How many stamps should a loyalty card have? And what should the reward be?
A stamp card comes down to two decisions: how many stamps, and what reward. Both can be worked out rather than guessed.
The rule: a card should fill in weeks, not months
A stamp card works for as long as the customer remembers why they wanted it. If it takes months to fill, the reward arrives when they no longer care, and many cards die half full. The right number of stamps depends on how often a customer comes back:
- Several times a week (the morning coffee, the daily bread): ten stamps. The card fills in three or four weeks.
- Once a week (the Friday pint, the Saturday class): eight stamps. About two months.
- Once a month (the haircut, the celebration dinner): six stamps. Half a year, which is already the limit.
For businesses that mostly see passing trade, people who will not be back, a stamp card does little whatever you do. A welcome offer or a prepaid top-up suits them better.
The reward: something you already sell
The best reward is the thing customers already come for: the coffee, the pastry, the cut. They understand it without explanation and they want it. An unusual reward, or a percentage off, makes people think, and thinking is the opposite of coming back.
A reward you already sell has another advantage: it costs you what the product costs you to make, not what you charge for it. A coffee whose ingredients and cup cost a fraction of its price is cheap to give and valuable to receive.
What it really costs you
The sum is simple. With ten stamps and a free coffee, you give away one coffee in every eleven to the customer who fills the card, and only to them. The real discount on that customer’s visits is around one in eleven, and across all your sales it is far smaller, because not every customer fills a card.
Compare that with the cost of a new customer: a campaign, an advert, a promotion aimed at people who may never return. A stamp card spends money on people who already come back, which is where it goes furthest. Do the sum with the cost of the reward, not its price, and ten stamps are nearly always a good buy.
When a stamp should be worth more
One exception is worth having: double stamps in quiet hours. A Tuesday afternoon, the first hour of the morning, the week before the holidays. Tell the people who hold the card (a notification on their phone, if the card is digital) and an empty hour fills. The rest of the time, one stamp per visit. The card is a promise, and a promise has to be steady.
Three mistakes that kill a stamp card
- Too many stamps. Twelve or fifteen stamps for a weekly customer is a year. Nobody gets there.
- A reward nobody wants. A keyring, a discount on something else, a product nobody orders. The reward is your best seller or it is nothing.
- A stamp that is hard to give. If staff have to find the ink stamp behind a busy counter, they stop giving it. With a digital card, staff scan the card on the customer’s phone and the stamp is done.
Paper or Wallet
A paper card works and costs little. It gets lost, forgotten and copied, and it cannot tell you how many are out there, but it works. A card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet does the same job and adds three things: it is never lost, it counts by itself, and it lets you reach the customer when they are not in the shop. If your customers already arrive with a phone in their hand, which is always, the digital card wins.
If you want to see what yours would look like, the one-minute card designer on our site draws it with your name and colour, no account needed.