Launch your loyalty programme in five minutes

People often assume a loyalty programme takes hardware, a supplier and weeks of setup. In practice, all you need is a phone and five minutes.

One: choose your rule

Ten visits for a free one, eight coffees for the ninth — it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s simple to say across the counter. A rule you can’t explain in one sentence will never be explained.

Two: set up your card

Its colour, its stamp, your logo if you want one. Everything shows as you make your choices: this isn’t a form, it’s the card your customers will have in front of them.

Three: print the counter sign

It’s the only physical object in the whole story. An A5 stand on the counter, and your customers can get started. The QR code on it is the one they scan — yours, the one on their card, is the one you’ll be scanning.

We put it out on a Thursday. By Saturday we had seventeen customers signed up without having mentioned it to anyone.

Four: try it on yourself

Add your own card and give yourself a stamp. It’s the best way to know what to say when a customer asks "so how does this work?" — and it takes thirty seconds.

And then?

Nothing. You stamp cards as customers come in, and the numbers turn up on their own on Monday morning.