How many stamps should a loyalty card have?

· By Sakib Abbas · 4 min read · Reviewed

The length of your card decides whether people stick with it or quietly give up. Here's how to pick a number that fits what you actually sell.

It is the first real decision you make when you set up a loyalty programme, and it is easy to get wrong in both directions. Too short and you give away margin to people who were coming anyway. Too long and the card feels like homework, so nobody finishes one.

Start from how often people actually visit

The useful question is not "how many stamps?" but "how long do I want a card to take?" A sensible target is somewhere between three weeks and two months. Long enough that finishing it means something, short enough that the reward still feels reachable on the day someone signs up.

So work backwards from your own footfall. A café with regulars who come in twice a week fills a ten-stamp card in five weeks. A barber someone visits monthly would take nearly a year to do the same, which is far too long — six stamps is closer to right there.

Match the reward to the effort

The reward has to feel proportional to what someone spent getting there. A free coffee after twelve visits is fair. A free coffee after four is generous, and a ten pound voucher after four is a discount scheme you have accidentally disguised as loyalty.

A quick sanity check: add up what a customer spends filling one card, then look at what you are giving back. If the reward is more than about a tenth of that, you are probably being too generous to sustain it.

Put something in the middle

The dead zone on any loyalty card is the middle. The start is exciting and the end is close enough to chase, but stamps five and six are where people drift. A smaller reward part-way through — a free extra shot, a biscuit, ten percent off one visit — gives them a reason to keep the card alive through the flat bit.

In Beyond Stamping you can set a reward at any milestone on the card, not just the last one, so this costs you nothing but the item itself.

You can change your mind

Card length is a setting, not a commitment. Anywhere from 4 to 20 stamps, adjustable later. Start with your best guess, watch how long real cards take to fill, and shorten it if people are stalling.