Ten stamps for a free coffee sounds perfectly fair from behind the counter. From the customer's side of it, on stamp two, it is a long walk with nothing along the way.
That is where most loyalty cards die. Not at the start, when joining is easy, and not near the end, when the reward feels close. Between stamp two and stamp four, when the reward is still an abstraction and there is no reason to care.
This is Problem 2 in The 10 Problems Every Local Business Has With Loyalty. If you have ever cleared out a drawer of half-dead paper cards, you have seen it first hand. We wrote about that drawer in paper stamp cards vs digital loyalty.
The closer people get, the harder they push
People speed up as a reward gets near. A customer on stamp eight will go out of their way to visit you. A customer on stamp two will not cross the road. The problem is not your reward. It is the empty distance in the middle of your card.
So do not make anyone cross an empty middle. Put something good there.
Milestone rewards: a small win on the way to the big one
Lekka lets you add up to five milestone rewards along a single card, before the final reward. A free cookie at four stamps. An upgrade to a large at seven. The free coffee at ten.
The customer's digital card always shows the next milestone, so they are never more than a couple of visits from something good happening. That steady drip of small wins is what keeps people walking back in, and it is the difference between a card that gets finished and a card that gets forgotten.
If you are not sure what to give away at each milestone, there are costed suggestions in 5 loyalty programme reward ideas for South African small businesses.
Setting it up takes about five minutes
Open your programme settings, choose where the milestones sit and what each one gives. Keep the early milestone cheap and easy to hand over: a cookie, a sweet, a small extra. Its job is not to be generous. Its job is to prove the card pays out.
Milestone rewards are available on every Lekka plan, including Free.
Start free
If your current card is a straight run of ten empty circles, this is the highest-impact five minutes you can spend on it this week.
Create your free loyalty programme with milestones built in. Free for your first 50 customers, no per-transaction fees. Start at lekkacard.co.za/vendor/signup.
