Nearly half (49%) of consumers participate in QSR loyalty programs — a higher rate than any other restaurant category. That sounds like great news: just deploy a loyalty program, and you’ll keep your regulars on lock.
The problem is that most rewards redemptions go to people who were already regulars.
Which means your loyalty program isn't acquiring anyone new. It’s just making it cheaper for loyal fans to munch on their favorite burgers, wraps, and salads (that they were going to order anyway).
Card-linked offer platforms take a different approach. Instead of one program doing one job, you can put different offers in front of different audiences with budgets sized to each segment:
- Brand new customers who’ve never heard of your brand before (or may have, but haven’t acted on your marketing)
- Existing customers who only come in from time to time (a % cash back can be the nudge they need to eat out)
- Lapsed customers who haven’t been back in a while (an even more generous % cash back, plus a delicious meal may turn them into a more frequent customer)
Each audience sees a cash back offer inside their banking app before they've decided where to eat. You pay only when a transaction happens, not for the impressions you rack up every time someone scrolls past the offers section.
That's a fundamentally different risk model than most QSR marketing channels. And for brands trying to grow beyond their existing base, it solves a problem other loyalty apps structurally can't: reaching consumers who have never opted into your ecosystem.
Why Card-Linked Offers Work for QSR
How the mechanism works
Card-linked offers (CLOs) are cash back incentives tied directly to a consumer's debit or credit card. A brand sets the offer terms — say, 6% back on any order, or 3% cash back on a specific menu item.
With a CLO platform like Kard, that offer is distributed through a network of banking apps, neobanks, and fintech platforms to cardholders who fit the targeting profile. When a transaction posts, Kard's matching engine checks it against all available offers in real time. If there's a match, the redemption is recorded, the cardholder is notified of their cash back, and sees it deposited back into their bank account.
The brand is charged for the verified sale and nothing else.
The consumer wins here, too. They don’t have to remember to activate an offer, upload a receipt, or remember to tap their app at the register.
Why QSR is structurally well-suited for CLOs
Two factors make QSR a strong fit.
1. Payment behavior
Most Americans tend to spend on their credit and debit cards on eating out. According to PYMNTS, 37% of restaurant customers paid for their most recent restaurant purchase with debit cards and 33% paid with credit cards.
Because CLOs live at the card level, you're meeting QSR consumers at the payment method they use most.
2. Category behavior
Based on our analysis of $3B in transaction data (across 47M+ cardholders) last year, QSR had one of the lowest average order values but ranked highest in vertical share.
It's a high-frequency, habitual category.
Consumers aren't deliberating over where to get lunch the way they deliberate over a car purchase. The decision is fast and largely automatic.
Habitual categories are also deeply competitive ones. Most of your potential customers already have a go-to spot to get breakfast, grab an afterschool snack, or satisfy a late night craving. CLOs give you a financial reason to be chosen instead.
As Kard CEO, Ben McKinnon, puts it:
“Most consumers stick to familiar patterns: the same lunch spot, the same skincare brand, the same pet store. With rewards-based offers, you don't need to change those habits — you can just shift them from your competitors to your brand instead.”
What Transaction Data Shows About QSR Diners
Before you set a campaign budget or pick a launch window, it's worth knowing when and how younger QSR consumers actually spend. What we found in our 2025 Consumer Trends in QSR report might change your planning.
When they spend
Most marketers assume Q4 is peak spending. For QSR, it's not. In fact, winter months are the lowest-spend period of the year.
Fall spend runs 23.2% higher than winter, and summer is close behind: 14.7% higher.
How to use this data: The back-to-school window and summer are when QSR dollars are flowing, and brands that build campaigns around those windows have the spending behavior working in their favor.
The weekday pattern is equally non-obvious. QSR weekday spend is 28% higher than weekend spend.
We attribute this, in part, to the flexible schedules of remote-working Millennials and Gen Z consumers, who are free to grab lunch or dinner out during the week (but can’t afford to spend a lot or linger too long).
How to use this data: If you're running CLO campaigns, timing offer distribution for early in the week can help capture midweek intent when it's highest.
How they pay
Last year’s data showed the financial services category growing from 9% to 12% of total cardholder spend over the course of a year — a 33% increase — reflecting accelerating digital payment behavior among younger consumers.
A survey by Toast corroborates this. 16% of consumers under 27 want more ways to order when dining in (via kiosk or QR code) and 9% of them want a faster way to pay. A survey from PayPal supports this, too, finding that 77% of younger consumers are more likely to trust businesses that offer their preferred payment methods.
But remember, Millennials and Gen Z are cost-conscious.
45% of them are compelled to go to restaurants with lower or no fees/service charges. Cash back speaks directly to that sensitivity. For this audience, a cash back offer can be a purchase trigger.
How to use this data: Steady growth in finserv throughout the year highlights the need for QSRs to expand payment options — if you can’t, you could be missing out on engaging a huge section of your TAM.
Partnering with performance-based rewards platforms that already have a network of banking apps, rewards platforms, and fintech that young consumers use can expand the audience your brand serves (and boost your revenue).
3 Things CLOs Can Do for a QSR Brand
1. Acquire new diners
This is the most direct use case, and the one where CLOs have the clearest structural advantage over loyalty programs.
A targeted offer reaches cardholders who have never transacted with your brand (or haven't within a defined window) and gives them a financial reason to try it. The offer lives in their banking app, not on your website or social feed. You're reaching people who have never opted into your ecosystem.
The results across Kard's QSR campaigns consistently show that the majority of redemptions come from first-time customers. Not people who were already regulars, not people who would have come anyway — net new diners.
2. Reactivate lapsed customers
First-party transaction data lets you identify customers who visited months ago and stopped returning.
A reactivation offer can be structured more aggressively than a standard new-customer offer — a higher percentage back on the first return visit to break the inertia — then roll into a diminishing structure to build repeat behavior from there.
3. Increase visit frequency and check size
For existing customers, tiered incentives are particularly effective.
Blake Ziolkowski, Kard's Senior Director of Merchant Sales, explains:
“Our Kard customers that offer a diminishing discount structure — get 15% off on a first purchase, 10% off on a second purchase, and 5% on the third purchase — encourage repeat purchases and gain higher average order values. A continuous rewards cycle shows your customers you care about their loyalty, which lowers the chances they'll bounce to another brand.”
The goal is a flywheel that doesn't require the consumer to download an app or remember a login. It runs through the card they already use.
Want more ideas for how to encourage repeat behavior? Check out our 8 new dynamic offer formats to keep rewards feeling fresh.
What Real QSR Campaigns Produced
Fazoli's: 81% new customers in first CLO campaign
Fazoli's is a FAT Brands subsidiary with 200+ locations across 26 states, making it the biggest quick-serve Italian chain in the US. The company’s goals going into their Kard card-linked offer campaign were straightforward:
- Attract younger diners
- Drive higher-value purchases from existing customers
- Give lapsed customers a reason to come back
Kard distributed a flat 4% cash back offer through banking apps popular with Gen Z and Millennial consumers, such as Varo. The offer worked across both online and in-store purchases.
The company saw $530K+ in sales and 6,000+ offer redemptions per week.
Even more impressive, the majority of the campaign's value came from customers the brand had no prior relationship with. 81% of all redemptions from people who had never eaten at Fazoli's before.
Cicis Pizza: $2.7M in attributed sales, 72% new diners
Cicis Pizza, a beloved all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, took a different structural CLO approach than Fazoli’s.
Instead of a time-limited burst campaign, they ran an always-on program for a full year. The offer was a flat percent cash back, served inside banking and fintech apps used by Gen Z and Millennial consumers, reaching new, lapsed, and existing customers simultaneously.
Over the course of the campaign, Cicis drove:
- $2.7M in attributed sales
- An average of 2,500 offer redemptions per week
- Topline ROAS came in at $11:1
2% of redemptions came from customers who had never eaten at Cicis before, and 28% came from existing and lapsed customers. Proof that a single campaign structure can reach all three audience segments simultaneously.
As Justin Whitehead, Director of Media at Cicis, put it:
“We were focused on attracting new, young, lower-income customers and giving them a clear reason to come back. Kard helped us do that without overcomplicating the experience for us or the end customer.”
How to Structure a QSR CLO Campaign
Offer type and depth
QSR has a low average transaction value, so the offer needs to feel meaningful without eroding margin. A 4–10% flat cash back offer is typically the right range for a standard campaign.
New customer offers can run higher (sometimes up to 15%) especially when paired with a diminishing structure on repeat visits. Unlimited offers (no per-cardholder cap on redemptions) work well in high-frequency categories because you're trying to reward long-term behavior.
Timing and targeting
Like we mentioned, fall and summer and weekday food runs are the highest-spend windows for QSR. Time your offer distribution accordingly and be sure to segment by customer type from the start.
New-to-brand, lapsed (6+ months inactive), and high-frequency existing customers each warrant different offer structures. So do different time-of-year campaigns. If you’re not using these variables to your advantage, you’re leaving money on the table.
Always-on vs. burst campaigns
Both approaches work. Burst campaigns tied to a specific moment — back-to-school, a menu launch, summer — can concentrate volume quickly.
Always-on campaigns, like Cicis ran, build a consistent acquisition engine that generates transaction data and deepens performance intelligence over time. If the budget supports it, always-on typically produces more efficient cost-per-redemption figures and richer first-party data to inform future campaigns.
A note on incrementality
Most QSR marketing channels can tell you that an ad was served but it’s not clear if that ad actually drove consumer behavior.
Make sure your card-linked offer platform can tell you whether an offer influenced purchasing behavior or simply rewarded actions that would likely have happened anyway.
At Kard, we show incrementality of each campaign by:
- Creating statistically equivalent groups: Divide your audience into test (80%), control (10%), and reserve (10%) segments
- Exposing only the test group to your offers: The control group receives no marketing intervention
- Measuring the difference in outcomes: Compare key metrics between groups to reveal the true incremental impact
That way, you can calculate meaningful business outcomes like conversion rates, spend rates, average order values, and transaction frequency — while controlling for all other variables — and make the case for more CLO budget internally.
Where CLOs Fit in Your QSR Marketing Mix
CLOs aren't a replacement for a loyalty app or a social strategy. They're a distribution layer that reaches consumers who aren't in your ecosystem yet — people your loyalty program will never touch because they've never opted in.
The most effective use of CLOs is as an acquisition engine that feeds everything downstream. A cash back offer gets a new diner in the door. Your loyalty program, your CRM, and your owned channels take over from there.
CLOs also work regardless of how a customer orders. In-store, online, or through a delivery app — if it goes through their card, it qualifies. You don't need to restructure your ordering infrastructure or ask consumers to change how they pay.
For QSR brands managing tight margins and rising customer acquisition costs, that combination (pay-for-performance pricing, verified incrementality, and reach outside your owned channels) is worth a serious look.
Ready to see what a CLO campaign looks like for your QSR brand? Talk to Kard's merchant team.
For more on the spending habits and dining behavior of younger consumers, download Kard's Consumer Trends in QSR report.
