The marketing tool built into your loyalty card

Getting someone through the door the first time is the expensive part. The second, fifth and twentieth visit is where an independent business actually makes its money, and that is a communication problem more than a marketing one.

Most owners know this. Very few send anything. Not because they do not want to, but because every tool built for the job starts by asking for things a small business does not have lying around: a clean mailing list, a template, a designer, and a free afternoon.

So we built the messaging into the loyalty card instead of alongside it. If you are already stamping customers, the hard parts are done.

It knows who joined in the last two weeks and has not been back. It knows who is one stamp short of a reward. It knows who has earned a reward and not come in to claim it. It knows who used to come every week and has not been seen for a month. Those are the four or five conversations worth having, and they are already sorted for you.

Edit the wording if you want to, or send it as it stands. You can add a promo code, drop in a customer's first name, and see exactly what will land in their inbox before it goes anywhere. There is no HTML, no drag and drop, and no branding step, because your business name and colours are already set up.

You can add one photograph if you want to. It sits at the top of the email and appears as a thumbnail on the in-app message, and it is resized and compressed for you, so a picture straight off your phone will not turn into a message nobody can load.

Type the gist in a sentence or two, the way you would tell a member of staff. Sunday special, kids eat free, bring the family. You get back a subject line and a short message written the way an owner talks to a regular, in South African English, using your own business details. It arrives in the composer as a draft, so you can change every word before anything is sent.

It invents nothing. If your note does not mention a price, a date or an offer, neither will the message, because a plausible detail you never asked for is worse than a vague one you did.

You can also send only in-app when something is minor and does not warrant an inbox, which is a good habit and one most email tools cannot offer you at all.

Before you send, the screen shows how many customers will actually receive the message, not how many exist in that group. Anyone who received a broadcast from you in the last seven days is held back. Anyone who has turned off offers is excluded. Both deductions are shown to you, with the reason, before you press anything.

Open figures carry a caveat most tools leave out. Some mail apps load images automatically and register an open nobody performed, and others block them and hide real ones, so that number is a guide rather than a count. Where the same message also went out in the app, you get something better beside it: a read there means a person opened it, because there is no image to prefetch and nothing to infer.

The one worth watching is different. Because the messaging lives inside your loyalty programme, we can also count how many of the people you messaged came in and collected a stamp within the following seven days. A general email tool cannot tell you that, because it has never seen your till.

We are careful about what that number means. It counts visits that happened after the message, which is not proof the message caused them. Regulars come in anyway. Watched over a few sends, though, it is the closest thing a small business has to knowing whether the effort was worth it.

Every send you have made is kept in one table, so you can sort by open rate and see which subject lines your customers actually respond to. Once you have a few sends behind you, each new one is measured against your own average rather than against a published industry figure, which is the only comparison that means anything when the list is your own regulars.

Broadcasts are included on Lekka's paid plans. Pricing is a flat monthly fee based on how many regulars you have, with no per-transaction cut, so a good month is entirely yours.