What is visit-based loyalty?

This mechanic suits appointment businesses (hair salons, barbershops, pet groomers, yoga studios) where visits are discrete, scheduled and similar in value. It is the simplest mechanic to explain and the easiest to administer, and it directly reinforces the behaviour that predicts retention in those categories: turning up regularly.

When is a visit the right unit?

When attendance is the behaviour you want and spend is either fixed or irrelevant: a gym on a monthly membership, a class studio, or a salon working from bookings.

Visit cards also suit businesses with long gaps between appointments, because a visit threshold of five or six is reachable where a ten-stamp card would take over a year.

What is the failure mode?

Enforcement. If a visit can be recorded without a transaction, eventually it will be, either by customers or by staff being helpful. Tie the visit to something that only happens when the customer is present.

The second weakness is that visits ignore value: a customer booking the cheapest service earns the same as one booking the most expensive. For most appointment businesses that is acceptable, because the goal is the returning relationship rather than the size of each transaction.

How short should the threshold be?

Match it to the visit cycle so the reward arrives within roughly six to nine months. A barbershop on a four-week cycle can use six visits; a salon on an eight-week cycle should not use more than five or six, because anything longer outlasts most customers' patience.

See also

• 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.
• 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.
• Retention rate: Retention rate is the proportion of customers from one period who return in the next, and even a small increase compounds substantially over a year.
• Cohort analysis: Cohort analysis groups customers by when they first bought and tracks each group forward, which separates a retention problem from a recruitment one in a way a single overall figure cannot.
• Purchase frequency: Purchase frequency is how often a customer buys within a period, and its inverse, the typical gap between one customer's visits, is what sets every other number in a loyalty programme.

Further reading

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