LOYI: Building Scenarios with Trigger Automations
Loyi's trigger automation engine lets you build self-running campaigns based on customer behavior. Every customer encounters the right message at the right moment.
A good loyalty program should be far removed from a system where the marketing team manually publishes campaigns every day. Manually managed processes have three major problems. First, the team gets fatigued and over time campaigns go out incomplete or late. Second, as the customer base grows, treating each individual personally becomes physically impossible. Third, the right moment for the customer is missed — if a message needs to go out at 8:15 a.m. and the team remembers at 2:00 p.m., that campaign’s effectiveness is cut in half. The solution to these three problems lies in building automatically triggered scenarios. Loyi’s trigger automation engine was designed precisely for this purpose.
What is trigger automation?
Trigger automation is a campaign flow that starts running automatically when a defined event occurs. The event can be an action taken by the customer. For instance, “customer completed their first registration,” “customer completed their 5th visit,” “customer has not visited in the last 60 days,” or “one week left until the customer’s birthday” — each of these is a separate trigger. You define in the dashboard what should happen when that trigger fires, and then the system automatically runs the flow you defined every time that event occurs. No intervention from you is needed.
The most commonly used trigger scenarios
There are several classic scenarios that have been tested repeatedly for restaurants and produce high conversion rates. These come as ready-made templates in Loyi’s dashboard; you simply adapt them to your brand and activate them. The first is the welcome scenario. Every newly registered customer receives a welcome message within the first hour after registration, including a small incentive for their first visit. If they don’t come within three days, a second reminder goes out. If they still haven’t visited within seven days, the app’s features are explained and a different incentive is offered. This three-step flow brings back the majority of customers who registered but never visited.
The second commonly built scenario is the visit milestone scenario. Each time a customer completes a visit, they move closer to the next milestone. After the 3rd visit a small gesture is earned automatically, after the 5th visit a medium-value reward, and after the 10th visit a large reward. This flow gives customers a sense of purpose on every visit while eliminating the need for the team to track each one manually. The third scenario is the lapsing scenario. Based on the category defined in the system, a customer who has not visited for a certain period automatically receives a win-back message. This message is personalized, reminds them of their favorite item, and triggers their return with a short-term incentive.
The fourth commonly used flow is the birthday scenario. Three or five days before the customer’s birthday, a notification appears in the app with the theme “celebrate this special day with us.” A special treat is offered on the birthday evening. A brief thank-you message is then sent the day after. Thanks to this three-part flow, the customer feels they received a genuine gesture, not just a discount, and associates that memory with your brand for years to come.
Setting up custom triggers
When you want to define your own scenarios beyond the ready-made templates, Loyi’s visual flow designer comes into play. This designer works entirely on a drag-and-drop basis. You place a trigger box on the left side of the screen, add wait and condition boxes in the middle, and place action boxes on the right. For example, you can build this scenario: “When a customer’s average basket exceeds a defined amount, wait 24 hours, then send a special thank-you message, and three days later send an invitation to advance to the Gold tier.” Once this flow is defined, it runs automatically for every new customer.
Personalization through condition layers
The power of automation lies in condition layers. When a trigger fires, the system does not immediately send the same message to everyone; it first looks at the customer’s status and proceeds down the correct branch accordingly. For example, when the birthday scenario starts, you can check whether the customer has visited at least once in the last six months. If they have, a more generous gesture goes out; if they haven’t, only a warm message goes out, because there is no point in spending a large incentive. Similarly, in the lapsing scenario, different levels of incentive can be sent based on the customer’s historical CLV. These condition layers allow the same automation flow to adapt itself to dozens of different customer types.
Improving flows with A/B testing
The quiet power of trigger automations is their ability to improve themselves over time. Loyi’s engine lets you set up A/B tests for every step of every flow. For example, you prepare two different versions of a welcome message; the system sends version A to half of new members and version B to the other half. Two weeks later it shows which version produced a higher conversion rate and automatically propagates the winning version across the entire flow. Thanks to this continuous improvement, your automation flows perform much more effectively a year later than they did on the day you first set them up.
Avoiding mistakes
The biggest mistake made when building automations is allowing flows to clash and send the same customer more than one message on the same day. This both damages the customer experience and increases the opt-out rate. Loyi’s dashboard automatically checks for this risk. If more than one automation message is about to reach the same customer within 24 hours, the system applies prioritization rules and sends only the highest-priority message. Additionally, a maximum number of messages per day, week, and month can be set for each customer. This way, a busy campaign period does not damage the customer’s relationship with the brand.
Conclusion
Trigger automations are the backbone of modern loyalty programs. Once well configured, your restaurant marketing team is freed from dozens of daily manual tasks and can focus on strategic decisions. On the customer side, every individual feels as though they are being attended to personally. Loyi’s automation engine offers a fast start with ready-made templates while also allowing you to build unlimited custom flows with its visual designer. Once set up, all that remains for you is to monitor the results and make fine-tuned adjustments.