Loyalty Academy
How to run a loyalty programme that makes money. These guides are about the problem, not about Fidella, and they are written to be useful whichever platform you end up on.
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5 min
How many stamps before the first reward?
Work it out from what the reward costs you to make, not from what the cafe down the road does. Below about six stamps most programmes stop paying for themselves. Above about twelve, people stop believing they will ever get there.
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6 min
How to price a stamp card without losing money
Work from what the reward costs you to make, not what you sell it for. Then work out what that is as a share of what the customer spent getting there. Under about 5 cents in every dollar is normal, and cheaper than most advertising.
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5 min
How to launch a loyalty programme to the regulars you already have
Launch to the people already coming in, not to strangers. Give your staff one sentence to say when they hand over an order. Put the code where people are waiting. Fifty regulars who use it beats five hundred sign-ups who never come back.
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6 min
How to tell whether your loyalty programme is actually working
Compare members against comparable non-members, or compare joining cohorts against each other over time. A programme's total activity always rises as people join, so any measure without a comparison group will tell you it is working whether or not it is.
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5 min
How to win back a regular who stopped coming
Find members whose visit gap has exceeded their own normal pattern, not some fixed number of days. Then contact them once, briefly, with something specific. This is usually the highest-return action available to a small business and almost nobody does it.
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5 min
Is your redemption rate healthy?
Compare it against your own history, not against a number you read somewhere. Any published figure is based on someone else's rewards and someone else's customers. What matters is which way yours moves when you change something.
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6 min
Loyalty programmes and the Privacy Act 2020
Collect only what you need, say what it is for at the point you collect it, keep it secure, and let people see and correct it. Joining a loyalty programme is not by itself consent to receive marketing, and using a platform does not transfer your obligations to that platform.
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6 min
Reading your loyalty analytics without fooling yourself
Total signups looks good and tells you almost nothing. What matters is how many people reach a first reward, whether members come in more often, and how each month's new joiners behave afterwards. A rising total can hide everything else getting worse.
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5 min
Stamps or points: which one fits your business?
Stamps count the things people buy. Points count the money they spend. If nearly everything you sell costs about the same, use stamps, because they are far easier to explain. If your prices vary a lot, use points, so a big order earns more than a small one.
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5 min
The real cost of paper punch cards
Printing is the smallest cost. The real ones are lost cards ending customer relationships silently, forgery you cannot detect, and having no idea what your outstanding obligation or completion rate is. Whether those matter depends on whether you want to measure anything.
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5 min
Why nobody is using your loyalty programme
Most likely, in this order: your staff are not mentioning it, the code is somewhere nobody stops, the reward takes too long to reach, or the reward is not worth having. Three of those cost nothing to fix. None of them is the technology.
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4 min
How to choose a reward people actually want
Give away the thing they already buy. It is easy to explain, its cost to you is known exactly, and it needs no persuasion. Clever rewards fail because they ask a customer to want something they have never chosen, on top of asking them to join a programme.
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5 min
How to write loyalty terms customers understand
State what earns credit, how much is needed, what the reward is, whether anything expires, and that you may change the programme with notice. Five plain sentences. Terms that read as a trap generate the disputes they were written to prevent.
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5 min
Loyalty for businesses where people visit rarely
A stamp card fails when visits are months apart, because the finish line is beyond anyone's planning horizon. Use recognition, prepaid packages, or a reward on the second visit instead. The goal shifts from frequency to being remembered at all.
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5 min
Loyalty liability: what you actually owe
Every unredeemed stamp and unused voucher is a promise you have not kept yet. Multiply outstanding rewards-in-waiting by what each costs you, not by menu price. The number is usually smaller than owners fear and larger than they had considered, because most have never calculated it.
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5 min
RFM analysis for a business with one location
Score each customer on how recently they bought, how often, and how much. Three numbers, all already in your records, no modelling. The segment worth finding is high frequency and high spend with poor recency: your best customers, who have stopped coming.
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5 min
Should you run a promotion?
Run one when you can name the behaviour you want to change and can bound it in time. Promotions fire without a customer choosing them, which makes them powerful and makes them the easiest way to give margin to people who were coming anyway.
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4 min
Training staff on a loyalty programme
Staff need one sentence to offer it, one habit for scanning, and one honest answer for when something fails. Everything else is detail. A programme lives or dies on whether the person at the counter mentions it, which is not a technology problem.
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4 min
What to do when a customer loses their phone
Their progress is on their account, not their phone, so nothing is lost. They sign in on any device and everything is there. The only real friction is if they cannot remember which sign-in method they used, which is worth training staff to ask about.
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5 min
When is a tier system worth it?
Tiers are worth it when your best customers are worth several times an average one. Status sticks around after a reward is used, where a stamp card goes back to zero. If your customers all behave much the same, tiers just add something else to explain.
Comparisons
What each alternative is genuinely good at, and where it costs you. Written to be fair, because a comparison that reads as a hit piece is worth nothing to anyone.
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Paper punch cards
Digital loyalty compared with paper punch cards
Paper punch cards are cheaper to start, need no setup, and work when the power is out. Digital cards survive a lost wallet, can be measured, and cannot be forged with a borrowed stamp. If you only want to reward regulars and never want to know who they are, paper is genuinely fine.
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No loyalty programme
Fidella compared with doing nothing
Doing nothing is free, adds no complexity, and is genuinely right for some businesses. It stops being right when you cannot tell a regular from a first-timer, cannot tell who has stopped coming, and have started asking questions your records cannot answer.
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Building your own
Should you build your own loyalty app?
Build it yourself if loyalty is the thing you sell, or if you need something no product does. For a cafe or a shop it is almost never worth it. Building it is the cheap part. Keeping it working, year after year, is the part that never stops costing you.