Glossary
What is burn rate in loyalty?
Burn rate is how quickly customers spend what they have accumulated, as against earn rate, which is how quickly they build it up. A healthy programme keeps the two roughly in balance; credit piling up unspent is a warning.
Earn and burn are the standard pairing for describing whether a programme is in balance.
Why imbalance matters
Credit accumulating faster than it is spent means a growing liability and a growing population of customers who are not getting anything. Both ends of that are bad.
What causes low burn
Usually a threshold set too high, or customers forgetting they hold anything. The second is far more common than owners expect, and much cheaper to fix.