencing 2nd March 2020)
Most Magic Stamp businesses ceased trading by the end of March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown. Many experienced a downward trend in custom starting mid March. Trade until June was effectively zero, with some businesses offering very limited takeaway options and deliveries.
While most businesses experienced a significant downward trend, this happened at a slightly different time for each business. Some businesses decided to close their doors preemptively while others remained open and experienced a more gradual decline as fewer and fewer customers visited.
In order to monitor progress towards recovery a target metric is required. For this, customer visits per day is used, where a visit is defined as a stamp event with at least 10 minutes between it and the preceding stamp event. This is configurable per business, but has shown to be a reliable approach for almost all businesses.
A target of 12.14285714 visits per day is selected from 15th March 2020
The visit target is calculated using a 14 day rolling average and picking a peak value before a decline. Visits peaked around 15th March 2020 for most businesses. The target value in visits per day is tuned manually for businesses which experienced a different trend in visits.
Following the date from where the target is picked (usually 15th March 2020) a significant downward trend is expected. The vast majority of Magic Stamp businesses experienced this trend, but some didn’t. These businesses do not qualify for this reason. Qualification is determined by the magnitude of the decline which needs to be 90% or more of the target. Businesses with a lesser decline are handled on a case-by-case basis. A qualification date is determined by when the decline reaches this threshold. Recovery is monitored using data following the qualification date.
Monitoring is done using a 7 day rolling average of visits per day starting from the qualification date. Recovery starts when this average exceeds a threshold. This threshold is 0% of target by default but is tuned manually for businesses who’s visit average never reached zero during the decline.
A recovery percentage of 100% was achieved on 26th May 2020
A recovery percentage is calculated by comparing the average visits to the target.
A recovery rate calculated on 19th May 2020 was 1.64 visits per day
Predicting the date of recovery starts by calculating a recovery rate and is expressed as an increase in the number of visits/day per day. The recovery rate is calculated by dividing the visit average by the number of days since recovery started.
A recovery date calculated on 19th May 2020 was 22nd May 2020 (recovered after 3 days)
A recovery date is predicted using a linear projection from the recovery start through the current visit average until the target.
A business is said to have recovered when the visit average equals or exceeds the target. A 7 day rolling average is used to smooth and prevent a spike in visits on a particular day from causing a false positive. Businesses will have to maintain their visits per day numbers for at least 7 days in order to reach successful recovery.