Clearly the digital system is best. People have cards, the computer calculates how many loyalty points they get, employee slides card during purchase and applies points to card. But of course it isn’t that simple. How do people get these cards? What happens if they lose it? Let’s clear all that up with instructions on the best way to handle a digital loyalty card system.
via Chris Coyier – Loyalty Cards. Some excellent points here for building a loyalty/reward system. I’m a big fan of My Starbucks Reward Program, the system is designed fairly well (even to not needing the card if you so choose). Probably the most important point is to make the reward system actually worth the time/money invested. One of the problems that most grocery type stores has if you don’t have the card, the cashier will just go ahead and use their employee card to give you the discount whether you use the card or not. The incentive to having the card is the discounts and to get junk mail, employees using their card to give you the discount removes really the only incentive for the program.