Glossary
What is stamp card?
A stamp card is a loyalty mechanic that rewards a fixed number of visits, one stamp per visit (buy ten coffees, get the eleventh free), and is the digital successor to the paper punch card.
Stamp cards work best for low-ticket, high-frequency businesses such as cafés and bakeries, where the purchase is habitual and the value of each visit is roughly the same. The mechanic's strength is legibility: the customer can see exactly how close they are, and the final two stamps reliably pull them back. Its weakness is fairness when ticket sizes vary, which is why restaurants usually choose points instead.
How many stamps should a stamp card have?
Set the threshold so a typical customer reaches it in roughly two to three months at their existing visit rate: about ten stamps for a café, eight for a bakery, and five or six visits for an appointment business.
Too high and customers never believe they will get there, so nothing changes. Too low and you are discounting people who were coming anyway.
What should the reward be?
Make the reward the customer's usual order rather than the cheapest item on the menu. A free filter coffee for someone who always buys a flat white reads as a downgrade and teaches customers the programme is not generous.
The cost difference is small, because a reward should be costed at its marginal cost rather than its menu price. A €4 drink typically costs under a euro to make, which across a ten-stamp card is under two per cent of the revenue from that customer.
When is a stamp card the wrong mechanic?
When ticket sizes vary widely. A stamp card treats a €2 pastry and a €40 order identically, which either overpays small purchases or insults large ones. Businesses with that spread should use points instead, and appointment businesses should count visits.
See also
- Punch card: A punch card is the paper ancestor of the digital stamp card, physically marked with a hole punch or rubber stamp at each visit.
- Points programme: A points programme awards points in proportion to how much a customer spends (typically one point per unit of currency) and unlocks a reward once a threshold is reached.
- Visit-based loyalty: Visit-based loyalty rewards a customer for the number of times they come in, regardless of how much they spend on each occasion. Loonine implements this as a stamp card with one stamp per visit.
- Average transaction value: Average transaction value is the mean amount a customer spends per visit, and in a loyalty programme its variance, not its size, is what decides whether to count stamps or points.
- Digital loyalty card: A digital loyalty card is a loyalty card held on a customer's phone rather than on paper, most commonly as a card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, which records progress towards a reward and updates itself when the business adds to it.
Further reading
How to add a loyalty card to Apple Wallet
A step-by-step guide for customers and business owners on getting a loyalty card into Apple Wallet, and what to do when the Add button does not appear.
Why paper punch cards fail, and what to replace them with
Paper loyalty cards lose customers for three structural reasons. Here is what each one costs and how a wallet card fixes it.