Multi-location Cafe · Specialty Coffee Roaster · 2025

Lofty Coffee Co.

Turning a 15-year-old local favorite into a retention-driven growth machine.

Client: Lofty Coffee Co.
Location: San Diego, CA
Industry: Multi-location cafe & specialty coffee roaster
Service: Community Growth Engine
Engagement: February 2025 – Present

01 — Snapshot

The Main Problem: a community staple with little marketing

Problem

After 15 years of growing on craftsmanship and word of mouth alone, Lofty had never run a real marketing program.

They had a vastly loyal customer base, yet few insights for how to speak to them or reach more people like them. For that decade and a half, Lofty grew the way great neighborhood cafes grow: a good corner, a great cup, and customers who told their friends.

The problem with an engine you didn’t build, though, is that you can’t fine-tune it. They had:

Plateauing YoY organic traffic within an overall declining market
Virtually untouched base of loyal customers numbering in the tens of thousands

Omni Common’s Solution

Simple: increase the number of customers in each frequency bucket while simultaneously re-launching a true new-customer acquisition engine. In other words, we built a full-funnel marketing system.

To be more specific, we built what we call a “Community Growth Engine.” This is an intelligence system that runs on one main core: community development as the engine, with every other channel acting as fuel and amplification of that.

29% → 41%

Returning customer share

Of the active base (2023→2025), tracking toward 62% in 2026, a structural shift to retention-led.

~70%

Revenue from repeat customers

Up from ~60%. Repeat transactions climbed to 88%, forecasted to reach 92% of all orders.

11.9% → 15.5%

Two-time-visitor rate

Quarterly visits surged ~30%, lowering one-and-done customers — this stat's first movement in 4 years.

7% → 23%

Loyalty penetration

Members visit 4.4× more often than the average customer — ~7,600 loyalty visits a month.

+10.3%

2026 revenue forecast

On +7.7% transactions (surrounding cafe market was estimated to be down 5–10%).

~10×

LTV:CAC ratio

9.5× in the 2025 model, on a ~$6.39 cost per new customer.

02 — Background

Artisan, Organic Coffee and Food

Lofty is a premium coffee & bakery chain with a deep, 15-year entrenchment in the San Diego cafe market. They have six locations anchoring the brand across the county.

Lofty built its reputation on an ethically-sourced menu heavily focused on sustainability, as all its coffee is roasted in-house, and all their food is local and organic. The city loves Lofty, yet there were no traditional machinations to get customers to return, to tell people what was upcoming, or to capitalize on any of their hard-earned good-will in any way. So we set out to change that.

03 — Approach

Give Loyal Customers More Opportunities To Engage

We analyzed a decade of transaction data — roughly 700,000 customer records and 3.3 million transactions! — and discovered two negative trends lurking underneath:

New-customer acquisition was rapidly decelerating, roughly −20% per year. This was a major concern, as Lofty had previously received a lot of value from traditionally returning customers.
Their customer base was heavily under-monetized; they had a database of ~700,000 people with almost no marketing relationship attached. Very few of them opted into email.

So naturally, we surveyed their customers, created new digital marketing, then built a brand new marketing funnel designed to interact with their customers top to bottom: a loyalty program, life cycle and influencer marketing, and much more.

Here’s what happened:

Community Development — the engine

We turned their celebrated presence in the community into a measured acquisition channel.

Across 2025, we executed 31+ community events: booths, coffee donations, in-cafe events, and sponsorships. These put Lofty in front of tens of thousands of people at marquee San Diego moments: the Carlsbad 5000, the Del Mar Wine + Food Festival, the Del Mar Celebrity Pickleball Tournament, and even a flagship Lofty 15-Year Anniversary celebration.

Every event carried a clear CTA, feeding their new retention system: loyalty sign-up, email opt-in, and in-store offer redemption.

5×Community event reach YoY · ~70K → ~350K impressions at lower total cost

Social Media

We built a content calendar with a clear brief: put the cafe experience online, giving their craftsmanship the audience it deserves.

In our first year, we published 200+ posts, generating nearly half a million views. Event and community content consistently drove the highest reach, while seasonal launches and the 15-year anniversary became shareable social moments.

+116%Lofty audience reach YoY (April)

Local SEM

A true “build-from-zero”. Lofty began with near-nonexistent local SEO.

We audited and optimized Google Business Profiles for all six locations, implemented schema and structured data, built local citations and links, ran lean Google Ads on high-intent local terms, and launched SMS-triggered Google review campaigns, and designed cafe-page redesigns with neighborhood blog content to keep everything compounding.

The result: roughly 128K branded-search impressions (Apr–Dec 2025).

+28K / +19KIncremental searches — Little Italy / Carlsbad (Q3 YoY)

Email & Lifecycle Marketing

We built up a full Square POS email + SMS system from scratch.

With this in place, we gently began surveying segments of this ice-cold email audience which had never been contacted before — in 15 years! Thus, a “4–7-send-per-month” email cadence for promo, seasonal, loyalty, and event messaging was born; this created more marketing touch points and stoked cafe interactions, which seeded valuable, positive reviews across multiple third-party domains.

47.5%Email open rate · ~950K sent in 2025 (≈2× industry benchmark)

Loyalty Program

We designed a high-quality loyalty program — not “buy 10, get 1 free,” think: exclusive access and experiences, like early access to new coffee blends, members-only events, and branded merchandise.

Loyalty penetration grew from 7% to 23% of the customer base, with members visiting 4.4× more often than the average customer, compounding at ~5% month over month, which now drives ~7,600 loyalty visits a month from roughly 42,000 total. The program is doing exactly what it was designed to do: drive frequency.

7% → 23%Loyalty penetration · 4.4× visit frequency · ~7,600 monthly loyalty visits

Influencer Marketing

We implemented and ran a San Diego–focused influencer strategy (e.g., lifestyle, food, fitness, and surf-culture creators), which sent local creators to events and launches.

This means vetting, contracting, briefing, and cross-publishing influencer output to Lofty’s owned channels. The program is structured to consistently feed user-generated-content into Lofty’s social and email channels.

0 → 6,000SMS subscribers grown in a single year

04 — Results

What Omni Common Accomplished

Overall Results: Lofty’s current state isn’t about any single campaign. It’s now a business that completely changed shape thanks to a new, clever marketing system based on local engagement.

Lofty’s customer frequency distribution, which had been frozen for four straight years, finally started moving: one-time visitors dropped from 75.4% to 71.6%, and quarterly visitors surged to ~30%.

That shift, along with the loyalty and email programs, drove returning customers to represent 41% of their active base, up from 29%. Returning customers now generate ~70% of revenue (up from ~60%), repeat transactions are up to 88%, and 22% more new customers came back after their first purchase.

And perhaps most impressively, all of this occurred within a falling market: comparable cafes were down an estimated 5–10% while Lofty was dramatically growing their transactions and revenue, YoY.