The points program nobody remembers joining
Plenty of pizza shops run a loyalty program. Far fewer have customers who know they are in one. If nobody notices the balance, the points are doing no work at all.
Ask a regular at almost any pizza shop with a loyalty program how many points they have. Most will shrug. A good number will not know they are enrolled at all. They signed up at checkout two years ago because a box was ticked by default, and they have not thought about it since.
That program is costing money. It hands out rewards to people who were going to order anyway and never changes anyone's behaviour, because nobody is paying attention to it.
Points only work when people can see them
A loyalty program is supposed to give people a reason to choose you next time instead of someone else. That only happens if the reward is on their mind when they are choosing. A balance buried in an app that nobody opens is not on anyone's mind.
So the first job is to make the program visible. Show the balance on every receipt and every confirmation email. Say how close the next reward is in plain terms. "Two more orders until a free large" works far better than "you have 340 points".
Make the first reward easy to reach
Many programs set the first reward so far away that a normal customer will never get there. If someone orders once a month and the first free pizza needs twelve orders, the reward is a year away. Most people will drift off long before then.
Put the first reward within reach of a typical customer in their first month or two. The point is to give them the experience of being rewarded early, so the program becomes real to them. Later rewards can be spaced further apart.
Remind people when it matters
The most useful loyalty messages are not newsletters. They are short notes at the moments when a reward is about to change something.
- A reward is ready and waiting.
- Points are close to expiring.
- One more order unlocks something.
These messages tend to perform well because they are about the customer's own money, not the shop's promotion. They also give you a natural reason to get in touch that does not feel like selling.
Count the people who use it
The measure of a loyalty program is not how many people are enrolled. It is how many people redeemed something in the last ninety days, and whether those people order more often than similar customers who did not.
If redemptions are low, the program is invisible or the rewards are out of reach. Both can be fixed. What cannot be fixed is a program nobody remembers, left running for years because it seemed like the kind of thing a shop should have.
