Digital loyalty card or paper stamp card: what does your business gain?

The paper stamp card has one great quality: everyone understands it. Buy ten coffees, get one free. It also has a few habits your customers know too well. The card stays in the other coat. The stamp is forgotten when the queue is long. The tenth coffee is never claimed, because the card is in a drawer at home.

A digital loyalty card keeps the promise and drops the habits. This is what changes, and what it asks of you.

Points instead of stamps

A stamp counts a visit. A point counts what was bought. With Puntjes you set an earn rule: for example one point per euro, from a minimum amount of five euro. A customer who spends twelve euro earns twelve points. A customer who buys a bottle of water earns nothing, if that is what you decide.

That one choice changes who gets rewarded. The regular who buys a small lunch every day and the customer who comes once a month for a big order both earn in proportion to what they spend. A stamp card treats them the same.

Rewards you can change next week

A stamp card fixes the reward on the day you print it. A reward in Puntjes is a line in your catalogue: a discount or a free product, with a price in points. You add a second one when the first stops working, and you set a stock and a start and end date when a reward should not run forever.

The customer sees the balance on the card in their phone, and on an iPhone the back of the card lists your rewards. The question "how many do I still need?" answers itself.

Campaigns with a start and an end

Every Tuesday this month earns double points. A birthday brings a small gift. On paper that is a poster and a stamp that looks different.

In Puntjes the double points are a campaign with a first day, a last day and the weekdays it runs on. When a purchase falls inside it, Puntjes adds the extra points by itself. The birthday gift goes out by email on the birthday, to customers who agreed to receive your emails. Not every plan includes these birthday gifts: look for "customer moments" in the pricing.

A card that lives in the phone

The digital card sits in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, next to boarding passes and concert tickets. It is at the till whenever the phone is, which is always. A customer who prefers a physical card still gets one: both point at the same balance.

You see who comes back

A stack of stamped cards tells you nothing until you count them. The Puntjes admin portal shows how many customers bought something, how many of them came back for a second purchase and which rewards were redeemed most. What you do with that is up to you; the numbers are there without a spreadsheet.

What it asks of you

Three things, none of them technical.

1. Decide the earn rule. One point per euro is a fine start. You can change it later, and the points already earned stay.
2. Decide the first reward and its price in points. Make it reachable within a few visits, so the card proves itself early.
3. Get the purchase to Puntjes. At the till that is a link with your till system, such as the ITReflex integration. In a webshop it is the API, or a webshop with Puntjes built in, such as F-REDDIE.

Where the stamp card still wins

If you sell one thing at one price and see the same fifty people every week, a stamp card does the job, and it costs a print run. The digital card starts to pay when you want to reward spend rather than visits, change a reward without reprinting, or run a campaign for a slow week. That is most shops, but not every shop.