Established in 1984 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wings and Rings has built a reputation on its fresh, never-frozen wings, homemade sauces, and customizable heat profiles. Across 80+ locations, the brand has steadily built a loyal guest base, launching loyalty in 2019 and expanding its digital presence. When the marketing team introduced a pilot with a third-party rewards partner across select locations, the program showed early promise — but the team needed more than a vendor report to know if it was actually working.

Wings and Rings was looking to experiment with a new channel to drive guest acquisition. The third-party rewards partner offered them a way to reach a broader audience through an established network of loyalty members. The program charged a percentage-based fee on the revenue it attributed to participating restaurants. When the vendor came back with promising preliminary results, Wings and Rings still had questions. 

As Linsey Case, AVP of Marketing, put it: "The question I kept coming back to was, is this really driving incremental sales, or are we just incentivizing people that were already coming to us anyway?" 

It's a challenge restaurant marketers know well. Vendors report their own performance metrics, but without an independent way to validate those numbers, brands are left making investment decisions based on data that may not tell the full story. For Wings and Rings, the program charged a percentage-based fee on attributed revenue — making the stakes of getting that answer right especially high.

Wings and Rings partnered with the Bikky team to run a guest analysis to validate the results and understand if the program was actually bringing in new guests. By matching the rewards partner transaction records against data in Wings and Rings' Bikky profile, Bikky was able to validate 81% of transactions using transaction date, location, and revenue cross-check. Each transaction was linked to a guest profile in Bikky, allowing the team to determine whether the program was driving incremental revenue from first-time guests or simply reaching customers who would have come in anyway.

53% of the program members were identified as net new guests, validating that the program was doing what Wings and Rings had hoped: reaching people who hadn't visited before. Those guests generated over $57,000 in revenue over the 5-month pilot, with 19% returning for at least one additional visit. 

"With Bikky, we were able to prove that actually a lot of the guests coming in from the program were new, so it was in fact driving new guest traffic."

When Bikky modeled the ROI against the percentage-based program fee, new guest acquisition alone drove a 40% return — giving Wings and Rings a clear, defensible business case to bring to franchisees.

Nearly a year out after the initial launch, Wings and Rings is re-running the analysis with updated data to determine whether those new guests are still coming back and whether the program continues to justify the investment. Analyses like this make it possible to draw a clear line between marketing investments and the revenue they drive. 

"It opened the eyes of a lot of people within the company to think of Bikky as a wide open, expansive opportunity — to validate, to measure, and to find answers to questions you didn't even know you had."

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