You can create various digital loyalty cards, including points-based rewards, discounts for repeat purchases, birthday incentives, or stamp-style programs (e.g., earn a free item after multiple purchases). Simple reward structures are recommended to engage customers effectively.

Customers can store digital loyalty cards in Apple Wallet or Google Pay, depending on the system, or access them via a dedicated app. Cards are scanned or tapped at checkout using a scanner app or tap device, ensuring ease of use.

Yes, standalone loyalty programs use scanner apps or tap devices, allowing businesses to operate without integrating into existing systems, ideal for simple setups.

Digital loyalty cards offer secure storage on customers’ phones, easy updates to reward structures, and access to customer purchase data for personalised offers. They reduce paper waste and support communication via email or notifications, enhancing customer engagement.

Many digital loyalty systems record transaction details such as sale amount and time, creating a verifiable audit trail that helps ensure accuracy and reduce fraud risks. While these tools make fraud harder, no system is completely fraud-proof. Operators need to monitor usage and apply the level of control appropriate for their program.

Although every business is unique, here are some guiding principles you might find helpful and worth considering when designing your loyalty program.

1. Maximise Perceived Value: Offer something that has a higher perceived value to the customer than its cost to you, eg high margin products like soft drinks, coffee, milk tea (cost to you $2 but for the customer, which they see as costing them, and having a perceived value of $8)

2. Encourage Complimentary Purchases: Offer something likely to accompany another purchase to offset any discounting effect of your offer, eg buy 9 get 1 free, effectively gives a 10% discount across each purchase, but this is typically made up for by other purchases made with it (eg cake or cookie purchased with coffee)

3. Drive Repeat Visits: Offer something likely to keep you front of mind and bring the customer back more frequently (eg a quarterly or monthly special offer with their name in the text message, like .. we have this new item John, come in for a free taste test this week.)

4. Increase Average Spend: Offer something likely to increase the average dollar spend and increase your net profit even after the cost of the offer is applied because of its high perceived value (eg spend $80 and get a free entree)

5. Minimise Fraud Impact: Offer something that can be easily monitored by staff and has minimal financial impact even if a customer tries to claim it more than once (eg they redeem a one-off reward multiple times without being noticed).

6. Target Quiet Periods: Offer something that will bring people in during otherwise normally quiet periods to help cover fixed costs (eg get a free soft drink with your lunch every Monday, grab a half-priced entree on Tuesdays before 5 pm)

7. Leverage AI Analysis: Use advanced AI reasoning to check to see if your loyalty program is likely to have a positive return on your investment (eg use your prompt with more than one AI Chatbot like Chat GPT, Grok etc and include the total cost of your basic loyalty program, the offers you are including and the type of business you are running and ask what the likely return on investment will be). You should also use these tools to see how your offers might be open to abuse and fraud so you can adjust the offers and safeguard as much as you can against that risk as well.

8. Monitor Effectiveness: Monitor the effectiveness of your program over time to ensure that it is having a positive impact on your business.